Week 6

Growing Success [online image] 2014 http://bit.ly/2edxWqD

This week was the sixth and final week of our time together in Math II and to be honest, I feel as though this semester FLEW by. This weeks class was focused on assessment, but more importantly, on providing students with descriptive feedback and report card  comments. One thing that Pat brought up in class this week really stuck out to me and it is something that I think will definitely influence the way that I mark and provide comments to my students. The comment that Pat made that really stuck out to me was something along the lines of providing students with just marks does not improve their performance. When you mark a child's work and only provide them with a mark or a grade, that is all they are going to care about. If the student scores high, then he or she is happy and that is all that matters. Conversely, if a student scores very low, when he or she sees their mark, they are going to be overwhelmed with anxiety or apathy, depending on the student. The student will very rarely care to think about where he or she went wrong. Instead, Patricia explained to us that it is much more effective to provide students with comments on their work as the main focal point of grading, and have the mark itself as a secondary piece of information. IF the comments are the focal point, then the student can see where they need to improve/where they made a mistake based on your comments, and thus they are able to perform better next time by applying your comments. I really think that this type of formative assessment will prove to be very successful in the classroom. We also covered writing report card comments and how we should structure our report card comments. In class we took part in a math conference that I thought was informative as each table group was given a piece of work and we were responsible for commenting on the quality of the work. We all rotated around the class, and I found this useful because it really opened my eyes to how other people in the class mark, and by seeing how others look at the same piece of work, it helps to broaden your own understanding.
This week Paddy and McKenzie were responsible for leading their webinar that was focused on report card comments and grading. I think that the two did a great job of leading the webinar, as well as providing excellent insight and research/resources links for us to access when we are in placement and in our own careers.
Reflecting on this, my second year of Mathematics in teachers college, I can confidently say that I am not the same student teacher that walked into Patricia's class two years ago. When I first started teachers college I was intimidated by teaching math. However, after Math I and my first placement, which was a math classroom, I actually was kind of disappointed to learn that I would not be in a math placement this year. I feel as though I have become very comfortable with teaching math which is a huge change from when I first started. Patricia has done an amazing job of providing us with the information, resources, knowledge, and confidence to become effective math instructors.