Adventures in Learning About Learning

  What have you seen as the biggest challenge for your cooperating teacher since you've been there? How are they working to overcome it? If you were in their shoes, how might you approach this challenge? This week was really  interesting because I was able to come in twice. Once just in the morning, and another time I got to be a part of professional development. The biggest challenge I have seen my cooperating teacher face is, as part of professional development, completing part of an equity audit. All the teachers were given about an hour to fill out one 2 sections of an equity audit, and my cooperating teacher worked with the other humanities teacher to do this. The conversation was long and in depth and they often disagreed on where they considered themselves on the scale for different categories. They worked through this by going back to the question at hand, and combining up with a common understanding of that question. Once that was done, and they got to the root o...

What formative assessment strategies have you seen your cooperating teacher use?  How were they used, what purpose did they serve, and if possible, what did your cooperating teacher learn from them? Provide at least 2 examples. More are welcome. I had a really interesting chat with my cooperating teacher about formative assesments. I explained to him that it was formative assessment week in this class, and he shared that his philosophy about formative vs summative assessments is that they don't necessarily have to be vasty different. He described using a specific formative assessment 3 times in a unit, once in the beginning, middle, and end. The last time he administers it, it's actually a summative assessment but since its in the same format its not recognized as one by the students. We then talked about how this was only really possible because of proficiency based grading. In the assessment he looks for their ability to...