I loved learning about how to assess and meet the needs of the students in our classrooms. I thought that there were so many important things to remember because there are so many different ways to help students! I love having all of these strategies in my pocket so that I can use them in the future. For this reason, I especially liked reading chapter five and thinking of ways to use that information in an actual classroom setting.
It is important to know where your students are before you can try to get them to where they need to be. This way, you can know what kind of instruction you need to give and you can know which student needs the most help. As you can imagine, this makes having effective assessments incredibly important. There are so many kinds of assessments that can be helpful when you are trying to determine needs. These vary from high stakes and standardized achievement tests, curriculum based assessments, alternate assessments and probes. These assessments can help you to understand various skills that students have or that students need to work on.
You can teach a class in a couple of different settings: Whole group, small group, and one on one. There are definitely advantages and drawbacks to each. Whatever setting you are teaching in, classroom management is incredibly important.
Another thing that stuck out to me was the need for scaffolding. Scaffolding is essentially supporting students as they are working to reach a goal. You start by helping them a lot, but as they learn you are gradually shifting the responsibility to them. I love this! This especially applies to RtI. It is a strategy often used in tier 3, but I think that it can be applied at all stages of learning, wherever students are at.
There are so many ways to meet the needs of students! I am so happy that I am starting to be more and more aware of these different strategies.
I agree that having these strategies will be very helpful as we begin our journey towards teaching our own class. Assessments are important but what qualifies an assessment as being a good assessment? I agree that there are multiple settings for teaching a class and that they all have different advantages and disadvantages. Which one do you like the best? Which one is considered to be the best? Also I agree that there are so many ways to meet a child's needs. It is amazing how many ways there are and that we can show our students that we care by meeting their needs.
ReplyDeleteGreat questions! I'm not sure yet what makes a good assessment. I think that it needs to be unbiased (principle of IDEA!) for sure. I think that a lot of assessments that we will give to see where our students are at will be standardized, so following protocol is a big deal here. I'm excited to learn more about assessments and to learn what makes a good assessment and what doesn't.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I like best for classroom settings. It really just depends on what I am doing. I have really enjoyed doing centers in my practicum classes because you get to work more one on one. I also like whole group though, because you have the whole class interacting with one another. I don't think that one way is best overall. With anything that you are teaching, you need to come at it from different angles. I think that it really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.