Final Course Reflective Essay
During this course, I have learned so much. Not only have I learned how to properly administer, score, and analyze several different reading assessments, but I have also learned how to be a better teacher. Before this course, I knew about assessments and how important they are for instruction and monitoring student progress. Before this course, I knew about assessments and how important they are for instruction and monitoring student progress, but now I know how to actually apply those assessments and their data to improve my teaching and thus student learning.
One of the most important things I experienced during this course is the real-life administration and application of assessment data during the practicum sessions. I was so nervous at the beginning of this course because I knew how to teach a lesson, but not how to use data from an assessment to drive my reasoning for a lesson. I’m still learning how to do this, but I now have the foundational skills that will allow me to grow and improve. I loved gaining hands-on experience during this course and wished every teaching course would
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I love the toolkit I have built for this course, and it will make a wonderful addition to the portfolio/toolkit that I created in my foundations class. Not only was the toolkit useful during our practicums where we were assessing, but it will also be great to have this as a resource when I have my own classroom. I like how we actually practiced using the assessments in our toolkits rather than just creating a toolkit full of stuff we have only learned about. I am so glad that I was able to purchase three of the four textbooks (instead of renting) for this course because have all been such great resources; reading textbook chapters are not something I enjoy doing, but the Strategies book and the Observation Survey have so many useful teaching strategies and information in them that I will be hanging on to both of