Assessment – For real

This week we had a session on assessment and how it is performed at SPH Kemang Village, our school.  It was refreshing to discover that much of what I have learned over the past year directly relates to how they are attempting to conduct assessment. Formative assessment is extremely important in our practice and is completed both formally through regular check ins and informally on a daily basis as a professional teacher.  Report cards are based on assessment outcomes and are all graded on a 1-4 scale, with 2 being approaching expectations, 3 being meeting expectations and 4 being exceeding expectations.  It is encouraging to see a school trying to figure out how to actually put these methods into practice even in the face of skepticism from others including parents.  I had some great conversations with experienced teachers who are using this method and figuring out ways to continue to improve assessment that is best for students.  The teachers here are clearly interested in what is best for the students and put a lot of time and effort into figuring out where the students are in order to help them progress.  I hope to continue to learn from these great teachers and improve my own practice.  I do appreciate all I have learned at UBC as I feel like I do not have to learn a whole new system of assessment.  I feel like the UBC program has given me a fantastic start on best practices of assessment, even though when leaving the program, assessment was an area I still had a lot of questions about.  Assessment is a difficult area of teaching, but one of the most important.  I aim to continue to get better at it for the sake of all of my students.

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