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I'm participating in Math Monday with Mandy Robek at Enjoy and Embrace Learning.
You might think
ASSESSMENT THAT DRIVES INSTRUCTION
is a trendy catchphrase
(syn: slogan, motto, catchword, buzzword, mantra)
that you can afford to ignore because it will eventually go away.
Sorry.
I'm here to tell you that if you are just teaching standards because
they are in your pacing guide
or on the next page of your math book
and you have no idea
whether or not your students already know those concepts,
then chances are
you will be wasting your time and theirs.
Yes,
it's a pain to give a pretest
and grade it
AND
go through the results child by child
to see who does and doesn't know which concepts.
But then your teaching path spreads before you
and you can clearly see
which students
need
which concepts,
what to teach whole class
and what to teach to just those few.
It's a pain
but it's worth it
and it's good teaching
so it's not going away anytime soon
and you might as well get on the
bandwagon*.
(or...in the words of a beloved former curriculum director...*the clue bus)
Ah, the math textbook appears again in a Math Monday post! I just did a pretest from the math text book that didn't tell me very much. Surprised? ;) Then I pulled out my file folder and discovered my old 1:1 interview about reading, showing and writing time in various intervals and went...ahhh a little piece of heaven. We listen to children read aloud why not do math aloud? One thing I noticed when analyzing results is I didn't need question by question analysis, I could use the questions about the same concept lumped together. It made the work seem a little less and more focused then going question by question then lumping the questions by concepts.
ReplyDeleteThanks for joining this week!