Teacher's Greatest Challenges Due to

¶ … teacher's greatest challenges due to legislative changes that emphasize standards. As an aspiring educator, I understand the need for judicious and comprehensive assessments. I also understand the limitations of assessments. This course has addressed many of my main concerns about how to teach within a standards-based framework without leaving any child behind. To address the needs of students in a diverse classroom environment requires energy, time, and patience. When these resources are short, tools like the ones presented in this class offer guidance and assistance.

For example, we need to learn about our students and their individual backgrounds, strengths, weaknesses, and needs. An assessment is only relevant if it accurately reflects how and what a student learned. Students who perform poorly on assessments are not necessarily lacking intelligence or effort. In fact, many of the most hardworking students will struggle on exams because their teachers have not learned about their needs beforehand.

Teachers in smaller classrooms do not have a hard time learning about their students on an individual basis at the onset of each school year. However, most of us will find that we are confronted with overcrowded classrooms that make it difficult to learn about each student. In this case, we still need to assess our students from the onset.

We need to know which students are still learning English, which have learning disabilities and what types, and which students have mental or physical challenges that might impede their performance in school. We also need to understand how ethnicity and socio-economic class affect the child's ability to study at home, and how their literacy skill are or are not being nurtured. The course also emphasized the role of assessments for the teacher. Assessments not only offer students letter marks and help our schools meet federal standards.

In fact, one of the most important functions of assessments is measuring the efficacy of any given lesson. If most students in the class perform poorly on an assessment, the nature or structure of the lesson might be to blame. McMillan (2007) point out the need for setting goals and targets with high expectations of our students. I have found a great deal of pessimism surrounding our profession. This pessimism is unfounded. Students want to learn, because curiosity is an innate part of the human experience.

Teachers should expect their students to possess an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately, federal standards demand that teachers cannot digress too much from standard educational curricula issued by our state. We face a dichotomy in our profession between teaching for tests and teaching for intellectual stimulation. Teachers can work around the dichotomy by offering their students opportunities to expand their knowledge on their own such as by viewing Web sites of television shows that will help them learn. Finally, grading students and creating portfolios for them can be time-consuming.

This course, along.