The teacher understands how learners grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.
As part of teaching the writing process and encouraging learner development during my student teaching experience, I had students make revisions to one of their writing assessments which focused on the role of fate vs. the role of free will and choice. I noticed students weren’t progressing at the level that I wanted them to at this point in their writing and that their improvements thus far were pretty minimal for most students. I made the decision to have students conference with me on their writing and make revisions to their second assessments based on that conference as a method of encouraging student growth. I was really inspired by Fecho’s (2011) Teaching for the Students, where he discussed the importance of and the manner in which teachers should conference to encourage student growth. Conferencing was something I had previously included in my unit plan (Artifact 1), so it was really fun to be able to actually put it into practice. It was an exhausting day and my voice was hoarse at the end of the two days from talking so much, but it was so gratifying to see the confusion clear on a student’s face as we worked through the roadblocks they were facing in their writing. As you can see in these two samples of revisions that students made post-conferencing (Artifacts 2 and 3), students added sticky notes, crossed things out, and re-wrote entire sections. It was certainly a messy process, and the final product wasn’t beautiful and neat, but I think the tactile nature of the revision process allowed students to see the impact of the changes they made to their writing. I also regraded their assessments post-revision so that students could see the concrete shift in their progress as they worked on their development as writers.
The aforementioned writing assignment was part of my SMART Goals (Artifact 4), in which I traced student growth over the course of three writing assessments. This was an excellent way for me to be able to gauge student growth throughout our time together. As students wrote each assessment, I was able to give them feedback and reflect on what I needed to touch on more often in my teaching in order to drive home key skills for students. As I moved through the process of collecting data, I was able to see just how much of an effect my teaching was having on students. As you can see in the visual representations of the data from my SMART Goals (Artifact 5), students gradually shifted towards the upper end of the grading scale as I moved through and built upon each assessment with them. I think this process of tracking student development was instrumental in really paying attention to what students needed in order to accomplish the level of growth I wanted to see in each of them. It was really gratifying to be able to see that development visually and I think it helped me to focus on what students needed from me to improve after each assessment.
Personal response journals were another method of measuring student growth which I employed in my student teaching. With my seniors, I had students write a pre-journal where they responded to a set of questions relating to themes and issues within the work we would be reading following these journal writings. After students read the work for that class period and we had some sort of discussion, students would then write their post-journals in which they reflected on the same themes and issues from our pre-journals, but with the addition of the new perspectives they gained from our readings and discussions. I gradually developed how exactly I wanted these journals to function as I moved through my student teaching. As you can see in the initial pre- and post-journal given to students (Artifact 6), I didn’t really utilize my questions in order to touch on themes that would pop up in the work, but rather to preface a video we would be watching about the author. While I think this was effective in getting students to think critically about this author, it didn’t keep the focus on the work we were reading as much as I would have liked and it didn’t encourage a ton of personal connection for students. In one of my last pre- and post-journals (Artifact 7), you can see how I had honed in on the types of questions to ask in order to get students to carefully consider themes within the work as well as share their initial opinions and connections and how those were altered (or not) based on what we read. When I assessed their journals as a holistic product at the end of my time, my main focus was on student growth and development, both between each of their pre- and post-journals as well as between their very first journals and their final journals. I think that putting the focus on students not having to know everything and having their journals be a place where they are expected to grow and change their minds was really instrumental in encouraging students to carefully consider the works we were reading and how they affected them.
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