The end of the school year brings a lot of added to-do items for teachers. Progress reports, parent meetings, and of course assessments. This year, those responsibilities are being put into question due to our situation with distance learning and the coronavirus. I’ve been grappling with the idea of assessments, because my fear is that they will cause more stress for students and families. At the same time, I know I have responsibility as an educator to gain as much information as I can about how my students are doing academically and what kind of support I should suggest for the summer.
The decisions that teachers have to make about year-end assessments will probably be driven in large part by their school. My school is encouraging us to do whatever assessing we can, but letting each teacher use her own judgement about how to do it sensitively. I’ve decided to rely on informal assessments, and I decided it was important to be clear with myself what the goals of these assessments would be. I’m not trying to hold the students to the usual academic standards, as that wouldn’t be fair, but instead focusing on gathering information to pass on to families and next year’s teachers. This information will also help to inform my own distance learning strategies should we have to continue this in the fall or winter.
So we got creative and reimagined our assessments, for a Zoom platform. Our goal is to not have the students know they are being assessed, but to keep it a natural part of the activities with what we’ve already been doing with them during Zoom lessons. Here’s a breakdown of the assessments we are giving, and how we’re doing them.
- Running Records: Running records actually seem like one of the easiest assessments to do over Zoom. I’m already running small group reading sessions over Zoom every week, so instead of having kids use the books I was screen-sharing from Epic or Raz-Kids, I can just have them read the PDF of the leveled texts. The leveled texts are even available here for download. It can even be done with a small group. I can just have students switch off reading between books (for lower levels) or after several pages (for higher levels).
- Math Assessments: Math is honestly the subject I feel the most out of touch with. It’s hard for me to get a sense of how much help they’re getting from parents. I’m used to getting immediate feedback from students about what they understand or don’t understand and adjusting my pacing based on that. So without that, I have felt a bit in the dark about where they’re at. My plan with math is to use one of small group zoom meetings to do a “math review”. I’ll give them a problem, have them solve it on their paper, and then we’ll all share out the answer. This will give me some much-needed insight into how they are solving word problems and double-digit addition problems with no adult help. It’s certainly not a complete assessment, but it will give me some information about math concepts and skills and how successful the lessons were.
- Writing Assessment: My co-teacher leads the writing small group sessions. Instead of doing her normal routine of having students share their work and comment on each other’s writing, she’s planning on having them write in response to a prompt. Our students have done writing prompts like this in the classroom, so it will be familiar to them. After writing about a page, they’ll have their parents take a picture of it and email it to us. Again, this will help us determine what their writing is like without adult help, since it’s so hard to determine the amount of support a child is receiving from family members.
How are you doing your class assessments with distance learning
this spring?
xoxo
Laura
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