Reflection and Self-Evaluation

I think my students did really well with learning goal 3 which was that the student will be able to answer discussion questions during the reading, ask questions when confused, and analyze why the characters are doing what they are doing. Overall, our discussions went really well in class and the students would ask questions when curious about something going on in the story. I think the age of my students influenced their ability to work well with analyzing and discussion questions. They are at a decent age where their abstract thinking has increased enough that they understand how to answer more detailed questions and know how analyze more than younger students. I think that their own paying attention of the text helped influence how the discussion went. Their ability to analyze also helped them with this goal, they were not really afraid to answer questions either. If a student did not understand something, they would typically ask a question right then.

I think my students struggled with learning goal 1 which was that the student will be able to work on slightly more enhanced vocabulary words and word origins and identify them in the text. I think this came down to their own prior knowledge and their inability to study for any single vocabulary quiz we had. The students were completely uninterested in the vocabulary words. I know that my words were also a bit more complicated than the cooperating teacher’s previous words had been but the students did not study for those either. They would look at them one day and then take a vocabulary quiz the next. Their grades did not honestly improve at all until I started having them do a writing activity on the vocabulary and then made the quizzes a little bit easier for them as well. I used the Technology Enhanced Items as well, so I made it easier by letting them know how many choices would be for each. This would give them a chance to narrow it down for each one instead of having the possibility of having it be multiples for each one. Their grades did improve but they still never studied for the quizzes or cared for them.

One professional learning goal for myself in the future is to vary my assessments and differentiate for those that struggle with testing. I would like to make projects or papers as an option instead of making everyone do the test. This way I can allow everyone to perform at their best level than having each person perform at one task that they may not be as good as everyone else at. I can also work with them on test-taking skills throughout the year so they can feel more comfortable with it.

My second professional learning goal would be to provide my students with more assessments sporadically throughout the year. I think this is because I would like to see more of where my students actually are and I don’t feel like I did when it came down to this unit. I literally just had the pre-assessment and the post-assessment for these students and that did give me great data but perhaps it would have helped me to have more random quizzes on the material to help to see where the students are at in the material. I did some worksheets and formative assessments but something on the content may have actually helped me to see who was really paying attention. I think the next time I do a novel or play like this, I plan to do quizzes to test their knowledge on the content. This is simply because it is important to see where students stand and who actually knows what is going on. Even if they don’t count as much of a grade, if they don’t know the content then that is not good. If I find they don’t know the content, it would be a perfect time to stop and go over what has happened up to that point in the text.