Chapter 9 reading reflection

Chapter nine discussed ways that teachers could make their assessments meaningful to their students in a classroom. One teacher tells her students that they can either be producers or consumers. She then goes on to say that we shoudl strive to be producers because we are creating something that will bring our learning to the next level. I think this is a great way to help remind students of how to think of themselves in the classroom and outside of the classroom. The teacher goes on to say being a producer is the "global goal" now instead of just being a consumer.
A teacher needs to be taking several things into consideration while assessing students' project work such as what they have created, teamwork, effort, and the creativity that went into the project. Teachers need to be fair when assessing and that doesn't mean that they need to assign everyone the exact same amount of work for each project. Some students take 3 hours to write what takes another student 20 min. The teacher needs to keep this in mind and assess accordingly. This is called establishing anchors.
The New Technology Foundation has come up with a gradebook that is shared with schools across the high school network. The grades are brokendown much more than what a normal teacher would do. One teacher has grades for how well the student knows the content, written communication, critical thinking, and work ethic. All of the students, parents and teachers have access to these grades, which can create more opportunities for meaningful conversations about student achievements.
Having students reflect on what they learned in a fun way, such as a podcast, can be another learning experience. Other students can give feedback on how they presented what they learned in their podcast in order for the creator to know what to do better next time. Another option would be to have the student create something new after the project is done to summarize or synthesize what they have learned from creating their project. An example could be having the students create a book about something that they had already been doing throughout the project then publishing the book for the students.
These new and improved ways of making assessment meaningful will help us in our own PBL project by fitting these different forms of assessment into our own work as well as the students. We will be able to assess whether the students actually know what they are doing or have done and how much they learned instead of allowing them to slack off on their work and still get a good grade becuase they know how to guess really well at multiple choice questions.