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com
Teacher Education
Course name: Level: BED, ADE
in Pakistan
Course Code: 8626 Semester: Autumn 2022
Assignment: 2 Due Date: 03-04-2023
Total Assignment: 2 Late Date: 03-04-2023

‫یلیک ببرھگ ے‬
‫ےھٹیب‬ ‫یک ے‬ ‫یکایت ےر ے‬
‫حتمنات ے‬
‫نمنئاےورا ے‬ ‫اجنےساتکںیبںیہنآریہںیہ۔وہہبلط مہاریرسوس ے‬
‫کذ ےرےعیااس ے‬ ‫نجہبلطیکویوینریٹسیک ب‬
‫ے‬ ‫ٹٹ‬ ‫ے‬
‫یک‬
‫ادارککآرڈررکواتکسںیہ۔زیناہھتےسیھکلوہیئاورالیےامیاسی ے‬200
‫زہچ ے‬ ‫رپنتمیقکالعوہمزیڈڈاکخ ے‬ ‫احلصرکتکسںیہ۔بتکیک ڈ‬
‫ئم ٹ‬
03096696159‫ی‬ ‫رک ے‬ ‫وسٹفااس نٹسآرڈررپدایتسب ے‬
‫ںیہ۔رصفواسٹےانےرپراہطب ے‬

Assignment no. 2

Q. 1 Discuss the different B.Ed programs currently being offered by AIOU and
how are they contributing towards the vision of quality teacher education across
the country?
AIOU Admissions Spring 2022 for B.Ed M.Ed MA EPM MA Special Education &
MA Teacher Education are announced officially on the website of Allama Iqbal Open
University. AIOU offers admissions in various programs. One of the most important
and essential Programme for Teachers Training B.Ed and M.Ed admissions also
announced by AIOU. B.Ed Programmes are available for three different categories
which are AIOU B.Ed ( 1 – 1.5 Years) Programme, AIOU B.Ed ( 2 -2.5 Years)
Programme and B.Ed ( 4 Years). M.Ed ( 1 year) and MA Distance & Non-Formal
Education, MA Teacher Education, MA EPM and MA Special Education programmes
admissions are also open. On this page of Parho Pakistan candidates will get all
information about B.Ed and M.Ed Admissions procedure.
AIOU offer B.Ed Programme for 1 – 1.5 Years duration to the candidates. The
eligibility criteria for this programme is MA / MSc / BS / BA Hons ( 4 years) with a
minimum 2nd Division.
B.Ed Programme ( 2 – 2.5 Years)
AIOU offer B.Ed Programme for 2 – 2.5 Years duration to the candidates.
B.Ed Programme ( 4 Years)
AIOU offer a B.Ed programme for 4 Years duration also.
M.Ed Programme ( 1 Year)
MEd Programme admissions are open in AIOU with the following specialization.
• Elementary Teacher Education
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• Teacher Education
• Distance & Non Formal Education
• Science Education
• Special Education
MA Distance & Non Formal Education
AIOU admissions are open in MA Distance & Non-Formal Education.
MA Teacher Education
AIOU offer admissions in MA Teacher Education.
MA EPM
Admissions 2022 are open in MA EPM Programme also.
MA Special Education
AIOU admissions are open for MA Special Education.
How To Apply for AIOU Admissions Spring 2022
• Interested candidates obtain prospectus from AIOU website.
• Candidates need to apply ONLINE through online.aiou.edu.pk
• Admissions fee should be deposited in any Branch of UBL , FWBL , MCB
and ABL.
• Fee can be paid through UPaisa , Easy paisa and Jazzcash.
Q.2 Elucidate the role of Information communication in Education. Is it the way
for modernization of education? Discuss
ation, as well as the critical use of new media for full participation in society—has thus
become an important consideration for curriculum frameworks.(8)
In many countries, digital literacy is being built through the incorporation of
information and communication technology (ICT) into schools. Some common
educational applications of ICT include:
• One laptop per child: Less expensive laptops have been designed for use in
school on a 1:1 basis with features like lower power consumption, a low cost
operating system, and special re-programming and mesh network
functions.Despite efforts to reduce costs, however, providing one laptop per
child may be too costly for some developing countries.
