Standard 5

Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.

I was given the opportunity to co-teach a grade 2 classroom at Harwin Elementary School during our block 2 semester. This experience was a fantastic way to introduce the idea of creating lesson plans for a real audience of students, while focusing in on finding multiple ways to keep the students engaged and motivated. The main objective for this “in-situ” experience was to formulate ways to keep track of assessment informally throughout the four Friday’s, so that we could eventually create a summative assessment on our 3 linked lessons under BC’s Art’s curriculum.

Throughout this experience I had the chance to co-teach with a fellow classmates of mine, Emily, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I felt this was a great way to scaffold our first real lesson as we were both a little nervous. I also really enjoyed collaborating with Emily for our linked art lesson as we both had areas of strengths and weaknesses in which we could piggy back off each other. We were able effectively split the tasks up fairly and easily agree on new ideas and materials we would use throughout the lessons. Coordinating who taught what portion during class time was simple and effective. We were able to take turns on fine tuning areas of teaching where we felt weaker individually and give each other effective feedback on how we did. I know that co-teaching isn’t something we might experience much once we become teachers, however I felt this opportunity gave me a glimpse into what it would be like to partner up with other teachers in your school and collaborate group activities with other grades.

In all honesty, I found the first formative assessment to be slightly difficult as we were assessing the students artwork. At first, we started out picking out the “best” most visually appealing artwork and comparing everyone else’s to the “best”. Then we quickly realized that this was not the right way to formatively assess each students work as most of the students actually met all the success criteria we had previously laid out. This in itself told us that even though student A’s piece of work wasn’t as detailed as student B’s, they still met all three success criteria for that day and therefore is proficient.

I find that when assessing art, different variations of end products are going to be present and it can feel easy to get caught up in your own art bias’s. It’s important not to compare artwork to one another. This experience really had us thinking about what it is that you are wanting your students to take away from doing this activity/lesson? What is the overarching theme of the lesson, what is it that you want your students to learn and explore…imagination, risk taking, a specific concept? The success criteria should convey points that are directly associated to this, and nothing more. If you make it known that you are just assessing individuality with an art project, then you can’t assess and grade how this is done by each student in a universal way, as the construction of the project was not part of the actual assessment/success criteria. In our case, we introduced the activity of creating their own faces on the second Friday. We emphasized that everyone looks different and how we really wanted each student to notice the small details on their face that makes them unique; freckles, long eyelashes, eye colour, moles etc and present this accurately on their faces. Our success criteria included:

1. Accurately represent their facial attributes
2. Use lines in a variety of ways to portray facial features and textures
3. Use a variety of mediums and materials to express individuality

Ensuring that we only took the above three criteria into account as they are stated was important. It wasn’t enough to line up a few crayons beside one another and say that one was developing because overall it looked nicer than the next. We had to really make sure we were just sticking to the criteria we came up with.

Overall, I think the experience at Harwin was really beneficial to introducing assessment in a small and manageable way since this was our first go at it. Emily and I were able to take into account the students diversities and teacher feedback with each lesson, allowing us to adapt and prepare accordingly. With each lesson, we arrived fully prepared with all the required materials, and even took into account the classroom set up. I believe this pre work helped each lesson run smoothly and effectively. I am proud to say that our crayon bulletin board turned out really well!