Academic Achievement and Students

¶ … Strategy, Assessment

The language objective for my students would be to maintain a reflective journal about something they read during the week. This could a blog, a newspaper, a magazine, a book, an e-book, etc. The journal should be about what they read, what they thought about it, why they read it, and so on. My main focus for them would be to advance their composition skills by beginning with a topic statement, supporting that statement with information and summarizing it with a conclusion.

I would measure this language objective by using a portfolio assessment. A portfolio assessment is a good way for teachers to see how the students have progressed with their writing. With the journal, I would consider early entries, middle entries and late entries and assess the overall progress made. The portfolio provides a broad view of the work of the student and also can give the student a feeling of pride -- something tangible to work towards completing.

The reason I would choose this assessment is that portfolios can be taken with students after they are completed and they can continually go back to them and read them and see what they were thinking about at that point in their lives. It makes the work personal and enjoyable because they are truly investing themselves in it. With my own portfolios that I kept in elementary and middle school, I would go back and look at them over the years to see what kind of person I was like at that age. It would help me to see how I had advanced over the years and give me confidence in myself at seeing what I had accomplished.

The strategy that I would use to support this objective would be to utilize various approaches, especially technology so as to make the objective exciting for students (Peregoy, Boyle, 2013). I could host a blog space where students could upload their assignments and see them and comment on one another's entries: this could be a good way for students to interact and see and compare their work with others'. It would also promote exchanges among the students, as they could post on one another's entries. I would also have them keep a private journal that only the teacher would see, just so students would not feel embarrassed about sharing everything.

Another strategy that I would use is that of the visual representation: I would bring in pictures, famous works of art, and describe a little about them or just have students try and guess what is going on in the picture. I would give them clues about the meaning of various objects, but then I would have them write a description of what they see in their journal. This would help them to work on composition as well -- starting off with a topic sentence, supporting it with middle sentences, and then finishing with a strong concluding sentence. As Gottlieb (2006) points out, using visual representations in class can be a very strategic way to engage with students and keep them mindful throughout the class.