School starts about a month from now, and I’ve never been good at turning off my teaching brain during the summer. As I travel, read, and catch up with friends during the summer, I find myself thinking about my classroom and how to connect my experiences with my students next year.
This summer, the connections are easily apparent as I’ve been working with DPI’s accountability department. I have learned so much about the test creation process, and I want to share that information with my colleagues as we transition back to school. Throughout the externship I have also explored (and will continue to learn about) how the Measures of Student Learning constructed response questions are created. I want to use that knowledge to create better constructed response questions to assess my students’ learning. This will help tremendously in my classroom to ensure that objectives are being mastered and that students can articulate what they have learned at a higher level.
I can’t wait to interact with the other Kenan Fellows at the Raleigh Professional Development in a couple weeks to see how they will use their externship experiences in their own classrooms.