Week 2 -- Triad One
Monday 10/08/12 to Friday 10/12/12, 8:00 AM- 4:00 PM
Instructional Practice:
Assessment - Practices, Strategies, Efficacy
Area of Concentration:
Assessment strategies to evaluate and ensure the continuous
intellectual and social development of urban learners.
Critical Dispositions Matrix
This week’s experiences highlighted four critical dispositions related to assessment:
- Teacher is committed to providing timely and effective descriptive feedback to learners on their progress.
- Teacher is committed to using multiple types of assessment processes to support, verify, and document learning.
- Teacher is committed to making accommodations in assessments and testing conditions, especially for learners with disabilities and language learning needs.
- Teacher is committed to the ethical use of various assessments and assessment data to identify learner strengths and needs to promote learner growth.
Culturally Responsive Framework
Four markers related to Culturally Responsive Teaching and learning assessment have been highlighted by this week’s experiences:
- Curriculum content that avoids bias and reflects the contributions of all cultures
- Consistent incorporation of culturally relevant classroom materials
- Enhancing meaning
- Engendering competence
Implications for Practice
Student-teaching requires a great deal of organization in order to maximize the learning experience.
One suggestion for organizing the 12-week practicum is to designate a small number of focus students to train on as control cases. While certainly, each learner is a unique individual – it will be clarifying to study a set of three or four particular learners in greater depth, allowing for comparison and contrast of a broad range of specific information.
In an effort to organize my thinking and assess my learning, I have also devised a system using Minnesota’s SEPT as a weekly practicum focus.
The weekly focus standard becomes not only a target for specific reflection, but acts as an anchor limiting written reports to critical and connected reflection – as opposed to passive musing back on whatever happened to have popped up. The practicum experience benefits from this organizing tool because it can direct and shape the learning. The meaning of the week’s events – both as a student and a teacher – are synthesized. The various course assignments, TPA tasks and licensure requirements can be placed in the student controlled practicum schedule’s practice-to-research context of the week, as organized by state standards – resulting in associated, standards-based field artifacts.
My second practicum week was a total and complete success! I am very proud of my training and preparedness to enter the diverse urban classroom. I see urban learners who simply need an excuse to do something great. The goal to inspire excellence in urban learners is sometimes achieved by simply giving them a positive word.
Framework for Excellence in Urban Classroom Leadership:
- Expect excellence and reward it.
- Learning targets must align to a testable knowledge, skill, or reasoning ability.
- To be effective, feedback must be: connected to a rubric or specific learning target; communicative of success; clarifying (either confirmative or corrective); and it must be continuous.
- Call the roll and openly acknowledge each member of the learning community. Make it a time to share a thought or say one positive thing about the day. If time is at issue on a particular day simply turn the roll call into a quick game – but honor the ritual of calling the roll so that at every session, each person has been acknowledged, if only for a brief moment.
- The culturally competent educator respects families' beliefs, norms, and expectations and seeks to work collaboratively with learners and families in setting -- and meeting -- challenging goals.
