Semester 4 Reflection: Curriculum and Assessment
I have grown within the strand of curriculum and assessment over the past semester. I have become more familiar with the Common Core State Standards that Wisconsin is adopting as well as 47 other states and the District of Columbia. I have been attending various presentations on new math texts and materials that claim to be aligned with the common core standards. I have listened to representatives from Digits, CPM, and Big Ideas. I am researching them to see what would be the best choice for our school to purchase. I volunteered to pilot a chapter from Digits this school year, so I can learn first hand if it would be the materials I would like best. I will be working with a trainer from the company to become familiar with all the pieces. I am I am attending a workshop called Common Summative Assessment Development this Monday, April 30 at CESA. The other sixth grade math teacher and I meet and discuss our test results as we give common assessments. I used math test results from the WKCE and MAP test to select students for my action research project and as one of the ways we identified students to receive math interventions and be invited to a supplementary summer school math class. I am growing at becoming familiar with the new standards and different ways we use assessment.
Reflection: As a group member I helped design a small unit for teachers using the Understanding by Design method. I am becoming more familiar with the Common Core Standards and what topics will be my responsibility for my math students to master. I have written the CC standards into student-friendly "I Can" statements. I have taken time to look at multiple resources that claim they are aligned with the Common Core. I have a great deal of growth to make with the CC Math Standards. I have also made more of an effort to collaborate with the other math teacher as we are using common assessments. We share and discuss our students' results and reasons for them. We use similar rubrics on the constructed response writing prompts we create together. We are working at developing our Professional Learning Community within mathematics.
Personal Baselines:
I have had some experience working with curriculum and assessment. As a math department we have highlighted the benchmarks we are meeting per grade level and we have listed how we individually meet them. We have also spent time exploring the results of our WKCE test scores over the past few years. We look at specific questions that have caused problems for many students and try to understand why our students are consistently struggling with certain questions. We do look at the growth or lack there of, that our students make within the MAPS test to determine individual math needs. We have also spent time grading our students' constructed responses so we are assessing them similarly. The more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn in this area.
Questions:
Why is there so much focus on the standardized test scores?
How can I better use the data from these scores to improve my teaching and the students' learning?
How else can I assess my students' learning?
