Making and Grading | Week 3 Reflection

For a lot of this week, I've spent time reflecting upon the workshop we had during residency with Josh from the Digital Harbor Foundation makerspace. To me, the concept of making seems to line up perfectly with project and inquiry-based learning. By bringing making activities into the classroom, you are encouraging students to solve problems in novel ways and get a deeper understanding of concepts. It also gives learners with non-traditional learning styles a opportunity to get a meaningful, hands-on experience with a tangible project in the end. In his presentation, Josh mentioned that making is an important skill to have because when you make something successfully (as opposed to buying it) you not only have a cool product, but you also gain learning an experience. But more importantly, even if you make a product that doesn't work well or at all, you still have gained learning and experience. This is the growth mindset in practice. I was so inspired by the workshop that I decided to do a little reflection about my own learning experiences on my video blog:

Another area that I have been reflecting on is the assessment and grading portion of instruction. On Tuesday of this week, the GT Biology class that I am working with did a worksheet.  As a class, they worked through the majority of the worksheet and then were asked to individually complete the problem on the last page. As they were completing the final question, my mentor teacher and I walked around to each group and talked through the question with them to make sure they were on the right page. As a result, the teacher decided to collect that final question for a grade. When it came time to grade the question, my mentor teacher explained to me how she wanted the assignment graded and then let me grade it. This was the first assignment I had ever graded and I was concerned that I was being too harsh when awarding points for the answers. The problem was that nearly every one of the students had not seemed to understand what the question was asking of them. When I realized that there had been a disconnect in their understanding, I discussed my concerns with the teacher. We decided to return the assignment to the student with the bad grades and give them the chance to redo the assignment after we clarified our expectations and answered any of their questions. I will be interested to see if this clarification helps them to complete the assignment in the way we initially intended.

This experience really brought my attention to the importance of making sure that your assessments, formative and summative, are assessing what you want them to assess. If student don't understand what is being asked of them, their performance is not going to be a good representation of what they have actually learned. In this situation, the students knew the information that the question was hoping to draw from them, they just did not understand how to provide that information. This is an experience that will stay with me as I begin planning my own classwork and assessments.