This first class began with a survey on poll.guru, we learned a little about our fellow “staff” and I found it interesting to note that most people enrolled in this class would like to teach Grades 1-5 or 10-12, I fall into the middle years area. We had a brief interruption by an academic advisor who told us about some upcoming deadlines and events for education students.

We then had time to complete an assessment of assessment, where we shared our thoughts on why assessment is important and both positive and negative assessment experiences we had in our school experiences. Here were some of my answers:

1. Describe what assessment and evaluation mean to you. Assessment is very important as it determines where your students are at and what direction you should take your teaching/what you need to regroup on. It’s important however to make sure the student doesn’t feel like the grade defines them as a person.
2. Why do you think assessment and evaluation are used within the education system? Shows where your students are at and where they need extra help. our job as educators is to support our students and give them the tools to thrive in society, so knowing where they are is super important. some schools use assessment to determine status among other schools in the area.
3. Describe a couple of good assessments, and not so good assessments, that you have experienced as a student. How did these assessments affect you? What could have been a negative assessment was during a partner project, I received an M (mastered) and my partner received an A (attained or approaching?). the teacher then said to me that I should have gone over my partners slides and info to make sure it was up to my standards, this really rubbed me the wrong way because I didn’t feel I should have to do extra work on the assignment compared to my partner. So I guess it was good that she did assess based on the individual rather than the final product. I also really enjoyed taking tests because I was very good at memorizing, though university has taught me that that’s not really the best approach to assessment as it promotes mimicking, especially in math. One bad assessment/project(?) was a Lip Sync “battle” we had to do in class; this was very difficult for me to do as it’s hard to be so animated and funny when your peers are staring at you from 5 feet away. I much preferred making a music video as it took away the live aspect from it and allowed me the freedom to be myself with my friends rather than scared out of my mind. So I feel like the music video was a much more accurate representation of what I was capable of vs. the lip sync battle.

After a quick break, the class was split into groups to focus on an assignment; we learned that Assignment 1 has six sections to it (weekly reflections and learning circles which are to be recorded in our e-Portfolios, a personal learning plan, a “5 Big Ideas” paper, a quiz, and a final interview). We also viewed the rubric for this assignment. Assignment 2 is a reflection paper on conversations we have with real teachers about assessment. Assignment 3 is a peer assessed assessment plan. This class seems to be very peer and self assessed, which is great because we are supposed to learn how to adequately and accurately assess assignments.

We did a brief overview of the quiz expectations for Part A, my results can be found here.

Finally we did a multiple intelligence quiz, my results can be found below:

• Logical/Mathematical – 30/40
• Verbal/Linguistic – 27/40
• Visual/Spatial – 26/40
• Intrapersonal – 26/40
• Interpersonal – 19/40
• Body/Kinesthetic – 19/40
• Musical – 18/40
• Naturalistic – 15/40

I am very much a mathematical person which I had guessed before taking the quiz, and I definitely knew my intrapersonal score was going to be higher than my interpersonal skills, which is one area I would like to improve before heading into my internship.