As a
novice teacher (only in my third year), I keep learning things in my TEACH-NOW program
that meet needs I am noticing in my classes. Like, what do you do when
you’ve taught the lesson and given the quiz, and 85% of your class is ready to
move on, but 15% really can’t afford to move on? And 15% of the first
group was ready to move on before you even taught the lesson? What I am
learning is that proactive pre-assessment and differentiation are important
elements that can prevent the problem I just described.
Pre-assessment
activities can be a short quiz or question and answer time with the class
before beginning a new unit. I developed a unit for teaching
6th-graders arithmetic operations involving decimals and made a pre-assessment
quiz using Quizlet. The goal of this assessment is to
determine which students already know the material in this lesson, which
students are ready to learn this material, and which students may need the
lesson broken down into step-by-step directions.
Hypothetically,
after the pre-assessment, I determine that I have:
- 5
students who answered most, including the most difficult, of the
pre-assessment questions correctly (Group I)
- 12
students who have some knowledge about the topic as shown in their score,
but need to develop higher order thinking skills (Group 2), and
- 5 students who appear to
have limited knowledge about the topic
After
administering the pre-assessment, I can now move forward with the unit by
providing the appropriate instruction and activities for the needs of the three
different groups (differentiation).
(The
concepts are adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing decimals and
recognizing that decimals are really fractions.) Students in Group I will
focus mainly on complex problems: (problems that involve adding four decimals,
or that require adding and subtracting multiple decimals, positive and negative
decimals, word problems, and SAT problems involving decimals). Students in
Group II will focus mainly on medium level problems (problems with three
decimals added, subtracted or multiplied and word problems involving decimals).
Students in Group I will focus equally on easy and medium level problems with
light exposure to word problems involving decimals. Each lesson has an
accompanying quiz, and each day will have entrance/exit tickets to assess each student's progress (See mindmap).
Pre-assessment
and differentiation are things I am learning that have the potential of
maximizing my effectiveness as a teacher.
Resources
MacMeekin, M.
(2017, September 02). 27 Ways To Assess Background Knowledge. Retrieved
December 19, 2017, from
https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/27-ways-assess-background-
knowledge/
December 19, 2017, from
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec13/vol71/num04/
Differentiation@_It_Starts_with_Pre-Assessment.aspx
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