Importance Of Student Learning On The English Language Arts Smarter Balanced Assessment

The plan outlines five goals that we have found for our school district. These goals show our commitment to provide the highest possible standards of education for all students in our district and to ensure the fair and equitable treatment of all members of our community. We consider understanding individual differences in each student and teacher so that we can adopt the appropriate programs of study for them of the utmost importance.

As a multicultural educator, I believe that students have different learning styles and needs as a result of their diverse backgrounds. In order to develop an effective student centered educational program, we need an equally effective assessment program. As a strong supporter of balanced approach and learner centered design models, I encourage my teachers to use alternate and informal assessment approaches along with standardized tests in developing their assessments. Standardized tests given by state will primarily help in ranking schools and students. Furthermore, the standardized test results cannot be used by the student’s teacher as it takes two to three months before

When I am developing units plans, I ensure that all my lessons are deeply infused with the Common Core learning standards. I am also a firm believer in incorporating differentiated instruction. I am able to differentiate through analyzing test results. From those results, I design tiered assignments to give students the appropriate level of material to complete. I deem it is important to know all of my students as individuals. When planning, my students interest and learning styles are taken into consideration. I have also enhanced the phonics based reading program, by infusing whole language learning. I enjoy creating hands on centers such as sensory bin dig, book box, and egg addition. When I find that students are having difficulty, I reach out to my colleagues for ideas. I especially do so for my students with IEP's. I regularly communicate with the speech, SETTs, and OT teachers. By taking these steps, I can execute lessons that are curriculum driven and

In 2013, Jennifer Cheatham took office as the new superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. Heralded as "well-informed, direct and easy to communicate with," among her first orders of business was to develop a Strategic Framework, which addressed the most significant issues facing the district including ELL learning options (Capellaro 1-2, Romero-Johnson). Also in 2013, after years of working as an interpreter, teaching, and administrating as a principal within MMSD, Dr. Romero-Johnson began as the Executive Director of the newly created Office of Multilingual and Global Education (OMGE). With support from top-level leadership, OMGE developed the “English Language Learner Three-Year Plan” to

In my assessment these students will be evaluated consistently my me and the instructors at Hillcrest elementary school. The students will be evaluated on how to continue his/her next steps within the school. Input will be given to the student at the school for data so they can learn more by adapting to their own personal experiences. I will first do a walk-thru of the classroom in starting my assessment. I will visually be able to check on my student’s progress and really understand the students. Next I will use a checklist to compare and see if the student is progressing or not. Criticism feedback won’t be seen as a problem but would be seen as a guide to understanding and achievement inside of the classroom. Lastly and most important I will give out a summative assessment to assess the knowledge of problem solving skills. The specific end goal is to persuade students to become long lasting learners inside and

The upcoming changes taking place in my district provide an excellent opportunity for me to facilitate opportunities for differentiation in other classrooms. As the "owner" of English 11, I plan to focus on creating many different differentiated activities for the upcoming school year; this is the first step in my action plan. This will allow two other teachers to witness and implement these activities in their own classrooms. As Tomblinson and Imbeau (2010) explain, the barrier from some teachers in creating a differentiated classroom is the thought that they just do not have enough time (pg. 2458). My work developing differentiated instruction activities into the English 11 curriculum will allow other teachers to sample differentiated activities and decide what works for them without having to do all of the planning themselves. This will also open up dialogue between teachers to discuss how we can modify activities and assessments. To ensure materials are available to teachers, I will create a shared Google folder that contains directions and sample work. As a leader, I will also make sure to speak with teachers who are sharing English 11 to discuss differentiated activities and make possible modifications. As we work through the year, I will ask other teachers of English 11 for increasing input and ideas for differentiated activities. Chapter 4 of Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom suggests that inviting colleagues to be a part of the planning process incorporates each teacher's strengths and allows educators to learn from each other (pg. 1310). Furthermore, I will engage our special education teacher in designing activities that will best meet the needs of her students. Tomblinson and Imbeau further explain that co-planning enriches the repertoire of each teacher and forges teams

