PRINCIPLE #8 : The
teacher understands and uses formal and informal assessment strategies to
evaluate and ensure the continuous intellectual, social and physical
development of the learner.
KNOWLEDGE
The
standard types of assessment aside (multiple choice tests, which have only ONE
right answer; standard skill drills, which incorporate no meaning nor relevance
to the learners life; etc.) I believe and practice assessment which test the
individuals whole learning potential.
The skills that are needed to survive in the society which has been
created and which is ever evolving are skills which certainly must be stressed
in the school and in the home. It is of
my personal philosophical values and beliefs that I must address this apparent
truth and structure my teaching methodology and pedagogy appropriately. Tapering here and mending there, ever
shifting my own pedagogical views in an attempt to reach the largest number of
learners in the time I have for teaching.
I hold sacred the notion the assessments must look towards the things
the learner knows in an effort to determine what they don’t know. I must address the possibilities that all
learners bring their own greatest talent and greatest weakness. I must address both of these in an effort to
gain access into the learners habits in the attempt to guide the learner
through the difficult yet rewarding endeavor associated with “learning”. The strength must be “tested” , so that the
individual might “learn” to adjust their
own metacognitivelyÀ balanced system for dealing with other
“tests” in the “real world”. Students,
in my opinion, who learn how to learn early on will have an easier and more
enjoyable time learning in the future.
Through adequately designed and competently administered (see PRINCIPLE
#6) assessments the learner can gain the feedback needed to affect the positive
changes in their own lives.
Assessments
are a well-balanced mixture of structures intended to measure the abstract
knowledge one can muster in dealing with the task of problem-solving, critical
thinking, and communicative surveys.
Surveys of their ability to adapt and create and polish strategies for
providing correctly thought-out answers.
Learning to know how to obtain the information and make sense and
meaning out of it is the paramount necessity for “testing” one’s levels of
comprehension, mathematics, written and oral communication, physical education,
and the arts. This philosophy will allow
me to design adequate, fair, challenging, and stimulating assessments which
train a person to think clearly and to abstract meaning from symbols. My assessments allow the student to creative
express his/her own understanding, and be assesses against a standard, not
against another. The competition is
stimulated in the learner through their own satisfaction of achievement. I want all of my assessments to focus not on
one or two intelligence’s, but, on all seven of Gardner’s scale. I know I will test at levels that are
commiserate with the learners individual abilities and levels of
comprehension. From a variety of source
material (Gamberg, et al, 1988; Sonnier, 1989; Curwin, et al, 1944; Daves, ed.,
1984; Eisner, 1985.) I have culled together information into a base of beliefs
concerning the tools used for assessing a students’ information and knowledge
acquisition and retrieval systems. it is
these types of styles which I will incorporate into my testing repertoire, and
these types of methods will be used to boost each and every one of my students
self-confidence as well as testing skills.
EXPERIENCE
Discussions
Globe Projects
Skits
Creative
Writing Assignments
À albeit, at times subconsciously, and
decidedly an arduous task one needs to accomplish before coming to be “an
expert student”. While at the same, the
teacher must be willing to engage in assessment tinkering as well, to find what
“works” and tests the knowledge that an individual has absorbed, not what they
can guess correctly.
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