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A REAL Assessment of Teaching?
Posted By Terry
Students take a lot of tests, but teachers don’t have much to go on to know how effective their class was. Yesterday was one of those rare and great moments for me when I got to see for myself what my students learned.
Last spring’s Composition Theory class was great–engaged students created a very successful final project where they gave a presentation and created a wiki for people who might want to start high school writing centers.
An observer of their presentation was Jonathan Morris from Henrico County, who got very interested. He got some people in the county excited and developed some materials of his own, and is now training the first set of middle school tutors! He invited my old students to come and talk to the trainees.
Mike and Brian looked apprehensive when we first walked into the school building. The whole idea of middle school apparently brought back bad memories. But as soon as we got with the class, they relaxed– and proceeded to blow my mind! I could see how thoroughly they understood all the theory we had worked on in spring as they described their experiences working in our writing center. They answered all the students’ questions much better than I could have, and the middle schoolers hung on every word. These students ask the same questions my new tutor trainees are asking: how do you get someone excited about their writing??
Often professors say “students won’t do anything that doesn’t have a grade attached.” Well, these guys weren’t in my class anymore and wouldn’t even let me buy them lunch. They volunteered because this grew out of a project they did, totally on their own. I have never seen a class take ownership of a project the way that class did. They were so proud when Jonathan Morris thanked them and said that because of their great presentation he learned so much and got so motivated that now an entire county is going to benefit. One high school has created a class to train tutors and they will be the next school to open a center, and then everyone else has an approved model to work from.
Can you tell how proud I am?
Feb 28th, 2007
What exciting ideas! Writing, like spoken language, is a technology that is so familiar that its power has become invisible to us. However, when teachers foreground these practices *as* technology to help students contextualize their learning and to highlight the crucial importance of alphabetic literacy for intellectual development, we begin to build a bridge of interest that can be useful to the digital natives we’re encountering in our classrooms. The excitement over digital technology can be a motivator for strengthening primary alphabetic skills and discussing the specific strengths and weaknesses of our various media of communication.