Quotable Quotes

Class 9- June 5th, 2012

Article: "Assessment FOR Learning, the Achievement Gap, and Truly Effective Schools" by Rick Stiggins

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Quote 1: “Pre-service and ongoing professional development opportunities are essentials”

As teachers, in order to assess our students, we need to be forever learners. We have to take part in professional development opportunities so that we can learn new research about how students learn and new assessment strategies that will best assist our students. We need to keep current and take on the changes of the research on learning. I know that learning to teach successfully requires years of trial and error and teachers need to be open-minded and continually change and developed their insights and practices so that their ever changing classroom of students will benefit. ________________________________________________________________________

Quote 2: “Turn learners in to assessors”

            I agree that assessment should not be something that is done to students but should be something that is done for students and students need to be able to learn to assess themselves. It is essential that students gather information about and reflect on their own learning so that are able to understand their own ways of learning. I really like the use of portfolios where students can reexamine their work, set moderately challenging goals for themselves, and plan to accomplish these goals. They can also use portfolios to see how much they have progressed throughout the year, which increases self-confidence, and look at the things that they can further improve on.

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Quote 3: “We must remember who is in charge of the learning, and it is not the teacher”

Although we as teachers try to engage students in our lessons as much as possible, students will still take from that lesson what they connect to, and it is not always the knowledge we want them to gain from it.  It is important for students to make connections by using prior knowledge, therefore, children need to become self-directed learners so that they have an opportunity to try their own learning approaches, and understand how they learn.  We need to teach our students how to think for themselves, teach each other, and answer their own questions through discovery. I feel that this quote by Alexandra K. Trenfor sums up my statement, “the best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see”.