Learning Outcome Nine
Learning Outcome Nine: Use multiple and authentic forms of assessment to analyze teaching and student learning and to plan curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of individual students.
I can support my use of multiple and authentic forms of assessment through a rubric created for a tenth grade class, a rubric created for a seventh grade class, and a cumulative assignment created for a ninth grade class.
One piece of evidence that proves my use of multiple and authentic forms of assessment to analyze teaching and student learning is a rubric that was created for my tenth grade interdisciplinary class at FM High School. The rubric assessed their work creating a magazine about happiness. The magazine was a culminating activity at the end of a unit in which they read Brave New World and had many discussions about the concepts of utopia and happiness. The rubric was used to assess students’ ability to incorporate everything required by the assignment in a thoughtful, intelligent way. It also assessed their ability to form a deep analysis and eloquently write about it. While it primarily assessed student work, it also was used to assess my own teaching. Their happiness articles plus the creation of the magazine was the cumulative assessment for all the work they had done with me and therefore assessed my ability to push them to high levels of thinking and analysis while giving them the tools to express those ideas. Students were given a lot of freedom when writing their happiness articles so that I could assess how much I had prepared them for such an assignment.
Another piece of evidence that proves my use of multiple and authentic forms of assessment is another rubric that was created for my seventh grade class at Grant Middle School. The rubric was used to assess skits that students created surrounding the concept of a good Samaritan. The rubric assessed their ability to create the skit, perform it with emotion, and listen respectfully to their peers’ performances. The rubric allowed for all stages of the creative process to be assessed from working in their groups to presenting to their peers. I was also able to assess my own teaching by seeing their ability to successfully write in a genre they had never worked in before and effectively portray a message about helping others based on readings and discussions.
One piece of evidence that proves my ability to plan curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of individual students is an assignment that was given to my ninth grade class at FM High School. After finishing the novel, Speak, students were given a cumulative assignment based on the novel which included many options as to what students would like to create. They were given the option to create a soundtrack to the novel, draw illustrations of different scenes, create a part of a graphic novel, cast the movie of Speak, or write a blog in reaction to the banning issue that was currently surrounding the novel. All of these options gave individual students the opportunity to work in a genre with which they felt they could be the most creative and successful. Every student was performing an analysis of the novel, but each one got to show their knowledge and critical thinking skills in a genre that they had chosen for themselves. The assignment met the needs of individual students by providing each student an option that supported the type of learner they were such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. The assignment also catered to the multiple intelligences that Howard Gardner describes in his book Frame of Mind. Gardner describes that every person has strength in a specific type of intelligence, and this assignment catered to many different intelligences including linguistic intelligence, musical intelligence, and kinesthetic intelligence. Students’ personal needs were therefore met since they had at least one option to choose that fit well with their intelligence and learning type. Students enjoyed being given a choice and having a sense of empowerment. They also recognized that they were given an opportunity to showcase their strengths and they responded with wonderful work.