Self-Assessment

As teachers in training, we often talk of inquiry, meaningful assessment and having the student own the learning. I now realize that my co-op teacher has been doing just that in her role as my mentor. I will use a class from this past Friday as an example: I had designed a "Reading Interest Survey" for a section of students who are beginning a reading enrichment program with me, which will last the rest of the school year. Prior to beginning the book Milkweed, I wanted to use a class period for building community, so I had them pair up at their tables to interview each other with the survey questions. The students were actively engaged, stayed on task and seemed to have fun with the activity. I said something in the introduction of the assignment about pretending they were television reporters conducting the interview and that they would get to present the person as a reporter. I did this having already discovered that seventh graders love to "ham it up!" They conducted the interviews with a level of enthusiasm that would suggest they really thought television cameras were going to roll into the classroom any minute. It all worked to my advantage, because my lesson was a success and all students were on task. Then something not so spectacular developed...as the students began to present their partners to the class, those in the "audience" were restless and chatty and the disruptions grew to a point of needing to be reigned in more than once. The talk about how privileged they were to be doing a very grown-up activity fell on deaf ears, so I resorted to the 5-4-3-2...in the big voice. It was a challenge to keep order after that and the final few minutes of class exhausted me.

My co-op did a brilliant thing afterwards; she asked, "What could you have done differently with the lesson, considering that in first block I lost control of the class by following an active participation enterprise with silent reading?" Not only did she challenge me to assess myself, she used an example of how she, herself, had created a similar situation earlier in the day. I began to understand that taking students from very active participation and asking them to do silent, individual work was not a good idea with this particular group of students. My co-op and I both decided that, in the future, each of us would have any quiet, individual work precede active group work. The reigning-in of the students just becomes too much of a power struggle, we agreed, and the quality of the active work gets lost. These nuances of good teaching might not be so obvious to me if my mentor did not ask me to look at and evaluate my successes and areas for improvement. For this, I am very grateful.