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• Tablets: Tablets are small personal computers with a touch screen, allowing
input without a keyboard or mouse. Inexpensive learning software (“apps”) can
be downloaded onto tablets, making them a versatile tool for learning. The most
effective apps develop higher order thinking skills and provide creative and
individualized options for students to express their understandings.
• Interactive White Boards or Smart Boards: Interactive white boards allow
projected computer images to be displayed, manipulated, dragged, clicked, or
copied. Simultaneously, handwritten notes can be taken on the board and saved
for later use. Interactive white boards are associated with whole-class instruction
rather than student-centred activities. Student engagement is generally higher
when ICT is available for student use throughout the classroom.
• E-readers: E-readers are electronic devices that can hold hundreds of books in
digital form, and they are increasingly utilized in the delivery of reading
material. Students—both skilled readers and reluctant readers—have had
positive responses to the use of e-readers for independent reading. Features of e-
readers that can contribute to positive use include their portability and long
battery life, response to text, and the ability to define unknown words.
• Flipped Classrooms: The flipped classroom model, involving lecture and
practice at home via computer-guided instruction and interactive learning
activities in class, can allow for an expanded curriculum. There is little
investigation on the student learning outcomes of flipped classrooms. Student
perceptions about flipped classrooms are mixed, but generally positive, as they
prefer the cooperative learning activities in class over lecture.
ICT and Teacher Professional Development: Teachers need specific professional
development opportunities in order to increase their ability to use ICT for formative
learning assessments, individualized instruction, accessing online resources, and for
fostering student interaction and collaboration. Such training in ICT should positively
impact teachers’ general attitudes towards ICT in the classroom, but it should also
provide specific guidance on ICT teaching and learning within each discipline.
Without this support, teachers tend to use ICT for skill-based applications, limiting
student academic thinking. To support teachers as they change their teaching, it is also
essential for education managers, supervisors, teacher educators, and decision makers
to be trained in ICT use.
Ensuring benefits of ICT investments: To ensure the investments made in ICT benefit
students, additional conditions must be met. School policies need to provide schools
with the minimum acceptable infrastructure for ICT, including stable and affordable
internet connectivity and security measures such as filters and site blockers. Teacher
policies need to target basic ICT literacy skills, ICT use in pedagogical settings, and
discipline-specific uses. Successful implementation of ICT requires integration of ICT
in the curriculum. Finally, digital content needs to be developed in local languages and
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reflect local culture. Ongoing technical, human, and organizational supports on all of
these issues are needed to ensure access and effective use of ICT.
Resource Constrained Contexts: The total cost of ICT ownership is considerable:
training of teachers and administrators, connectivity, technical support, and software,
amongst others. When bringing ICT into classrooms, policies should use an
incremental pathway, establishing infrastructure and bringing in sustainable and easily
upgradable ICT.(16) Schools in some countries have begun allowing students to bring
their own mobile technology (such as laptop, tablet, or smartphone) into class rather
than providing such tools to all students—an approach called Bring Your Own Device.
However, not all families can afford devices or service plans for their children.
Schools must ensure all students have equitable access to ICT devices for learning.
Inclusiveness Considerations
Digital Divide: The digital divide refers to disparities of digital media and internet
access both within and across countries, as well as the gap between people with and
without the digital literacy and skills to utilize media and internet. The digital divide
both creates and reinforces socio-economic inequalities of the world’s poorest people.
Policies need to intentionally bridge this divide to bring media, internet, and digital
literacy to all students, not just those who are easiest to reach.
Minority language groups: Students whose mother tongue is different from the official
language of instruction are less likely to have computers and internet connections at
home than students from the majority. There is also less material available to them
online in their own language, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to their
majority peers who gather information, prepare talks and papers, and communicate
more using ICT.(39) Yet ICT tools can also help improve the skills of minority
language students—especially in learning the official language of instruction—through
features such as automatic speech recognition, the availability of authentic audio-
visual materials, and chat functions.
