The Assessments I Use Daily in the Classroom

Three Recommendations

In my eighteen years of teaching, I’ve seen many fads come and go and come back again. If you’ve taught long enough, you realize that everything cycles back again. The following day-to-day assessments are the best to use in class. I made my determination based upon how effective the assessment measures learning and the ease of use for the teacher.

I intentionally made the assessments generic so that teachers of any subject or grade area can apply them.

Here they are.

Rubrics

No matter what a teacher does, there needs to be a rubric for assessment. It’s easy to make a rubric. Break whatever task you want the students to complete into parts. For each part, create performance based statements.

Every teacher knows this, so what?

Well, I create rubrics for routines and daily tasks--not just assignments.

Rubrics don’t teach anything, but rubrics allow the teacher to provide easy and streamlined feedback. It takes mere seconds to review a behavior and response, circle the performance statements that the student didn’t meet, and hand it to them.

Create a rubric for class discussions, daily behaviors, and assignments, and you’ll be able to provide detailed and individualized feedback to every student.

Student Self Assessment

Having students assessing themselves doesn’t always work. It requires training the students, and students who are mature enough to honestly reflect on their learning.

When implementing a system of student self assessment, a teacher needs to make sure that the reflection is based upon an objective. I’ve seen many student self reflection assignments that ask students to reflect on how they felt about the assignment. While this is important, it doesn’t lead to the type of independence and ownership that teachers want to instill in their students.

If the objective has an element of “degree” in it (which it should), then it should be fairly easy for students to assess their learning. For example, the objective is, “student will be able to write an analysis paragraph that cites two quotes of support.” A student should easily be able to see if they have two quotes of support.

The next level of self assessment is comparing the work to an exemplar.

In the previous example, the teacher asks students to compare their paragraph to an exemplar analysis paragraph.?

This forces deep thinking.

Closure

Every piece of learning should end in closure.

It’s important to tie the closure to the objective.

It should be quick, broad, and force the students to actively do something.

During the end of a lesson, I have the tendency to skip over closure. It doesn’t always seem relevant at the time, but if closure if done correctly, it can cement knowledge in students’ brains. Also, it’s one last chance for the teacher to see if everyone got everything.

Conclusion

Choosing the right daily assessments will streamline your workflow and benefit students.