Toolkit step 1 – Pre-Assessments

What is your approach to pre-assessment? What is its value? What did you learn about yourself or your students from the pre-assessments? What are your goals for your teaching in the coming year?

I believe pre-assessment is a critical part in creating a good instructional formula.  Heacox states “Without pre-assessment, you do not know the preparedness of your students for new learning, the specific learning differences amongst your students, or where to begin devising new curriculum goals.” (Heacox, 2009)  I agree with this statement and feel that pre-assessments have great value to you as an educator.  Without them you are heading into a lesson unprepared to reach your students’ needs and to help them achieve your learning goals.  Pre-assessments can give teachers the framework to build their lessons on to create the most effective learning environment.

When reflecting upon the continuum of pre-assessment and Teacher inventory that I completed from Heacox.  I learned a lot about myself as a teacher.  It kind of opened my eyes to some areas that I would like to improve on for the next school year.  I showed great flexibility in my teaching and I felt confident with my delivery of a lesson.  But an area where I could improve and grow was my planning of the curriculum.  I have never been consistent when giving pre-assessments over a topic.  Being an elementary teacher most of my pre-lesson activities would be very informal and I would try to assess my student’s understanding of a topic by having a brief discussion.  I feel that never gave me a true feel for what my student’s knew, because the ones that know the answers would give the answers and the ones that where unsure would just sit back and nod.  I feel that becoming more consistent in using pre-assessments and using a variety of assessments could help me improve on my instructional planning for the next school year.  Therefore my goals will reflect on how I plan to incorporate pre-assessments into my elementary classroom next year.

  1. Starting the school year, it is very important to get to know your student’s and their interests.  This can sometimes be a difficult thing to do in an elementary classroom, where the students are influenced by their peers and may mimic a friends answer instead of giving their own opinion, so using a Getting to know you sheet that they can do at home with their parents or various beginning of the year assessments, can give you a good idea of their likes and dislikes, which you can incorporate into your lessons or determine their skill level is.
  2. I would also like to improve on getting to know my students’ Language arts abilities.  This next year we will be grouping our students by reading ability, so we can teach to similar skill sets.  One way I was considering doing this is by performing a running record with each student to determine his or her reading fluency level.  Reading fluency is a good indicator of comprehension and word recognition.
  3. I have always struggled with identifying my students’ abilities in math.  The math series that we use has a very strict script that you are supposed to follow.  After two years of using this math series, I am becoming bored.  I would also like to give a general math pre-assessment to determine what areas of the curriculum we need to spend more time on and what areas can be supplemented into other parts of the day, such as our calendar meeting time.
  4. Finally, I would like to get my students thinking more about our topics in science. A graphic organizer, such as a KWL chart, would be a great way to see what each student knows or has heard about a specific topic.  That is a great way for students to jot down ideas about a topic without worrying about being wrong.

I believe using pre-assessments will create classroom lessons where I am focusing more on the students and their needs instead of just covering the topic.  With the knowledge I learn from the pre-assessments, I could create fun interactive lessons that the students and I will both enjoy.

Here is a copy of my bibliography

Toolkit 1 Annotated Bibliography

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