Students with different styles of learning: ICT can provide diverse options for taking
in and processing information, making sense of ideas, and expressing learning. Over
87% of students learn best through visual and tactile modalities, and ICT can help
these students ‘experience’ the information instead of just reading and hearing it.
Mobile devices can also offer programmes (“apps”) that provide extra support to
students with special needs, with features such as simplified screens and instructions,
consistent placement of menus and control features, graphics combined with text,
audio feedback, ability to set pace and level of difficulty, appropriate and
unambiguous feedback, and easy error correction.
Q.3 Describe the process of microteaching by focusing its reflective nature in the
development of novice teachers. What is the role of supervisor in this process?
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Microteaching is a teacher training technique for learning teaching skills. It employs

real teaching situation for developing skills and helps to get deeper knowledge
regarding the art of teaching. This Stanford technique involved the steps of “plan,
teach, observe, re-plan, re-teach and re-observe” and has evolved as the core
component in 91% of on-campus clinical teaching development programs, with the
significant reduction in the teaching complexities with respect to number of students in
a class, scope of content, and timeframe, etc Most of the pre-service teacher education
programs widely use microteaching, and it is a proven method to attain gross
improvement in the instructional experiences. Effective student teaching should be the
prime quality of a teacher. As an innovative method of equipping teachers to be
effective, skills and practices of microteaching have been implemented.
Efficient technique and effective teaching
Microteaching can be practiced with a very small lesson or a single concept and a less
number of students. It scales down the complexities of real teaching, as immediate
feedback can be sought after each practice session. The modern-day multimedia
equipment such as audio–video recording devices have a key role in the learning
process.
Observing a fellow teacher and using a trial-and-error in own teaching sessions are
very common way of self-training. But, both of them have their own demerits. On the
other hand, microteaching helps in eliminating errors and builds stronger teaching
skills for the beginners and senior teachers. Microteaching increases the self-
confidence, improves the in-class teaching performances, and develops the classroom
management skills.
The conceptual framework
Microteaching in medical education
The traditional medical teaching emphasizes on the transmission of factual knowledge
and hence, the teachers are the main source of information. But, the conventional
methods of medical teacher training are not adequate. So, the teaching objectives have
now shifted to the student centered, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely
concept.Microteaching allows learning each skill to the maximum extent as there is a
chance of listening, observing, and practicing.
Implementation of microteaching in medical education
There was an increase in interests toward introducing microteaching techniques in the
Indian medical schools.This training technique provides medical teachers an excellent
opportunity to improve their teaching skills and follows the Skinners’ theory of
operant conditioning and also has a scientific basis. The Medical Council of India has
also recommended training for medical teachers for their continued, efficient
performance in that capacity at any age. It is widely accepted that the quality and
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competency of medical teachers can be improved by effective medical education

training programs.
Steps and requirements of microteaching
Knowledge acquisition, skill acquisition, and transfer are the three different phases of
microteaching. acquisition phase is the preparatory, pre-active phase, in which the
teacher gets trained on the skills and components of teaching through lectures,
discussion, illustration, and demonstration of the skill by the experts. In the interactive,
skill acquisition phase, the teacher plans a micro-lesson for practicing the
demonstrated skills. The colleagues and peers can act as constructive evaluators which
also enable them to modify their own teaching-earning practices. The teacher can
reinforce behaviors and skills that are necessary and extinguish that are not needed.
After understanding the concepts and components of each core teaching skill, the
participant should prepare a micro-lesson for each core teaching skill, and implement
one skill in each microteaching session in a sequential manner. The setting can be
done in the department itself with minimal facilities on a weekly or monthly basis.
Adequate and appropriate constructive feedback for each skill can encourage re-
teaching and re-implementing of the skill. The feedback data can be reused, and all the
core teaching skills can be integrated in a macro lesson and ultimately to a real
classroom teaching or medical education programs. The entire faculty play dual role of
trainee and constructive evaluators. This also improves the evaluating skills of teacher.
Though there are possible chances of not providing proper feedback during the initial
sessions, the skilled ability to evaluate and provide constructive feedback increases
when there is an increase in the number of sessions.
