During my practicum, I believe I demonstrated many aspects of standard 5. When I planned my lessons, I made sure to implement effective planning, instruction and assessment practices in order to create respectful inclusive environments for student learning and development.
For example, before I taught one of my lessons, I went home and I thought to myself, “how can I accommodate all my learners in this lesson?” I wanted to be able to assess my students fairly while using a range of different learning styles. Since this was a lesson based on students understanding of positive or negative actions (bucket filling/dipping), I had the flexibility to do use a number of different strategies to help my learners.
I was honest and upfront with my students about the learning goal and told them what I hoped they would learn during the lesson. I have learned that in order to ensure assessment is reliable, I must assess by the learning goal and to share the learning goal I’m looking for. During this lesson, we did a read aloud, brainstormed ideas, wrote ideas on the board, did group work scenarios, an active question period, and filled out an exit slip. My students were engaged the entire time and it finally felt my thorough lesson planning was starting to pay off. Throughout the lesson I had many different ways to check in on student learning and was able to clearly see by the end of the lesson that all my students had met the learning goal. This was such an unbelievable feeling!
Ultimately, throughout this lesson there were many different ways I could assess my students and feel this is a lesson where I demonstrated my understanding of effective assessment and created a respectful, inclusive classroom environment. The activities in this lesson helped create rich discussion in the classroom, peer feedback and self-reflection among students. I hope to continue to use all these strategies in my future teaching to enable my students learning.
Observed Lesson Plan for Christine- Sara Guadagni