Reading Reflection #9

1. Description of a method of understanding prior-knowledge of students.

Making sure to encourage our students to promote their prior-knowledge on a subject is a great tool for teachers to see what students already know and what may need to elaborated on. There are different ways that teachers can do this such as: anchor charts, K-W-L charts, doing a group discussion, think-pair-share and etc. Several of these ways can be beneficial to students to hear what others may have to say about the topic that is being covered. When students already know a little information about a topic they feel more confident that they will succeed during the project.

 2. Discussion on the importance of establishing anchors for a project.

Using anchor charts in the classroom is a huge support system on its own. Having students fill out a K-W-L chart with what they already know, what they want to know and what they learned from doing this project helps reinforce what students have learned about. Making sure that your students are filling these out as they go along is important because each student learns at a different pace. Anchor charts are important to make sure that each student is able to understand where they are going with their learning. These charts are also helpful for teachers to see where these students have come compared to where they were before you started the project. Anchor charts are also helpful when it comes to differentiated instruction and how each student as an individual is learning versus getting graded as a group.

3. Description of several ways to assess what students learned during the project.

There are several different ways to assess students while they are working on their projects. These can be formative assessments where they aren’t being graded on what they learned such as: an exit slip, a K-W-L chart, journal reflections. These types of assessments are used throughout the project and aid the teacher in understanding what the students are learning and where they may be stuck and don’t understand a concept. Summative assessments are the main assessment for the project and provide the students with their final grade. These assessment types vary from class to class and project to project. I really like what the author mentions in the chapter on page 144 about having professionals come in and give the students feedback on their overall projects. Though you will ultimately be grading their project it gives students meaningful real-world feedback that matters to them.

4. Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

Several of these concepts relate to our project this semester. We are always being assessed by one another and by Professor Peterson. Our formative assessments are our concept maps which also work as an anchor chart to track our journey through this project. We are always able to go back to the concept maps that we’ve created to get information to add to other aspects of our project. Our weekly chapter reflections are also used as a formative assessment to see how well we understand the information in our text book. We are almost done with our project and to look back on how each concept from the book relates to our topic is eye-opening to see.