Core skills applicable in clinical teaching
The core techniques involved with microteaching are based on the fact that teaching
can be analyzed and estimated using various simple teaching tasks/skills, which are a
set of behavior or acts of the teacher that facilitates learning (directly or indirectly).
During the origin of microteaching, almost 20 teaching skills have been identified.
But, it has now increased up to 37 or even more. Listed below are some of the
important teaching skills.
Lesson planning
It involves the preparation of a micro-lesson which should be organized in a logical
sequence. The content should be concise, appropriate, relevant, and could cover the
specified duration.
Presentation and explanation
This involves the skills required to explain with clarity and proper understanding of
the concepts. The components include teacher enthusiasm, creating readiness by a
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beginning statement or topic sentence, effective explanation, planned repetition, and

concluding statements or key messages with summary of explanation.
Illustrating with examples
The teacher trainee should be able to rightly explain the concept by simple, relevant,
and interesting examples to increase learners’ understanding.
Reinforcement
This skill is meant for increasing the participation of the learners in the development of
teaching process. Use of positive verbal and non-verbal cues would be key component
for this skill.
Stimulus variation
Securing and sustaining the attention of the learner is imperative for a good teacher.
The effective components of the skill are gestures, change in speech pattern, and
change in interaction style.
Probing questions
It is important to allow and encourage the fellow trainees to ask structured questions
and clarify doubts. Redirection, refocusing, and increasing critical awareness are
significant components of this skill.
Classroom management
Providing proper instructions, restricting inappropriate behavior, and calling the
learners by name are essentials of this skill.
Using audiovisual aids
The increased awareness of the audiovisual aids is important for this skill. Adequate
spacing, distinct size, proper spacing between words and lines, and use of relevant
words or phrases are the key components for this skill.
Q.4 Compare the teacher education reforms in developed and developing
countries.
Hundreds of reforms are introduced into school systems around the country every year
in curriculum pedagogy, governance, technology, and so on. Unfortunately, most fail
to achieve the substantial improvements in student achievement that their advocates
hoped for and, overall, U.S. educational performance has been flat for the past twenty
years.
We now know that a number of other countries have gotten a lot better than us,
accelerating educational improvement in a short time and on a large scale. Their
success in improving hundreds of schools is inspiring. But what exactly has enabled
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them to raise their game and become global high performers? And are there lessons for
U.S. schools?
My new book tells the stories of five very different systems—Australia, Canada, China
(Shanghai), Finland, and Singapore. Despite differences in the details of policies and
practices, as well as in the cultural contexts and political systems in these countries,
there are clearly some common drivers of success.
Here are the ten big lessons from the world's top-performing and rapidly improving
systems:
1. Long-Term Vision
The leaders of countries with high-performing education systems share a palpable
conviction about the centrality of education to their dreams for their society—to raise
people from poverty, achieve greater equality, develop a well-functioning multi-
cultural society and, certainly, create a thriving economy and a growing number of
good jobs. Each of these systems has a long-term vision for how education can achieve
this, which is widely shared inside and outside the education system. In Singapore, for
example, the vision helped to propel their economy from third world to first; China's
2020 vision was developed with online input from millions of people and includes
universal high school graduation and world-class universities; Alberta asked all its
citizens to contribute to a dialog on what the educated Albertan of 2030 should look
like. Finland's vision was to become a modern society and economy, free from
domination by larger powers.
2. Sustained Leadership
Major reforms are often triggered by an economic, social, or political crisis and may
be led by a single strong leader. Such reform efforts can bring about significant
improvement within a three- to five-year period, but substantial changes in
performance or closing achievement gaps on a large scale require a longer time frame
than most political cycles. Therefore high leadership turnover is a fundamental barrier
to sustaining change.
Understanding this, the premier of Ontario regularly brought together all the key
stakeholders—teachers, parents, business, students—to get buy in, iron out problems
as they arose, and maintain sustained support for Ontario's reforms over a period of
many years.
