Standard 5: Assessment and Differentiated Instruction
Teachers shall understand and use multiple assessment strategies and interpret results to evaluate and promote student learning and to modify instruction in order to foster the continuous development of students.
Rationale
In a classroom of 25 students we can assume that many of them will learn information differently. Dr. Howard Gardner has proposed different ways in which people learn called Multiple Intelligent Types. Gardner proposed 8 different multiple intelligence types as:
1. Linguistic and verbal intelligence: good with words
2. Logical intelligence: good with math and logic
3. Spatial intelligence: good with pictures
4. Body/movement intelligence: good with activities
5. Musical intelligence: good with rhythm
6. Interpersonal intelligence: good with communication
7. Intrapersonal intelligence: good with analyzing things
8. Naturalist intelligence: good with understanding natural world
If all students learn in different ways, it follows that our methods in how we assess their learning should also vary. Utilizing differentiated assessment strategies will help teachers assess student-learning and ultimately benefit student retention.
Reflection
I was a having a very hard time trying to create meaningful lessons for one of my special needs classes. This class was a 2nd-4th grade special needs class in which all students had their own IEP. I began my lesson as if it were a lecture, telling the students what they were to learn. Next, I would illustrate what I wanted them to do in a step-by-step demonstration. Finally, I would guide the students in their final projects as they worked independently. Using their final art product as the only form of assessment, I found that many of them were either doing their own work (not related to the assignment) or working without any real purpose. I needed to reevaluate my methodologies and the ways in which to assess their progress. In the next lesson, I used a poem to illustrate the major concepts of the lesson, showed the class short clips of movies, read from an art focused textbook, and had the students demonstrate the art technique themselves. In order to assess my students, I gave them a choice of writing a poem/story or have them draw, paint or sculpt the project out of clay. To my surprise, many of the students chose to write poems instead of draw paint or sculpt. Using a variety of teaching strategies combined with varying the ways in which I assessed student learning had and extremely positive effect on my students. I continue to vary the ways I teach and provide my students with options and choices in how I assess their achievement. Attached you will find a variety of graphic organizers that I use to differentiate my instruction.
