Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning Response

Two of my greatest downfalls currently in my learning to become  a teacher are wait time and creating assessment. Creating assessment is an incredibly difficult and a daunting task. I also do not get much practice when it comes to creating assessment. I have only created assessment a handful of times and it wasn't too difficult. I am not sure if I am good at it or not, but every time I have created it it has been the most difficult part of my lesson plan. This article has been pretty helpful for creating assessment for me. I like the idea of making it relevant to the students. As we have been saying, this is the most important thing we most keep coming back to. Making students learning relevant to themselves and helping them find out how they learned it is arguably one of the best skills to teach them, not only to keep them interested in learning, but to make them better at it. I love her ideas on all of them being response based and written out to assess students understanding of not only simple terms, but also bigger concepts like tackling major ideas from novels. However, I find one issue with this that maybe I do not understand. The amount of time it would take to create, read, properly asses, give useful feedback, and understand each student’s ability enough to change instruction to help them would be incredibly time consuming. I know that this is the best way to help our students and that is what we should always be striving for, but I feel like the amount of work that would be spent going into evaluation could hinder time building dynamic, engaging, and relevant lessons for our students. This would be a great task for teachers who are well set in and understand their unit and lesson plans to a T, but to someone like me, a new teacher still developing strategies, developing myself, and trying to maintain a relationship with my students this amount of assessment would take up a lot of time I spend doing those activities. I will however keep this in mind in my future assessment creation. I will learn a lot more from my students writing than responses to multiple choice or fill in the blank. It will be a great resource to help build my assessment tool belt.