Before Assessment, Evaluation and
Reporting I lacked knowledge about exactly what went into assessing students. I
had many questions about how to organize collected information, how to know the
appropriate ‘level’ for each grade or each student, types of assessment,
assessment tools… the list goes on and on.
Being introduced to Growing Success
and the Kindergarten Addendum during this course has strongly reduced my fear
of assessment and evaluation. Although I am nowhere near being a Growing
Success ‘guru’ it eases my stress to know that there are documents that provide
essentially step-by-step processes for assessment and evaluation that I can use
to support me during my experience as a pre-service and in-service teacher. As
a pre-service teacher, this makes me far more confident about properly lesson
planning and assessing my students during my teaching blocks. The potential of
improperly educating or assessing students is one of the most stressful aspects
of becoming a teacher. I would never want my teacher training process to
negatively affect the educational career or students. Growing Success provides detailed
information on all aspects of assessment, making it much easier for all
teachers to provide a similar program and therefore create a standard that is
easy for teachers, both pre and in-service, to adhere to.
Being introduced to assessment for learning,
as learning and of learning helped me understand how to breakdown activities
and tasks into appropriate types of assessment. I was unaware that there were
classifications for assessment. Because my prior knowledge of assessment was
mostly surrounded around the report card, I assumed that any type of assessment
would contribute equally to the final mark. Looking back, my previous view is
very ignorant of the amount of planning and care teachers put into their
lessons. The types of assessment demonstrate how much individualized planning
and adjustment goes into creating lesson and unit plans. The different types of
assessment allow teachers to gauge where their students are in terms of their
understanding and then adjust their plans to suit the learning needs of their
students. Doing assessment as and for learning provides information on growth,
strengths and weaknesses that can be used to help create tasks for the final
assessments of learning.
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The Achievement Chart is the aspect
of Growing Success that I was most excited to learn about. Certain curriculum
documents can seem vague or confusing but learning the four sections of the
achievement chart and their associated verbs makes breaking down specific
expectations much more comprehensible. I feel as though the Achievement Chart
is an extremely helpful tool when ensuring a balance of activities and lesson
types. It also ensures students are being evaluated and assessed for different
progressive criteria and not just for their final product. This allows teachers
to understand individual students strengths and weaknesses and therefore cater
their lessons to address these needs.
I appreciate that Growing Success
touches on the importance and inclusion of external support (eg. Principals,
parents/guardians, school team, etc.) when creating plans for evaluating and
assessing all students (specifically those with IEP’s). It is encouraging to
know that communication and collaboration is encouraged when assessing students
and that external circumstances are meant to be considered when creating long
term plans for whole classes and individual students.
Overall, Growing Success has provided
insight about the complexity of assessment and evaluation. I have been excited
to learn how well rounded the assessment and evaluation expectations for
Ontario teachers are. The information in Growing Success demonstrates that
students are given the opportunity to show their strengths in a variety of ways
while simultaneously allowing teachers to easily identify areas for improvement.
Growing Success guides teachers to wholly assess their students and easily
identify areas of need therefore ensuring they are receiving a well-rounded
education.
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