Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

The practical examples of how to set up an assessment or evaluation of what the students' reading and understanding of a piece of literature are going to be easily applied to my classroom experience and unit plan.  I liked the criteria for classroom discussion and how it gave clear expectations of what that teacher expected from her students during discussion time. To me, it seems like I will want to find a balance between assessing my students critical thinking and engagement with what we are reading with some testing of the facts. I think about Tovani and how do we catch how much a student is truly understanding and the more varied the assessments in a class, the more opportunities we have as teachers to work with our students on finding their strengths and furthering the development of their weaknesses.

One thing that keeps standing out to me is the need to keep expectations clear to our students. As a student in junior high or high school, I remember a lot of my stress came from not knowing what to expect on a test, quiz or how I would be graded on an assignment especially early on in the school year. Another factor that I'm thinking about is differentiation. Even without ELL students or student with an IEP, there are different learning styles and proficiencies that should be thought about. We had a poetry exam my senior year which included writing our own poetry to show that we understood different poetry styles. Our teacher said she wanted us to have fun with it, but for me it was horrible because I'm not creative like that. For me, it would have been nice to have had some differentiation so that it wouldn't have weighed so heavily on our creativity and more on our knowledge of the differences between different poems. That being said, I remember a friend of mine thinking it was easy and she was happy about it. Finding some middle ground would have been nice, although I can recognize that finding that sweet spot is a balancing act and it will be hard (or impossible) to keep everyone happy all of the time.