Assessment for Learning

        Assessment for learning seems like a great direction for our education system to be headed. Although there is some trailblazing to be done in terms of professional development and available time in the school day, the end result seems like a more motivational, engaging and collaborative environment for students to be successful.
        I believe that I would have benefited from assessment for learning in certain subject areas. Overall, I was a very good student, but I consistently had trouble achieving high scores in math. I received tutoring in math all throughout high school. It seemed that if I didn't completely comprehend a unit in other subjects, like history or science, I could at least memorize what I needed to know to pass a unit test. With math, that "technique", if you can call it that, didn't really work since questions in math have so many more variables. Either way, the idea of having a teacher evaluating my learning with my input, specifically in math, and saying "This is where you are not using the strategies correctly." or "You are this is where you are making minor errors each time." would have likely saved me a world of struggle throughout school. I wouldn't have been the "loser" in math, as mentioned in the Educational Leadership article. It was not that I did not enjoy math either. The What a Difference a Word Makes article was right when they said that students with continued struggle tend to shut down and push away new introductions to like topics. When I struggled with math, I never wanted to attend that class or do my homework, but if I was working on a lesson I finally understood and could be successful at, I wanted to work harder and I had confidence. I liked the line in Assessment Through a Child's Eyes when they said "...the key to winning is to avoid losing twice." I can definitely relate to that!
       In addition to math, I think that I could have benefited from the target expectations portion of assessment for learning in several subjects. I earned good grades in classes like literature, art, and social studies, however, whenever there was a large project or assignment, I would get anxious thinking about the end product. If I would have been able to see an example of undesirable work and outstanding work, I would have been able to see what success looked like and determine how I was going to get there. I could have assessed my own thinking and processes to identify my strengths and weaknesses in the project, prior to turning in.
        Time seems to be a large piece of the puzzle to make assessment for learning successfully work.  In thinking about this topic, I wonder if schools that already use block scheduling are already part way there, since they have longer class periods for subjects where descriptive feedback and student/teacher discussions could occur more easily.  I truly think that assessment for learning is the future of education, but we must come together and commit to the work that must be done in terms of teacher training and schedule changes.

Understanding "Understanding"

Ironically enough, I initially found this article very difficult to (you guessed it!) understand... and I guess I should say understand easily. I ended up reading many sentences twice to try and make sure I was comprehending what the author was trying to say. In spite of this, by the end of the article, I found the overarching message to be important. We must teach beyond the facts and require students to gain insight and perspective into the topics that we teach to acquire true understanding.

To do this, teachers must make an effort to understand how and if students are taking in the information we are supplying them, beyond the facts. The author suggests we do this by detecting what students are "seeing" and "not seeing" about that topic, and assisting them past any obstacles. This will likely be a more difficult challenge than it sounds like due to the number of students in your classroom, the limited amount of time you have in a school year and the identification of each student's hurdles to true understanding. The author mentions that this balancing act is more like an art, and I can see why!

It would be easy to say that a student "understands" a topic based on their retelling the correct facts or acing a multiple choice test, but that it not where our job stops. We should make our best effort to teach the insight towards what makes the facts true, and it's different perspectives. Not only would this step be a challenge for teachers, but also a challenge for students to own that 'step further' into true understanding. They might not have been previously given the resources or confidence to dig that deep into "understanding", thinking that knowing the facts is enough. Here again, it is our job to incorporate those thought provoking questions and healthy debate into each lesson, so that students naturally take that leap into true understanding and insight.