Elementary Assessment Webinar

March 14, 2012

Rob and Catherine

Almost 25 educators participated in the second Maine Arts Assessment elementary webinar on March 14th that was re-scheduled since the first one held in January had a technology glitch and was not recorded.

Catherine Ring and Rob Westerberg did a fabulous job faciliating and their guests music teachers Barb Packeles and Alice Sullivan and art teacher Shannon Campbell shared experience and examples of assessment tools.

The participants were half music and half art teachers and 83% presently assess their students a lot with 16% assess a little. When it comes to comfort level assessing; almost 64%are very comfortable, 27% somewhat comfortable and 9% not at all.

Alice

Some of the challenges assessing students in the arts classroom include the following:

• traveling classroom to classroom and in many cases school to school
• standards based – translating grades to a standards based classroom
• the number of students taught over a few days
• hardly any time between classes

Advantages of assessing:

• makes the learning goals clear
• data driven world – holds us accountable and teacher can show how the teacher has done their job
• documents how students are doing
• 21st century teacher can exhibit the artifact of the learning
• allows for student reflection
• student designed assessments – effective strategy
• provides for a more balanced curriculum when using the Maine Learning Results

This is just a small piece of the discussion that took place during the webinar.

Shannon

To access the recorded webinar session please go to: http://stateofmaine.adobeconnect.com/p2fy0uxaeaq/

Catherine and Rob have put together a meeting plan that you can use during a teachers meeting. Bring your colleagues together and use the webinar archive and the meeting plan to help lead the discussion. You can access the meeting plan for this session and the other 4 webinars at http://www.maine.gov/education/lres/vpa/assessment.html.

Barbara