Standard 8 | Information Literacy Skills
The competent teacher will develop information literacy skills to be able to access, evaluate, and use information to improve teaching and learning.
Artifact:
NCTM Article
NCTM Article Review
Through my membership with NCTM, I am able to access resources available on their website as well as electronic versions of monthly journals. My artifact is a review of an NCTM article that I chose as an assignment for CI 403M: Teaching Diverse High School Students. There were many important notions in this article about implementing a portfolio in the math classroom. With this form of assessment, students were able to create and collect various “artifacts” used in the classroom and purposefully organize them to demonstrate mastery of the course goals. They are required to verbally explain procedures and communicate conceptual understanding. These are the main goals we want our students to come away with, and having a portfolio gives the students an organized forum to portray their knowledge in writing. They not only organize various vocabulary terms and procedures, but they get to analyze and create new work that they can call their own. This lets the students demonstrate higher levels of thinking, rather than assigning homework that is purely procedural. What is great about this assessment is that students are thinking about it throughout the curriculum. The students know they will need to write vocabulary, think about the skills and concepts they will need to write down to show their understanding.
As a result of searching for interesting articles, I was able to discover the various resources available on the NCTM website as well as those within the journals. I am able to access sample lesson plans, classroom activities, and the latest research conducted for math teachers. While browsing through the available articles, I was able to access one I found most relevant to me and evaluate it's effectiveness and usefulness.
With NCTM and various math education blogs and articles, I am constantly searching for new and interesting information that can help me develop and grow as a teacher. When I enter the field, I want to be prepared with valuable resources that I can access and ideas that I can use in the classroom to improve teaching. The portfolio assessment is something that I would love to implement in my classroom. I think that the only way to get it done efficiently and effectively is with the help and collaboration of other math teachers, and even teachers in other content areas. This way, students will be able to be accustomed to the format of the assessment and have a variety of formats to show their understanding. This will also increase literacy across content areas by strengthening skills of how to make a cover letter, writing down important vocabulary words, labeling, giving descriptions, questioning, applications, and reasoning. I want to know if there is a school that has more than just one content area using the portfolio assessment, or if it is only effective with one content area. I also want to know how much student confusion or rebellion is dealt with during the assessment. Do students cheat? Is it possible that they are not getting as much out of it as expected? Does it require too much work? I imagine that managing a big assessment project such as a portfolio containing sections of the curriculum can be cumbersome. I feel that writing entries in the portfolio might take away from valuable content, but it is the teacher’s judgment about what they feel students need more time to digest. The portfolio assessment could possibly be done multiple times over the course of the class so that students are receiving ample feedback in a shorter period of time, and it will seem like less of an ordeal and more beneficial to the students learning. With this assessment, teachers should be constantly checking the portfolios and giving positive feedback, because they should know that what they are creating is not only used as an assessment but is benefiting them more than they think, and they should feel rewarded. With this assessment, teachers should show their students that they care about their learning and want them to grow and succeed as students.
NCTM Article
NCTM Article Review
Through my membership with NCTM, I am able to access resources available on their website as well as electronic versions of monthly journals. My artifact is a review of an NCTM article that I chose as an assignment for CI 403M: Teaching Diverse High School Students. There were many important notions in this article about implementing a portfolio in the math classroom. With this form of assessment, students were able to create and collect various “artifacts” used in the classroom and purposefully organize them to demonstrate mastery of the course goals. They are required to verbally explain procedures and communicate conceptual understanding. These are the main goals we want our students to come away with, and having a portfolio gives the students an organized forum to portray their knowledge in writing. They not only organize various vocabulary terms and procedures, but they get to analyze and create new work that they can call their own. This lets the students demonstrate higher levels of thinking, rather than assigning homework that is purely procedural. What is great about this assessment is that students are thinking about it throughout the curriculum. The students know they will need to write vocabulary, think about the skills and concepts they will need to write down to show their understanding.
As a result of searching for interesting articles, I was able to discover the various resources available on the NCTM website as well as those within the journals. I am able to access sample lesson plans, classroom activities, and the latest research conducted for math teachers. While browsing through the available articles, I was able to access one I found most relevant to me and evaluate it's effectiveness and usefulness.
With NCTM and various math education blogs and articles, I am constantly searching for new and interesting information that can help me develop and grow as a teacher. When I enter the field, I want to be prepared with valuable resources that I can access and ideas that I can use in the classroom to improve teaching. The portfolio assessment is something that I would love to implement in my classroom. I think that the only way to get it done efficiently and effectively is with the help and collaboration of other math teachers, and even teachers in other content areas. This way, students will be able to be accustomed to the format of the assessment and have a variety of formats to show their understanding. This will also increase literacy across content areas by strengthening skills of how to make a cover letter, writing down important vocabulary words, labeling, giving descriptions, questioning, applications, and reasoning. I want to know if there is a school that has more than just one content area using the portfolio assessment, or if it is only effective with one content area. I also want to know how much student confusion or rebellion is dealt with during the assessment. Do students cheat? Is it possible that they are not getting as much out of it as expected? Does it require too much work? I imagine that managing a big assessment project such as a portfolio containing sections of the curriculum can be cumbersome. I feel that writing entries in the portfolio might take away from valuable content, but it is the teacher’s judgment about what they feel students need more time to digest. The portfolio assessment could possibly be done multiple times over the course of the class so that students are receiving ample feedback in a shorter period of time, and it will seem like less of an ordeal and more beneficial to the students learning. With this assessment, teachers should be constantly checking the portfolios and giving positive feedback, because they should know that what they are creating is not only used as an assessment but is benefiting them more than they think, and they should feel rewarded. With this assessment, teachers should show their students that they care about their learning and want them to grow and succeed as students.
