Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.
Planning
During my four week practicum, I was immensely proud of the planning growth that I underwent. At the beginning of my practicum, I feel that I didn’t truly understand the extent of the planning that was needed. I am disappointed to admit that my preparation and planning was not adequate. However, this became an important opportunity for my growth. I spent many hours creating a system that worked for me in order to facilitate my planning process. My system ended up being extremely efficient and impressive, as expressed by my coaching teacher. I spent a lot of time doing planning and preparation, and my hours paid off. There were many days that I was both the first to arrive at the school, and the last to leave.
Instruction
I was lucky enough to have learnt instructional techniques from a brilliant educator this practicum. My coaching teacher was incredibly effective in her instruction, and guided me to be the best that I can be in my own instruction. After a week and a half of teaching half time, my coaching teacher felt confident enough in me to increase my teaching to full days! I loved teaching the full days, and the opportunity that it provided for me to facilitate transitions, starts to the day, dismissal, and other subjects not covered by our core. By the end of my practicum, instruction felt natural and comfortable to me. It was so nice to not feel that I needed to rely on my lesson plans, and to simply teach in the moment, without cue cards or notes to fall back upon. I am incredibly proud of my growth in confidence in my instruction.
Assessment
As I began teaching, I had not placed much thought into my assessment pieces. I wasn’t confident in how to assess Kindergarten students. They could not write, their artistic abilities – although creative and exciting to look at – were not effective in translating their ideas across, and I simply did not feel I had adequate time during each lesson to verbally assess each child. Then, I discovered the magic of Center time. When my coaching teacher demonstrated to me how she uses centre time to do individualized interviews with her students, it was as if a whole new world opened up to me! I began creating my own assessment questions and reports that I could use to assess student comprehension of the topics we were exploring in Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and Science. I would pull students aside for 1-2 minutes at a time, and ask them the pre-determined questions that I had designed for each project. I learned that I love assessment! Finding out how my students had interpreted their learning, and what parts of each lesson had stuck with them was so exciting for me. I finally understood why so many educators have such a passion for assessment.
Attached is the assessment rubric and interview questions that I used to conduct my assessments on my Kindergarten students for my Seasonal Changes Unit in Science: Paterson – Seasonal Changes Unit Assessments
Reporting
During practicum, I was primarily reporting my assessments to my practicum teacher. However, this time and these conferences turned out to be very valuable in my learning. When scrutinizing my assessments with my coaching teacher, I learned how to determine the difference between gaps in my own teaching, and instances where students had misunderstood the learning. I was lucky to have the opportunity to perform multiple assessments that would be reported on the students December report cards, including in Math and Social Studies, with a Self-Assessment attached.