Assessing My Assessment

I absolutely hate standarized testing, as I am sure most teachers do. While we cannot really escape them it is important to incorporate as many alternate forms of assessment as possible. I still dont know what to do when the administration at your school is requiring that you "teach for the test", as I had to do during my full-time student teaching. One week was wasted going over practice tests and scores for the westest.

The articles that we read did give me a lot of new ideas though. Especially the learning repsonse log. I like the idea of students thinking about the way they think and it puts your expectations as the teacher in the forefront of every day's lesson plans. It also creates an open dialogue between teacher and student. I dont think that happens enough, especially when class sizes are large.
This could be a great assessment tool in addition to something more formal-perhaps even a writing piece on students interpretation of the response log (has it helped them? what would they change? Etc.) You could even take the log format online and have students post on class readings, much like we are doing here!
The repsonse log also provides different form of assessment for your own teaching, which I like.

Only question: do students give themselves a grade or should it be based solely on participation?

I think that the ideas in Exhibitions of Mastery would be great--in the ideal classroom. Involving research and the community within a project just doesnt happen enough, especially when it's part of the CSOs. I could see myself using this in an abbreviated way, unless I thought the class was capable of carrying out something like this independantly. How do you provide a rationale for a project this extensive?

The only article that I really didnt understand (the content or the overall purpose of the article) was Reading the Claims. I didnt see the kind of assessment they were discussing, if there was any. Especially in regards to the boy that liked to skate. Should we be assessing students on their everyday behavior? I felt like sometimes the article was starting out this way but it didnt seem consistent.

I think that the main point is making sure that as educators we use a variety of different assessments with our students. I'm more of a fan of portfolios and creative types of assignments and I enjoyed the learning repsonse log the most. I just watched Freedom Writers and it reminded me of that.

Darn movie made me cry!