Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development

Professional standards for bc educators

This standard is huge. It incorporates all the things people generally think of that teachers do, I think. Planning, instruction, assessment and reporting are things every educators needs to know how to do, and from a teacher-education standpoint are the biggest things to learn, at least for me personally.

Having an in-situ experience at Harwin Elementary allowed me to practice and learn how to implement this standard in my practice. We were put into pairs, each pair in one classroom for this experience. We planned together, Ariel (my partner) and I chose to co-teach our lessons, and we practiced formative and summative assessment over 4 lessons, 1 Career Education lesson and 3 Art linked lessons. In our first lesson, Ariel and I asked the students about the types of art they were curious about. The picture above shows the ideas they brainstormed and mentioned to us. From these, we had an idea. The end product was comic book covers, our two build-up lessons were 3D art and balanced colour, both of which were used to make their comic covers.

One example comic book cover using purple and yellow balanced colours and 3D element in the title.

We wanted to use their ideas and see what fit with the curriculum, and we found shape in 3D art, balanced colours and repetition for colours in their comic covers, and they made characters, some students chose to use elements or reference movie, video game, or book characters, others made their own characters.

The first lesson, we overestimated our time, so we tried to plan better. The 3 art lessons our timing went really well. We used instruction for periods where we knew we could get information across without losing attention, then moved to having students try the activity and if we needed to add instruction, we did, either through planning or when we saw the students needed clarification.

It was interesting because we were with the students for only short periods, so we did not get to get to know them like we can on practicums, but we still saw moments in planning where we said “the class did that quickly last time,” or “we need to be very clear and explicit in our instruction for this topic,” as we were planning.

Another example comic book cover using blue and orange balanced colours and a box as the 3d element.

We assessed based on success criteria we wrote, and saw that in the future we would need to be more explicit in our criteria and what we were looking for, but each time we got a little better. We learned about reporting, though we did not actively report in the way Standard 5 described, so we did talk to students as we moved through the lessons. When needed, we were able to help a student with something they were struggling with or where a struggle happened the lesson previous, which we found through formative assessment, and summatively assessed at the end, getting the idea of what we would give back to each student, the comments we would make and the language we would use with students.

During my first practicum (EDUC 391 Practicum), I got to try out assessing student work when I had them do a math mini project. I made a 1-point rubric with students and we decided what would make a project proficient. No one in the class was below proficient, as everyone had all elements they needed, and I found that students seemed to really remember what they needed because they helped make the 1 point rubric, though I did always keep it where it was needed for reference as well. I thought back a lot to the experience in Harwin and what we talked about around assessment when I was marking the students work.

Standard 6