Adventures in Ms. Lee's Classroom

In the classroom, I knew there was the typical homework, quizzes, and tests that teachers would have you study the right material in homework and in class discussions to do well on. But I wasn't very aware that there were different types of assessments and different ways to look at what an assessment looks like. There's the formative assessments, summative assessments, and the informal assessments. I've noticed that the students have many formative assessments from the daily homework assignments to in-class quizzes and examples that students are able to work on either in a group or individually. The students are able to discuss their homework and in-class examples with each other, but the quizzes are not to be discussed amongst them until the period is over or given permission by Ms. Resourceful. The summative assessments are the chapter tests that the students do as well as the cumulative. The chapter tests occur once every 2-3 weeks or so, whereas the cumulative tests o...

Teaching a class is one thing, but what are your students doing while you teach? In this post, we look at several recorded times on the first day back from fall break, where students were observed as being either on-task or off-task. 9:50 10:12 10:20 10:35 On-Task 15 23 25 18 Off-Task 10 2 0 7 The class head count was 25 students in the class on this day. It may be from having a long weekend, but only 15 students had started their warmups at the beginning of class, which is only 60% of the class. Initially, it took about 5 minutes for each student to be prepared to work on their warmups at the start of class. At 10:20, 100% of the class was working in their groups on how to prove that two lines are parallel when there was a transversal present. At the beginning of class, only 60% of students were on task as the other 40% were talking to their neighbors about their 4 day weekend. In this class time, there were students that listened attentively a...

In the classroom, I've noticed that there are the jock, popular, and other student cliques established amongst the students. Most students know each other and have a positive relationship with each other, but I've noticed a few students would like to be by themselves because of going into other areas of conversation rather than talking about math or how to go about solving a problem. Despite the different cliques about the classroom, there are some students that show they care about how others are doing, and others that don't make it known that they care about the other students in their group. The students are very respectful of Ms. Resourceful in the classroom. It is evident that the students care for her in a professional matter, and that she cares and respects the students in a professional matter. I've seen the students communicate politely with Ms. Resourceful and she had given responses back to the students in the same manner. There are basic classroom nor...