Her flexibility is an important key in being able to reach every student individually. Mrs. Thompson mentioned in conversation although the children are grouped by the school based on commonality of skill level, she finds every year that the skill level is still very varied. With that said, it is imperative as a teacher that creative ways be implemented to allow each student to learn equally verses “teaching to the middle.” By “teaching to the middle” often times the children who fall behind continue to struggle while the students who are more advanced lack a challenge. Chanel mentioned one way to combat this would be to pre-plan agendas because organization is a key component to a successful classroom

The Response to Intervention framework is a critical element of the Westside Elementary to meet the individual instructional needs of our students. The school utilizes universal screenings to access all students reading data in grades one through five, three times throughout the school year. Primarily, two assessments, STAR and Aimsweb data, determine the pathway of the students and the services deemed appropriate, including teacher information and collaboration with the MTSS team. The students partake in the assessments three times a year; fall, winter, and spring. Tiers are not stagnant; students may receive services from multiple tiers, depending on instructional, academic, and environmental needs. Therefore,

In order to project how our students will perform with our use of Marzano Instructional Frameworks, we first review data from our previous years’ Smarter Balanced Assessment, grades 9-12 and Measurement of Progress, grades

The SmarterMeasure assessment is used by Jefferson College to assess whether or not a student is prepared to take an online course or a class where technology is readily used. The test analyzes five different areas of readiness: life factors, personal attributes, technical competency, technical knowledge, and reading recall. Within each area, sub areas are used to tell the student where their strengths and weaknesses are. A student is measured on a scale of one to four in each of the areas, with four being the highest. For example, a student scoring a four performs well with that skill, but a student scoring a one may want to seek improvement in that area before taking a college online course.

learn, planning backwards from there to create learning targets, lessons and assessment items, using the

For SCPS to move forward, four key questions must be answered: Where are we? Where do we want to be? How will we get there? And how will we measure our progress? The “Where are we” question has been answered over the past year as an environmental scan of the school system was conducted via the resource utilization study, the shared services study, the analysis of programs, the climate survey, the staffing plan, the class size analysis, division benchmarking (including SOL, SAT, ACT, AP and IB testing results) and the student accommodation plans.

My theory of action was if I help teachers build instructional capacity by developing and improving their backwards planning or curriculum mapping (identifying essential standards) and enhance their data analysis approach, will they make a shift from following a script to making effective instructional decisions based on the specific needs of students. My strategic actions were to plan and design professional development opportunities that would enhance the teachers’ instructional practices and differentiate my support for them through professional learning communities, informal walkthroughs, and formal evaluation processes.

“People need to know why what they are doing is worth the effort and how it connects to their personal and collective mission and values, or the endeavor will soon be stalled. We show that morality is often reflected in the work and used as a means to inspire others.” (Blankstein & Noguera, 2015). The teachers were organized, they ensured constancy and consistency through the teachers and students by having meeting and evaluating the work of the students in all classes. “Improving our school meant that we needed to improve instruction across the school. Quality instruction was the driver of our improvement. When we learned to teach differently, and focus on teaching our students the literacy skills they needed, the students learned the material better.” (Blankstein & Noguera, 2015). And this was the insight that inform my professional practice. In my school, we start working all the teacher as one team since last school year. This school year we are on the same path by improving our grading policy across the school and by helping each other to have a school of excellence. When something is new, fear is going to be there always, but it is our decision if we allowed fear to defeat use, or we can decide to fight our fears and conquer the

Assessments are a critical tool in monitoring the progress of English language learners at all grade levels. The main purpose of assessments is to ensure students are receiving quality teaching instruction in accordance to academic and content standards. Even though these tests are not the only resource used for testing students, they provide teachers with invaluable data to determine if the student is growing in certain academic areas. There are several types of assessment that can be used to measure a student’s progress. In this paper, various alternatives to