Week 1 Reading Reflection

The Goal is NOT to Cram for the Exam

I am most intrique by the idea of formative assessments.  My elementary and secondary schooling experience was a while ago, but I DO remember the end-of-the-week, end-of-the-unit, end-of-the-semester, and end-of-the-year summative assessments.  My grades were reported based on these summative assessments that I only studied for on the night before the test, trying frantically to remember everything thing I learned- only to be immediately forgotten the moment I filled in the last bubble with my #2 pencil.  I suppose my daily homework assignments were formative assessments, but these assignments to be done at home were useless to me if I did not understand the content presented to me in class.  My homework might have been checked and graded, but it was rarely reviewed to assist me with concepts I might not have understood... and the next time I saw the information was usually on the summative assessment.  

Today my children's teachers are starting to "flip" lessons in the upper grades.  The student's "homework" is to watch a recorded lesson at home (sometime it is the teacher, but usually it is a YouTube video) and then class time is spent working on what once was considered "homework".  More common in math classes, this technique allows students and teachers to work through problems together, giving every student the opportunity to master the lesson in class with assistance from the teacher, as well as classmates.  What once was homework is now a formative assessment.  I like this idea.

Formative assessments are easily adapted to library instruction.  A lesson plan can be built around the in-class creation of a product.  The effective instructional librarian doesn't just stand in front of the class lecturing on how to create a short video in iMovie, but instead models how to create such a project as participants follow along- each creating their own video.  Experts can assist novices- no one is on their own.  By the end of this hands-on learning experience each student, by completing the task, has provided the teacher with an individual formative assessment and students have more likely mastered the content of the lesson.  This scenario works well in a school library where the Media Specialist can build on past lessons to create a larger product which encourages mastery of a subject/program, can work with the same group of students to understand each student's prior knowledge, and can develop a community of learners that is comfortable asking questions and sharing ideas.

I should have my mother read the ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians (2010), then she might start to understand that my intent is NOT to be like the school librarian at the elementary school that she taught at for 30 years.  Every time I mention something that I am doing in class or in my student teaching she states, "My school librarian never did that."  Though the librarian at my mother's old school was a lovely lady, after my volunteering experience of weeding old books off the shelves of my own children's school libraries throughout the years, I've developed a theory that "old school" librarians didn't have any time to actually teach because they had to spend all of their time painting the Dewey Decimal call numbers on the spines of books... with very tiny brushes.