To begin class we were assigned eight papers to grade, seven of our peers and our own. These papers were our professional dialogue papers where each of us conversed with two teachers about assessment. Having the experience to grade these papers was valuable as a student because we are able to finally practice assessment using rubrics and we were able to read the advice of fourteen other teachers. As a teacher, exercises like these would be valuable to make sure that the marks are reliable and you can view how accurate your assessing is. I was a little nervous for this however, because I didn’t want to give someone a lower or higher grade than they deserved because I didn’t understand the criteria how it was meant. Whether I performed well on that process or not, I still value the experience.

We came back at about 8:45 and learned about Hattie’s research of the different things that affect student learning. I was actually very surprised that a lack of sleep had almost no negative effect on a student’s grade, especially since I feel like I have been preached otherwise and it is contrary to my experience with lack of sleep. I was not surprised to see that homework has a positive effect but I was at the same time because so many students and teachers have negative feelings towards homework…I suppose it depends on the type of homework you give. I was interested to see the Jig Saw method as having a 1.2 grade effect on students; I had never experienced this activity until university and after seeing these stats, I definitely want to implement this into my teaching.

Next we did a grade five fractions activity, I got 100% and blew up the speedometer!

My symbol for this week is a puzzle piece in honour of the jigsaw method of learning.