Planning Assessments

Overview

In this blog I will be creating formative assessments for a learning objective in my lesson plan. The objective that I have picked for the formative assessments is from Standard RL.2.3: Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.

Performance Objective: 

Students will be able to identify story elements and record story details using a story grammar organizer. 

Formative Assessments 

1. Teacher Evaluation
• I picked teacher evaluation because in my performance objective I asked my students to complete a story grammar organizer. Specifically, I am asking my students to identify and write the setting, characters, problems, events, and solution on their worksheets. Once the students have finished their story grammar organizer I will be able to see where they are in understanding the story and the key concepts. Once I have evaluated the students responses for the worksheet, I can see where each student is in terms of learning for this standard. 
2. Hand in, pass out 
• For this formative assessment, I would ask the students questions about the story elements and details and have them respond on a piece of notebook paper anonymously. I would then have the students pass in their papers to me. I will then pass back the papers randomly for grading. As a class we would go over the answers and I would take a poll on many questions the students answered correctly. I picked this formative assessment because it allows my students to answer honestly and gives me a way of seeing how the majority of the class is doing. 
3. Exit Slip
• Before class ends I really like the idea of having out an exit slip. This exit slip will have a few simple questions for students and they would give this to me before they leave. The questions could be "Things I learned today....", "Things I found Interesting....", or "Questions I still have....". Or it could be questions about the story elements or details. I really like this formative assessment because it would give me a chance to see where the student is in this lesson and I could have time after school to adjust my lesson accordingly for the next day. 
4. Quick Nod/Body Language 
• For these two formative assessments I really want to incorporate them in every lesson. Since I will be teaching a younger age, I really feel that this will be beneficial to finding out how students are doing during the lesson. This will also help as I get to know the students as well. If there are certain students I know and I know their signs when they are bored or struggling then this will greatly help me with my lesson. I also think asking a question to the class or to an individual helps because I can know if I need to repeat myself or describe something in a different way. 

Conclusion

Overall, I think that having numerous formative assessments in place really helps to see where students are in lessons. I also really like that if I have a few planned out that I can change them as the lesson progresses. I want to make sure I am aware of what is going on in my classroom and really help my students. These formative assessments will also tell me if I have certain students who need a more challenging lesson or if I have certain students who need the lesson broken down a bit more. In these situations I can split my students up in groups and have certain groups working on different levels of the lesson while I go around the classroom making sure that everyone is getting the lesson figured out. Overall I think these formative assessments for this standard will really help my students.