Evidence Based Practices

Assessment is a very important part of teaching and when used correctly, can guide a teacher
in terms of how and what to teach. If after doing an assessment I realize that most of my students
did not grasp the concept that I taught, I will then re-teach it, but I will come up with a new way
to teach it in hopes that my students gain a better understanding.
I base my instructional goals on the common core standards. I look for a logical order for
teaching the various standards, allowing one concept to build upon the next. At Bilbray
Elementary School, we have books of assessments that correlate with the common core
standards. After giving an assessment, I group my students into the categories of meets/exceeds,
approaching, and emerging. I then choose small groups from these categories to re-teach the
concept. For written tests, I always read the instructions more than once since several of my
students are still not fluent readers. In addition to written assessments, I use a lot of informal
assessment in which I ask questions and observe students while they are working or playing. For
example, I recently taught my students how to play a game called trash. The object of the
game is to put ten cards in order from one to ten. If they pick a card that has already been turned
over, they put the card in the trash pile. My students love playing this game, and by observing
them play it, it is a very easy way for me to assess whether or not they understand number
sequencing and recognize the numbers one through ten.

Bump is another great game for assessing math skills. In this game, students roll two dice, add
up the total, and put their unifix cube on the corresponding number on the game board. By
observing them play, I can tell if they have one to one correspondence, can add two numbers
together, and recognize the number they came up with.
Helping students relate what they learn to a real-world situation is another important aspect
of teaching. For example, when I was teaching about U.S. currency, I asked my students to think
of examples of when they would need to be able to count the money they had. This discussion
not only helped my students apply this concept to the real world, but it also helped them realize
that what they were learning was important. I recently taught my students about seeds and the
parts of a plant. Rather than just reading about it in a book and watching a video, I took it a step
further and had each of my students plant their own seeds in a greenhouse. Once again, we
applied their learning to the real world.