Assessment

•Reflective Writings: I’m a strong advocate of writing. I’ve always been able to find my true voice and focus on my thoughts through writing, and hoping to share this special experience with my students, I tried to incorporate as much reflective writing as I can in assessing my students. There were students (ESL, SPED) that needed modification and extra assistance for such assessments, but generally I found this form of assessment to be extremely effective in finding out how much my students to connect things they’ve learned in class to real life and their actual thoughts / feelings.

•Quizzes / Tests: Traditional quizzes and tests can be quite redundant in a classroom and easily lose its true value, but in order to prevent this from happening, I designed and created most of the quizzes and tests given to my students in class, basing the questions on what I believe is the best, fair way to assess my students. For example, knowing that my students are strong in recreating historical facts into fiction, I used such questions in place of other critical thinking questions commonly used in tests. Quizzes were also designed to assess the basic understanding of students, in preparation of the test that will involve all that have been covered in the quizzes.

•Presentations: Presentations, especially group presentations, have been proved to be the best way to assess my students’ learning while also expanding their creativity skills. Working in groups was a successful way to build better community in the classroom, and it also improved my students’ speaking skills. I always love grading presentations as well, as I get super excited to find out about what the students came up with!

•Projects: Projects were always like a celebration in our classroom. I was hesitant at first to assign projects thinking that it will take away valuable class time, but well-designed projects that involved all the skills learned in class were always a fun way to have a closure of an unit. The best part in projects is that we get to display it in the classroom once we are done, adding color and character to our classroom.

•Rubrics: At times, I found grading to be difficult in ways that I couldn’t be 100% fair and unbiased, but with rubrics, I felt that I could give the fairest grades, the true grades that they students earned in their work. It was quite hard grading my ESL and SPED students based on the same rubrics as the rest of the class, so I made adjustments to the original rubric to be used fairly with these students.

•Peer Review / Grading: Peer review and grading was a form of assessment that I did not choose to use until the last minute, but I feel that I should’ve used it a lot more in the classroom. I always worried about students’ reactions to each other’s grades, but when I gave specific directions to either write words of praise or encouragement on the papers they graded, my students showed great enthusiasm in rewarding and praising each other for their hard work. I also docked points off for those students that mis-graded the other person’s paper, as I also emphasized the importance of having to take care of the other person’s paper as if it were their own.