SSED Week Five

     Once again, Social Studies Methods has changed my entire GRASP(S) (pun intended) on teaching!  It never fails that I am pushed to think of things in different ways and keep in mind the classroom that will one day be my responsibility.  The main shift in my thought process this week was from thinking of fun and creative activities for assessment to thinking of performance tasks.  I am excited to learn more about the learning experiences and how they feed off our generalizations to lead up to our performance tasks.  I also can't wait to take my ideas for student activities and learn how to transform them into performance tasks.

     This week, I had the opportunity to plan with my clinical educator the lessons that I will be teaching in her classroom.  For my fine arts integration piece, she has recommended that I give the students the opportunity to select a creative way to display what they have learned.  This was SUCH an exciting moment for me as I realized that she is pushing me to create a performance task for the students!  I believe that fine arts will be a great place to start with this idea, because the standards naturally push students to be creative and expressive.  Creating performance tasks in other subject areas may be a bit more challenging.  However, integration of fine arts into core subjects would be the perfect way to approach creating a performance tasks for students.  

    One thing that was brought to my attention this week in a new form was the idea that we can give "assessments of learning," "assessments for learning," and "assessments as learning."  All three of these are important, though the last form of assessing appears to be less common.  I believe that one of my goals as an elementary educator will be to figure out how to assess my students as they learn.  Through my clinical observations thus far, I have not seen assessment while learning performed in the classroom as often as I believe it should be.  I hope that my attention to this subject prior to teaching will help me become efficient in assessing my students as they are learning.

     I believe that my brain has now clearly organized the differences between an activity and a performance task.  The next step for me to take regarding performance tasks is to be able to take all the many ideas I have about activities and transform them into performance tasks.  I hope to be able to create options and a clear rubric for my students to select and show their learning in a creative way.  I want to create an assessment environment where students are not always expected to come to one specific conclusion.