Ch 8 “What Do I Do with All These Sticky Notes?” Assessment That Drives Instruction

This chapter is about testing and assessment and how to successfully gauge whether the students are learning or not. She starts off with a conversation that she as having with a class of students on the first say of class. She was trying to guide them into asking certain questions to get them excited about the course. But a student asked something that she didn’t’ expect and wasn’t trying to get them to ask. The students asked about tests in the class and how many there were going to be. She then tried to veer them towards the right direction again and she realized that they were not going to be satisfies unless she went over testing thoroughly. She figured out that students are very concerned about tests and quizzes. So many teachers make the class all about testing and it usually doesn’t have a good meter for what they learned.

So how do we test? What can we do to actually test what our students are learning and how do we know? Tovani uses a lot of grading throughout the semester instead of two big tests throughout the year. She tries to assess their progress throughout the year through assignments that make them write daily or weekly things that show her that they are learning. She has one thing that she asks the kids to do in her class whether they take all the sticky notes from their text and places them on a piece of paper for her to see there thinking all on one page. She has them write what page number it came from so that she could go back to it if necessary. This is a very good idea to get not only you as the teacher to see what they have learned but to get them as a student to see the connections they have made and all the hard work they did throughout the year.

She also creates portfolios for each student and places work that she feels is essential to the progress or regression of the students learning. She is very selective on what goes in the file. She includes such things as old test scores from previous classes, previous grades, and new work to show improvement or terrible work to show where they started from. She shared at the end of the chapter how on a final test that she had once given to her class she included this question, “Attached to this sheet is the definition of reading you wrote for me during the first week of the semester. Look at your definition, and think about all that you know about reading. Compare your new knowledge of reading with what you used to know.” I find this type of question to be so helpful and can truly show the progress to both the student and teacher on what they did learn throughout the year. I fell that is not only important to note that the teachers know what the students learned but that the students can also see the progress that they have made throughout the year.