Multiplicity

Here is a picture of me and Macy reading this article. If you can notice, she's lost a little bit of weight. She loves carrots. She also really loves the concept of "multiplism".

As we were reading this Macy and I were discussing some of the assessments I use in my classes. One class I really would love to develop stronger assessment methods for is my writing class. I often feel that I need to constantly edit and help the students revise everything they write. I often forget that every once in awhile I need to give them an assessment to see what they can do on-demand without my help. There is just as much value in allowing them to make mistakes and not talking about them as are there are in discussing key issues in their papers.

Again, the ideas of portfolios came up and again, lol, if anyone has some advice or websites I can visit to get some help in starting the implemetation of portfolios in my own clasroom I would greatly appreciate it.

One thing that I seem to tend to forget as a teacher sometimes is that we are constantly assessing the language use of our students. Today I had studnets define "apartheid" and they all looked in their books and copied down the definition the book gave. I then had them create a concept map on the board of all their different definitions. The final step was to have them partner up and pretend that I was a 10 year old and they had to explain the "book" definition in simpler terms. Many of my students struggled the activity and it really made me understand that this concept of apartheid was still new and unfamiliar to them. Although it was a quick and relatively unintrusive assessment I still was assessing where my students were in terms of understanding and defining this concept.