Authentic Assessment

Hey friends!  I hope everyone is having a great weekend.  The focus of my blog is about authentic assessment.  Luckily for me I have a retired fourth grade teacher for a Grammy.  She was also a graduate of Ball State with a focus in reading.  I had her read the part of the chapter about authentic assessment to get her opinion.  Her opinion goes like this: She personally believed that it is unrealistic and wouldn’t work in a modern day classroom.  Ideally this strategy will be perfect, but realistically classrooms are become larger and students have more physical, mental, and emotional problems and to leave them alone in centers might be unrealistic.  The teacher to student ratio is not ideal.  She sees the benefits of authentic assessment.  Throughout the years she was teaching she had created a checklist that is easier to just check off then she could go add notes to it later.  She thinks that creating a system like that is just being a good teacher.  She doesn’t think that the checklist or process that you go through needs to be done everyday.  Grammy states “kids don’t need the additional pressure of having the teacher constantly making notes about the work they are doing.  It is a teacher’s responsibility to be making mental notes on what their students are doing.”  She also wouldn’t want to do it in a group because students who have a reading issue would feel badly about themselves because students do know when they are bad readers.   If she grouped them by ability she would do a group assessment with better readers.  Although she saw many negatives to some of the authentic assessments she liked that you could give the students instant feedback with the authentic assessment.  The ‘listen to my voice’ example really struck her heart.  The idea that she is a firm believer of is that the top students with succeed no matter what setting they are in and that the kids that have an IEP with end up succeeding as well because they do get the extra help, it is the students in the middle that teachers really need focus on when it specifically comes to reading.   In the end, she believes that the teacher has to do what is best for the teacher and the students.  She also wanted me to say that her entire opinion on this topic is based on a reading program, not the other subjects.  I personally believe everything that she has said about it is true.   As future teachers I feel most of us idealize what our classroom is going to be like and we are probably wrong.  We won’t have 15-20 students, we will probably have 20-30; we won’t get all of the aids and help that we need.  It’s a hard thing to imagine, but we know that it is most likely going to be that way when we start teaching. Most classrooms have too many students in them these days and yes, individualized lesson plans are ideal but it is very hard to do that.  Lets say we are just working with one student on their reading checklist, what are the other 20 students in the classroom doing? Busy work? I know I don’t want my other students doing busy work.  It is finding the balance in the classroom on what type of assessment is best for you, your students and what your school requires.  I really would like opinions and questions on what my Grammy had to say about assessment and what you think would work best in your future classroom.