Final course Reflection/ Feedback form

GPDE 5000A

1.      Professional Readings:

The article that impacted my learning the most throughout the course Understands by Design. I choose this article because the process was new to me, therefore all the information I know about this process, I learnt it in the course. The Background design gave me a new perspective on teaching and learning. Never in my eleven years of teaching have I stopped to think about planning for assessment before instruction. This idea shocked me at first but after reading more about the process, hearing others point of views on it, planning a lesson using the process and reflecting on it, I came to realize that it is the most innovative teaching strategy I have come across since teaching.

Teaching to achieve favourable outcomes from the assessment makes more sense to me than teaching to achieve objectives. The outcomes of the assessment will be used to determine students’ progress, not the objectives of the lesson. So therefore, it is logical that whatever we teach students should be align with the assessment items to be used in measuring their progress.

Assessment tools: Assessing students in my classroom usually takes the form of test/ quizzes and oral presentations. Having been exposed to numerous innovative ways of assessing students for understanding and application of concepts I now understand the importance of using formative assessment to collect students data and how to use these data to make informed decisions. I am also more competent in tailoring assessment strategies to fit the purpose of the assessment and students level of development and interest. Assessment tools I would implement in my class are conservation schedule, checklist, videos and blogging.

Process: I plan on implementing the gallery walk. Especially in the differentiated classroom. Students would be free to represent their work in various forms and transform the classroom to resemble a gallery. They will then present their present their work to peers. I choose to use this method in the differentiated classroom because students at all level gets to learn from all the activities that were given at various levels. I also plan on using the round table seminar to get the participation of all students and at the same time assess their level of understanding of the concepts.

Facilitator feedback.

1.      What I like the most was the warm environment that was created and the opportunity to work with experience students, Jamaica 6.

2.      What I like the least is that there were too many materials to summarize.

3.      I think you should continue putting some of the readings on audio tapes.

Florence Ricketts