TPGP Goal 2 Reflection

My second professional growth goal for my practicum was to create assessments that
adequately assess all students by measuring in multiple modalities and forms with added
supports for students who need it; to ensure that the outcomes are being assessed and not just
reading / writing proficiency. The reason why I chose this as one of my growth goals was
because I believe assessment is one of the most essential parts of teaching. I also believe that
it is something that can always be improved and refined and that it will likely be something that I
work on for my entire teaching career. One of the things that I believe is most challenging about
assessment is being able to assess the right content and not just assessing the modality that
the students are using. Because of this, I chose this as my goal to try to improve my practice
and make sure students are getting the feedback that they need to succeed.

My strategies to reach this goal was to get feedback from my teacher mentor,
administrator, and university consultant. To reflect upon my lessons to see how I could improve.
And to make a conscious effort to make sure that all of my assessments were valid and reliable.

I had several goals in this practicum to refine my assessments and make sure students
are getting the feedback that they need to learn. My first goal was to provide proper support to
all students who may need it during assessments. This was something that was suggested to
me by my teacher mentor and is something that I will definitely continue in my teacher career.
These supports include things such as: reading test questions out loud so that any student who
needs reading support has it, helping scribe for students who have trouble writing out answers,
or having students complete tests orally instead of writing out their answers.

Another strategy that I had to improve my assessment practices was to assess students
in multiple modalities for all of my units. Some of the ways that I assessed students for my units:
tests, artistic representations, oral tests, posters, videos, google slides, hands-on activities, and
many more. I use multiple of these assessments for each unit and then reference the
assessments against each other. This way I could see if one assessment was different from the
others because that could mean that that assessment was not actually assessing the content of
the unit. Multiple assessments can also show if a student was just having a bad day or has test
anxiety which may be why they did poorly on an assessment.

This is an area where I believe I will constantly grow throughout my career in finding new
ways to assess students, new ways to make sure assessment is valid, and to plan units that
assess students in multiple ways. In this practicum I grew professionally in making sure my
assessments had greater variety and had greater validity.