Planning Instruction and Assessment

Instruction and assessment are integrally linked. As a first year teacher, I have learned firsthand the value of truly understanding students' level of knowledge in structuring my lessons and evaluating my own teaching, let alone determining my students' progress.

As much as this notion was relayed throughout my Teaching Fellows training, this realization has come over time, as I now have a much clearer understanding of my curriculum and how my students think. (A little background: during my first month teaching, at the request of my math coach, I distributed a pre-test to all of my sixth grade students - to determine whether they learned the post-March fifth grade standards that could be on the sixth grade statewide exam. At the time, I looked at the pre-test as little more than another document to add to the students' portfolio. Towards the end of September, however, when I introduced fractions, it became clear that many of the standards I expected the students to have ascertained was not prior knowledge. (Yet our pacing schedule carved out a single day to review how to add and subtract fractions (with like and unlike denominators, mixed numbers, etc.).) Unsure of what to do, I spent just two days reviewing fractions and quickly moved onto the next scheduled topic. My students' grades on the following test reflected this.)

I've reflected on this experience many times and realize that I could have been far more effective had I been more aware and proactive about gauging my students' level of understanding prior to a summative assessment (in this case, my unit test). Assessment of my students prior to introducing fractions would have informed me that students were not aware of basic information relating to fractions, including (a) the fact that we only add the numerators when we add fractions or (b) how to change a mixed number into an improper fraction. Assessment of my students during and after my lesson should have revealed that my students required more instruction time. Assessment of my students after we moved on from the topic provided no benefit to me, and I had already moved onto another unit.

Assessment is now an ongoing process as I plan my lessons. Every day, and actually, after every class period I am careful to examine what went well or poorly and why, and I tweak my lessons to account for my experiences. While this creates additional work (as I can never perfectly plan in advance the best presentation of my content), I know that I am far more effective as a teacher by doing so. And next year, after having completed one full year of the curriculum, I will be able to implement these strategies from the start.