Highly qualified teachers guide lesson plans and instruction through assessments. Teachers adjust and enhance their pedagogical skills by analyzing and interpreting student data. Assessments of learning provide students and teachers valuable criticism to perpetually develop, improve, and maximize knowledge.
Variety of Assessments
Effective teachers use a variety of assessments that are both formative and summative. At the end of each class period, students place their attendance sticks in one of three jars: I understand it (green), I need to do my homework (yellow), and I need extra help (pink, not shown in image). I record student responses in my grade book. This system serves as a formative assessment after each lesson. It also encourages students to reflect on the lesson and what they need to do to prepare for the next class meeting.
Feedback
Successful teachers communicate frequently with their students. Feedback is important so that students know the performance on assessments. I complete the majority of assessments that I give to my students. After completing it, I make a rubric to reference as I grade the students. This ensures consistent and fair grading.
Fair Assessments
Highly qualified teachers create fair assessments. Students deserve to have all of the information for assessments, particularly summative assessments. After I wrote and administered my first summative assessment, I asked students if they thought the test was fair. Every student said it was a fair test. I received a lot of positive feedback about the test review.
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
–Pablo Picasso