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

My lesson plans were solid and diverse during my second practicum. I instructed confidently, and all feedback given to me by my coaching teacher with regard to tightening up the class behaviour and the expectations and deadlines was immediately implemented in the classroom by myself. I followed my coaching teacher’s writing rubric, as it was already familiar to the students, and I created a rubric to make the assessment of the youtube project fair and considerate of planning and other work that occurs outside of the product itself. This project assessment also honoured the student’s self-assessment and enabled me to better understand and consider information that did not make it into their project reports or the project itself and had a large impact on their final grades.

In my last practice, I received very little feedback with regards to improving my lesson plans, and I feel proud of the progress that I have made with them in the past year. The time intensive labor of the early days to build strong foundations has payed off both in my thinking and in speeding up my planning in the present. I have received positive feedback with regards to the effectiveness of my instruction, and I look forward to bringing all the skills I am polishing in this practicum into my future practice as an educator. I have also been very excited this time to have the freedom and the encouragement of my coaching teacher to implement a portfolio model of assessment and bring it to all three of the classes I am teaching. I am also happy to report that my coaching teacher is keen to continue this portfolio model of holistic assessment (in which we collect all assignments to compare and measure growth, as well as place within any classroom observations we make that could contribute to triangulating our assessment practice.) I am very excited to bring this portfolio model into all my future classes, as I believe that it is possible, even in a math class, to collect all student practice and tests in order to assess the overall performance of a student rather than the performance of a student on one particular day. The growth mindset the program has helped me to develop more thoroughly is the reason for my strong belief in holistic portfolio assessment at this time.