Amberly Austin Instructional Media

Assessing students as we teach is a fundamental practice of good teaching.  Simply asking students to answer a question or write about a certain topic is not always the most effective way to do this, however.  Students like all of us want to be engaged and entertained while at school so why shouldn't we as teachers make our formative assessments interesting and engaging? For my research on this topic I went to the website for the National Center on Universal Design for Learning.  The website suggests three different ways we can formatively assess student understanding.  Each of these differ in practice so that kids can express their learning in different ways.  The first is physical action, this basically means that students differ in their ability to use the materials in a classroom.  The second was expression and communication, this is students abilities to express themselves.  The example used on the website was that a dyslexic may be able to tell...

Representation is a very important part of being a teacher.  Giving our kids every opportunity they can to learn through different mediums of representation is essential.  Everyone learns differently and as teachers it is our job to help our students use their learning strengths to grow and learn what they may think are difficult concepts. Deborah Moore-Russo and her partner Jillian Wilsey had some interesting insights on was to change representation in the classroom.  They did a study on math teachers to see how they taught basic algebra.  The most important thing that they found in the study was that teachers constantly evaluate how they are representing their content.  In addition to that I would argue that teachers need to evaluate themselves constantly on how they are representing content in multiple mediums. As a result of my research more than anything I plan to self-evaluate my teaching often and make goals to improve and do better. That is my bigges...