Observation Week of 10/23 – Formative Assessments

This week was a very fun week observing in my classroom because every day I was there they had some kind of special activity going, and I got to learn more about formative assessments and how they are used in a real classroom.

The middle school I observe at is directly adjacent to the elementary school (they basically share the same property), and my first day in my social studies classroom this week the middle schoolers went over to help the 5^th graders at the elementary school with their social studies projects.

When the middle school students were told that they would get to help the elementary kids they were ECSTATIC! And as I watched them help the younger kids it became very apparent that this was a beneficial activity for both classes. The middle schoolers were learning how to process learning in a new way to be able to turn around to convey it understandably to the 5^th graders, and the 5^th graders were getting valuable insight from students who already had first-hand experience. Not to mention both grades were very excited to be social and show off to one another, but this was in a beneficial way to where it positively affected everyone’s learning.

On my other day in the classroom there was shortened class periods due to an assembly at the end of the day, but they still had enough class time to complete their lesson. They started by finishing up some of the group presentations that hadn’t had time to present from the week before, and then finished with starting a vocab worksheet that would be due the following Tuesday. I found that because this wasn’t the normal type of presentations that the students did, they were funnier, shorter, and more creative, that the students in the audience were more engaged and almost everyone was 100% focused. The vocab worksheet they did was especially designed to help them remember the definitions by associating the vocab word with a similar word that the students chose. I thought this was extremely clever and useful, and is something I myself might begin using in my own studies!

I also got a chance to observe and talk with my observation teacher about formative assessments this week. Besides the teacher walking around during independent work or group work time to check in with the students, the school as a whole does something called AFLs. AFLs are “Assessments For Learning” and are basically different types of formative assessments. AFLs can be short multiple-choice quizzes or homework worksheets, but more often they are games online that get graded called “Lesson Games”, or different kinds of small projects or activities during the lesson. This way of formative assessments is fun for students as they seem to actually enjoy the games and projects, and at the same time, it is benefitting and gaging their learning progress.