WEEK 4 ASSIGNMENT - REFLECTION OF LESSON

Week 4 Assignment – Lesson Plan Reflection

Casey Fichtner

UCLA Extension
WEEK 4 ASSIGNMENT - REFLECTION OF LESSON

Multidimensional assessment supports student understanding by providing

feedback to students during learning. My SIOP lesson has within it, several

opportunities for multidimensional assessment. These assessments provide

opportunities for the teacher to adjust the lesson as it progresses as well as

opportunities for reteaching in future lessons within the unit.

During my SIOP lesson, students label a pill bug drawing. This operates as a

learning scaffold as well as a self-assessment that provides students with an

opportunity to review and correct their understandings. Additionally, the exit ticket, in

combination with the pill bug drawing, provides the teacher with an assessment of both

the language objective (writing 2 sentences) and the content standard (understanding

academic vocabulary). The teacher uses a rubric to review both assessments.

Observational and oral assessment also occur throughout the lesson as students

engage in peer conversations such as turn and talks, during the lesson presentation,

and small group work, during student application. Peer conversations provide the

teacher with opportunities to observe student thinking in response to questions and

activities. The teacher can use these assessments to adjust the lesson or probe further

with individuals and small groups. The thumbs up/thumbs down assessment occurs in

the lesson review, assessing student confidence in meeting the objectives. This

assessment also provides another opportunity for the students to self-assess their

understanding of the content objectives.

These four assessments help English Language Learners because they provide

opportunities for feedback and scaffolding. The pill bug assessment incorporates the
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use of realia (the actual pill bugs) and a visual (the drawing of the pill bug). These are

both scaffolds that support English Language Learners in acquiring and demonstrating

an understanding of academic vocabulary and concepts. Additionally, the exit ticket

assesses understandings that have been supported through hands on activities and

peer discussions. Scaffolds support English Language Learners in acquiring the

language that is expected on the exit ticket. Displayed vocabulary words and the pill bug

drawing also provide English Language Learners with word banks. Word banks can

assist English Language Learners by reducing the cognitive demand for producing

language. This ultimately allows students to focus on demonstrating mastery of the

learning objectives.

Assessment scaffolds reduce students' stress during the assessment process.

This in turn reduces affective factors that can inhibit comprehensible input and

demonstration of mastery. Thumbs up/thumbs down is a private and informal group

assessment. Observational assessment, collaborative peer interactions, and hands on

activities also create low stress assessment environments. Producing the pill bug

drawing with the use of realia and hands on activities lowers the affective filter through

scaffolding that allows students to engage with and use academic vocabulary.

The most stressful assessment in this lesson is the exit ticket. Because of the

potential stress levels, this assessment is supported through scaffolded activities in the

lesson that help to build academic language required for the exit ticket. The teacher also

provides several reference materials: labeled pill bug drawings, lesson vocabulary

posted with visuals on the board, etc. On this assessment, English Language Learners

with low syntax mastery can have sentence stems provided or give oral answers prior to
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written responses. According to Colorin Colorado, this differentiation supports English

Language Learners in demonstrating mastery of the content standard while scaffolding

completion of the language standard. Differentiation can also reduce students’ stress

levels.

In addition to lowering students’ stress levels, this lesson embeds features of the

SIOP model within each assessment. The lesson begins with an introduction to the key

vocabulary. Students then engage with the key vocabulary through hands on

observations, cooperative learning, drawings, and the creation of written sentences that

apply the learned vocabulary to the process that they have just observed. This adheres

to the SIOP feature of key vocabulary review (Echeveria et al., 2000, p. 168). During the

presentation portion of the lesson, the teacher restates student thinking with the

sentence stem, ‘I notice...’. This provides immediate feedback to students on their

output, another SIOP feature described by Echeveria, et al. (2000, p. 171).

Not only does this lesson utilize SIOP assessment features, it incorporates

assessment throughout the lesson. This is a SIOP feature described by Echevaria et al.

(2000) as multidimensional assessment (p. 172). Multidimensional assessment occurs

during meaningful tasks such as hands on observations and peer discussion, a key

component of this lesson. It also relies on multiple indicators to evaluate student

mastery of both the content and language standards, including group and individual

administration of both oral and written work. All of the components of multidimensional

assessment can be seen throughout this lesson and will help English Language

Learners and all learners with mastery of the lesson objectives.

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References

Echevarría, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2000). Making content comprehensible for English

language learners: The SIOP model. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Using informal assessment for English language learners. (n.d.). Retrieved from

https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/using-informal-assessments-english-

language-learners
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APPENDIX A: Pill Bug Drawing Assessment

This is an example of what the pill bug drawing assessment might look like. The

drawing would be student created. The labels on this example represent different ways

that students might decide to label the drawing to demonstrate understanding.