You've got to assess yourself!

Assessment is something that is not only meaningful to the students we teach, but also to us as teacher's. As a student (both then and now) you sit and wait in anticipation to see how you have done on a test, a quiz, or on a paper. This simple letter or number is validating (or debilitating in some cases). This little number/letter tells us exactly what our writing or knowledge is worth - it tells us whether we know something or not and, in a way, gives us a peak into our future. If we cannot succeed in school, how will we succeed in a job, will we even get a job? What a lot of stress over something that is seemingly so simple! And what about the students who are legitimately just bad test takers. They may know the information, but because of their inherited bad testing skills, they do poorly.
Although grades are primarily looked at as a student thing, teachers should also be assessing themselves based on their students performance. If all of the students in a class do poorly on a test, whose fault is that? It cannot possibly be that all of the students are bad test takers or just simply did poorly because they didnt prepare. . . Either the test was poorly written or the material was poorly taught (or a combination of the two). I remember in highschool, i had Latin for two years straight with the same teacher (i still remember her name to this day) in those two years, one person (the same person) ever got above a 70 on a test or quiz. Clearly there was something wrong with her methods of teaching and testing. Thankfully, high scores on homework (and a lot of self teaching at home) enabled most of us to pass this class. but i remember how upsetting it was and how stupid i felt. I sat in class and never understood what she was talking about! As a teacher, we must decide first WHAT we want our students to learn from a lesson, and then develop the lesson. When creating our assessments, we should ensure that they are actually assessing what we intended to teach and what we actually taught - everything must line up. Scores of the students should be looked at after each assessment so we can evaluated the strength or our teaching, our assessment, and our students' understanding and make modifications from there.
When we talk about assessments, we immediately thing of informal observations and tests. As we all know, not everyone is a strong test taker. How do we get around this? Assessments must be done, but in today's world with technology, we have so many choices beyone pencil and paper tests. One of the coolest things that i have learned about as a graduate student overall in my time at the mount is about authentic assessments. My first real experience with authentic assessments was during my first semester and i had to read an article and write a paper about it. I learned so much! Authentic assessments actually enable students to utilize the skills we are teaching them and it gives are reason behind the teachings! I remember wondering as student, when am i ever going to need to know how many degrees and angle is. . . Let's make our students see when they are goign to need to know this today! Although authentic assessments are time consuming and sometimes difficult to make happen, the ever expanind world of technology can help us to bridge this gap. Our students are so comfortable with technology and jsut about anything can be done - simulations, web casts, etc. Let's not only teach to the various needs of our students, but also assess based on their needs!