Daily Write

With the words assessment, marking, and evaluation as our focus, we wrote for 5 minutes… and then talked for 25 more, mostly on the nature of subjectivity and objectivity when assessing Ss work.

Will’s Energizer – Bob the Weasel

Please see the Energizers page on this blog for all the details on this and every other energizer activity presented in class.

The Students We Teach

After responding to some “Stand Up If…” sentence stems, I asked you to walk, talk, and categorize yourselves based on characteristics the Ss you sketched and analyzed had in common.  T’hen, you thought of actions you could take to meet the needs of that “type” of student in the classroom.  This photo (Thanks, Jerin) captures the essence of our discussion (Thanks for scribing, Andrea):

Introduction to the Group Presentation Assignment

To start I showed you a sample handout and video prepared as part of a presentation on the Containers for Characters strategy that was delivered last year.  Here’s the handout:

• Containers for Characters LLED 320 Group Presentation Handout

• Go over the task
• Find groups
• Make a tentative choice of a strategy or graphic organizer to use as a presentation topic

Here’s the task sheet and the assignment rubric:

• LLED 320 Group Presentation Task Handout
• LLED 320 Group Presentation Rubric

Student Writing Assessment Task

The goal of this task and the work around it is to improve your assessment skills and to develop strategies for using assessment to inform instruction.

After looking at the task itself – here’s the handout: LLED 320 Writing Sample Assessment Handout – we did the following:

• As an entire class, marked a piece of writing by an Eighth Grader using the Grade 8 Quick Scale for Communicating Ideas and Information – Personal Essays and Opinions.
• Used value lines to structure small group conversations about our assessment of the piece
• Used whole class discussion to continue the assessment discussion.

We’ll follow up this class by looking in more detail at the connection between the Performance Standard Quick Scales and letter grades and by having you assess samples of the student writing you gathered on practicum.

As an extension to this assessment activity, you might be interested in checking out this short video that raises some interesting questions about the role of rubrics in writing assessment:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH3PSjh2G20[/youtube]

Eric’s Energizer – Traffic Jam

For Next Class…

For LLED class on Tuesday, 24 Janurary 2012, please bring:

• 4 to 6 student writing samples
• A fully charged laptop (I’ve booked a laptop cart for those without)

Assigned Readings

To add richness to our classroom community building activities this week and to set the stage for our further exploration of writing assessment next week, please do the following readings from the Student Diversity text:

1. Introduction
2. Chapter 1: The Classroom as a Learning Community
3. Chapter 3: Getting Strategic With Strategies

As you read, please use the Sticky Notes strategy and place a minimum of 3 stickies in your book at places of your choosing.  The image below sums up the SN strategy (it’s from p. 75 in Student Diversity):

That’s all for today.  See you on Tuesday, 24 Jan.

– Lawrence