Well I started reading chapter 3 at the beginning of the week and I am still working on it and as we all know this chapter is long.... so far it has been an experience.
Informal Assessment: these would be the startegies used by a teacher to see if the student is "getting" what they are suppossed to in reading. There are several different strategies that are used and they include basal reading series, IRIs, miscue analysis, CBMs and portfolio assessment. So what I have learned is that there are some that are across the board used in all classrooms and then there are some that are not. Since I am not a teacher yet I can't say with certainty which ones are better than others or even if they are effective. I can see how using the basal series would be useful because I would think that it at least gives you something to go by, like a reference, but at the same time it can not tell you everything you might need to know. By using the observation method, I think that it would actually tell you more. As a teacher you will see facial expresions and body gestures that can say a lot...that says a lot about the student. I think that a combination of the strategies might need to be done to really know. Like I said I am not in the classroom so I could be wrong. Maybe several techniques are used, I just don't know it.
I have been in a 1st grade class where the teacher was assessing him on word recognition. She had a worksheet with the sight words on them and a timer and she gave him the paper and prompted him to read the words on the sheet one at a time and he couldn't. They were very simple words but you could tell that he had no idea.. An example word was something like, step and he didn't sound out s-t-e-p, he would sound out totally different letter sounds and it was shocking. At that, the letters he was sounding out didn't even go together to form another word. They were just random letter sounds! I don't know what happened to him because I didn't observe long enough but this teacher was a good teacher so I am sure she continued to help him or recommended more help for him maybe even a reading specialist. The odd thing is that he didn't think he was wrong either....
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First let me start with, "You are already a teacher!" There is no waiting or magic time when it happens. You are consistently developing you identity as one, but you are already a teacher. Some of the thing you write above, Id hope, and Id argue that you do know. For example, you know that, "a combination of strategies might be best." Don't you? Question is, "What strategies does a teacher need to possess in order to deliver quality instruction?"
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant as that I don't have the formal experience in the classroom to be able to judge which would be better than the other. I do know that a combination would be the best. I feel that depending on the teachers experience and the students prior knowledge as well as background, change what the teacher's strategies would need to be. A teacher cannot expect the student who has no prior knowlede of what is at hand to score well when being assessed. (I think that would be evident). Of course then the teacher could adjust so that she can deliver a quality instruction.
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