Classroom Assessment Being a Teacher,

Classroom Assessment

Being a teacher, or educational philosophy, if it is to remain vibrant and robust, must evolve with contemporary culture. The classroom of today is clearly different than the classroom of the 1960s or even the 1980s, and we are well beyond the "duck and cover" model of viewing the outside world. The three most critical issues in contemporary education are literacy, relevance, and structure. Within each of these issues, however, is a dramatic change in the demographic and psychographic make-up of contemporary society? As a teacher, one must be not only sensitive, but also an expert at dealing with gender issues, race and cultural issues, the changing family unit, parenting challenges, budgets, and individual community issues. It does little good to teach concepts and structures that are outmoded and have no interest or relevancy to the student's life. Instead, every concept in education should be revitalized in a way that the student is shown "HOW" this is relevant to their lives. This concept is not difficult; math may be taught using real-world examples of finance, acreage, business or engineering problem solving; social science can be easily made relevant using the newspaper or Newsweek/Time for Kids; science is around children every day of their lives -- simply using examples of why ice cream freezes, how gasoline makes a car run, or the process of getting fresh water or electricity into one's home makes the topic interesting, and relevant. Too, popular media can assist, not detract, in making reading and writing relevant. Utilizing graphic novels or movies as a springboard for essay ideas, or even a child's own screenplay, makes learning fun -- and still relevant to their personal experience. Tying in cultural issues, ethnic heritage, and experience is also an easy way to make learning relevant. With such trends as "No Child Left Behind" and increased attention to standardized tests, teachers in the contemporary classroom are challenged even more to find new and innovative ways to present their material in a relevant manner, to hone their own skills, and to become more effective in the classroom. Certainly, there is a difference between mastery and expertise, but depending on the curriculum the idea of mastery goes beyond Bloom's rote memory and moves so that student's can demonstrate competence and an ability to synthesize past information (Lalley and Gentile, 2009, 29-30).

The idea, though, is to ask ourselves as educators what the point of assessment is: grading for parents and administrators, checking progress, or as a learning tool to help both students and instructor gague how much of the material has been mastered. Effective teaching is dependent upon a number of different factors and cannot easily be quantified. These factors include a number of qualitative issues (cognitive skills, maturity, demographics, etc.), content area, expertise in subject matter, and so forth. However, regardless of the stimuli given, it is possible to use planning, pedagogical technique, and certain activities to make any lesson more effective. To make skills more embedded, it would be wise to use some of the following: