Failure to Understanding

Failure to Understand

“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.” – Burt Rutan

I was not feeling well this week, but regardless of my feelings I still have work to complete. This week our focus it's still towards formative assessment. Our seminar discussions were a continuation on the understanding of what formative assessment is, and how we can appropriately use it within the classroom to help guide student learning. Within our seminar, I voiced my opinion that assessment should be about the holistic aspect of a student and not just the paper to pen knowledge that we pass along to them.

I must say that I enjoy the two Frontline assignment for this week. The assignment on assessment drift reiterated the assessment creation project that we did earlier in the year. It proved to be a great reminder of how to properly create an assessment and to ensure that it serves its true purpose. This Frontline portion was a clear reminder of many of our standards, 4. H. 1 states that teachers use multiple effective ways to assess student learning and utilize the data to enhance student learning. The second Frontline assignment focus on three diverse types of assessing. Ipsative, Norm-referenced, and Criterion-referenced are three ways to assess student learning through assessment and data. Of the three assessment base approaches, I feel that the norm-referenced approach is a little too aggressive for the 21st-century approach we are using in schools today. These assessments are in line with our standards, mainly 3.a.2 and 5.a.1.

My Twitter account was abuzz with our second educational Twitter activity. The #games4ed crew came together to discuss teaching vocabulary in the classroom and ways to make it more technologically inviting for students. My input within the discussion was not as grand as others. I did gain a wealth of knowledge on effective ways of implementing technology towards my vocabulary assignments, and with help from some of my friends in this group, we will soon be looking for ways to implement these recent technologies according to the NCSCS. As soon as we have some of these locked in, I look forward to sharing them with my colleagues and professors.

While lying in bed hacking up a lung Friday afternoon, a thought dawned on me. I know I may be late to the party, but I realized something that I've been ignoring this complete process. We are currently learning to become effective North Carolina professional teachers, but it really came to me that standard 1.c is one of our crucial points for our education at Gardner-Webb University. As future professionals, we are putting the practice in now to improve ourselves through more professional development each week. This will help us to shape the lives of our future students and instill in us a desire to continue to improve as professionals to give the best quality performance we can always. Though I may not succeed as I always want to in every objective I'm given, the quote that we read in Frontline hit me in the heart and is what I will strive to remember from this point on.

That's all for now...

Always learning, Always Growing;

William B. A. Alspaugh