Standard 5: Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning.
5.2: Demonstrate an understanding of the purpose of providing timely and supportive feedback to students about their learning.
Throughout the process of completing my professional internship, I was highly conscious of the need to provide students in depth, and timely feedback on their learning. Assessment and reporting is an area which I knew I needed to improve, and from constant work and awareness of this area, I believe I have achieved this standard.
During the course of the professional internship, I was able to notice what aspects of my programs, and particularly lessons, worked and what aspects needed adjustment. Consequently I was able to adapt my programs to be more suitable for the students and their learning. In the same way, students need to be able to have immediate feedback on how they are doing, so they know where they need to make adjustments, and so they can also understand when they have been successful, and why.
In all of my programs, I endeavoured to provide students with comprehensive and timely feedback, so they could gauge where they were at with their learning. With programs such as poetry, and maths, which were focusing on similar skills week to week this was particularly important as the feedback enabled students to track their progress and continually work at developing their skills.
The first piece of evidence that I have included to demonstrate my achievement of this standard include a rubric which I used to give students feedback on their poetry. Poetry writing took place during the last session of the day every Wednesday. Before the students started writing their poem, we would look at some examples of poems on the smart board, and I would model writing a poem of the particular form we were studying, with input from the class.
There were some interesting results in relation to the achievement of learning outcomes for this program. A good majority of the class were successful in replicating the language and structural features of the poems, but only a small percentage demonstrated high achievement in using drafting and editing successfully- and even those who demonstrated highly did fully achieve this outcome. As a result, the constant feedback for students using the rubric was very useful, as both myself and the students were able to get that updated feedback on whether the outcome was being achieved, and whether their editing skills were improving. Once this weakness had been identified, I was also able to modify my teaching practices, to focus on developing this skill more.
The second piece of evidence I have included to demonstrate my achievement of this outcome is my feedback on some student work. I have included this, as the particular students were not only high achievers, but fast workers. While some may say that students such as these do not require as much feedback and positive reinforcement, I disagree as all students deserve to know whether they are doing well, or lacking in certain areas.
The third piece of evidence I have included is a picture of the reward system I created for use in my classroom. It operates off the 'beat the teacher' model, but with some difference. With this reward system students were able to get daily feedback on their behaviour and work ethic.
In the future I would aim to implement a more constant, and complex system of providing feedback, whereas students would be able to access a file or document pertaining to their current achievement in all learning areas. I believe this process would allow the classroom environment to be open, and both the students and myself as a teacher to be accountable for each student’s learning. I plan to implement this by participating in the ‘Graduate Teacher Professional Learning Program’ over the course of the first six months of my career.