U.S. states and districts could likewise bring together a group of key stakeholders to
define a vision for what the educated American should look like in 2030 and to build
momentum towards this vision through political cycles and leadership turnover.
3. Ambitious Standards
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Countries that excel set ambitious, universal, and clear standards for all their students,
typically at the national or state/provincial level. The fundamental problem with
locally set standards is that they lead to wildly varying expectations of performance
and lower achievement overall.
Countries that have historically set standards at the local or state level are therefore
increasingly coming together to create common standards across all jurisdictions. In
Australia, for example, states have come together for the first time to create a national
curriculum. In Alberta, Canada, standards are set at the provincial level and province-
wide curricula and examination systems ensure those in both rural and urban areas
have consistent opportunity to pursue these standards. In the United States, the
Common Core State Standards are following international best practice in establishing
fewer, clearer, and higher standards in some areas, but high-performing systems have
standards in all subjects to avoid narrowing the curriculum.
4. Commitment to Equity
Leaders in every country proclaim their commitment to equity, but successful
education systems focus on achieving equity in a strong and deliberate way.
Our mediocre performance on international assessments is due in part to the large
percentage of students scoring at or below basic levels.
High-performing systems use a variety of approaches to minimize the impact of social
background on student achievement. These include system wide policies like equitable
funding, having common high expectations for all students, and ensuring high-quality
teachers in every school. They also include classroom-level interventions like focused
early literacy and math support and a variety of family and community supports
outside of school.
These policies don't eliminate the gap between the children of parents with widely
varying education levels, but they do significantly level the playing field to create a
society that is open to talent from wherever it may come.
5. High-Quality Teachers and School Leaders
Vision, leadership, high standards, and commitment to equity are crucial starting
points, but unless they affect teaching and learning in the classroom, they won't bring
about significant change.
There is broad agreement among high-performing and improving countries that no
matter what reform strategy they are pursuing, the quality of an education system rests
on the quality of its teachers. These systems adopt policies to attract, prepare, support,
reward, retain, and advance high-quality teachers.
As systems devolve more authority to schools, they need stronger leadership at the
school level. School leaders focused on results are able to create the conditions that
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make effective teaching and learning possible. Many systems—Australia, Ontario, and
Singapore among them—have created new frameworks and processes for training
school leaders.
In general, high-performing systems put the energy up front in recruiting and
supporting high-quality teachers rather than on the back end of reducing attrition and
firing weak teachers.
6. Alignment and Coherence
Lower performing systems have large "implementation gaps" between the policies
enacted at the national, state, or even district level, and what actually happens in
classrooms.
There are frequent inconsistencies between, for example, the stated policy goals of
higher-order skills and the lower-level tests that are used to assess them, or between
the goals of schools and the conflicting orientation of the higher education system that
produces teachers.
Policies are also frequently enacted without the support to schools needed to carry
them out. Common Core State Standards are a good first step towards higher
performance but won't become the real standards in classrooms unless curriculum,
teacher preparation, professional development, and assessment are all aligned and
consistent.
In many high-performing countries, consistency is achieved by curriculum or syllabus-
based instructional and examination systems, around which everything is aligned.
Others have traditions of regular work among teachers within or across schools to raise
the quality and consistency of classroom instruction.
7. Intelligent Accountability
All systems struggle with the balance between top-down managerial prescription and
bottom-up professional judgment. In recent years some systems, like Singapore and
Finland, have devolved more responsibility to the school level as the quality of their
teachers and school leaders has become stronger and to encourage innovation.
However, other systems where performance has been weak or uneven have used more
centralized mechanisms to promote more consistent performance.
There is a lot of variation in the design of management and accountability systems.
Overreliance on simple student outcome tests for accountability is not effective in
moving systems to high performance, but nor is uniformed professional judgment.
High-performing systems combine multi-faceted and transparent accountability, using
a broad set of student and school outcomes, with initiatives that build professional
knowledge and capacity, thereby creating a culture of continuous improvement and
ever-higher expectations.
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8. Effective Use of Resources

High educational expenditures don't necessarily lead to high performance. In fact,
many high-performing countries have relatively modest expenditures. That said,
resources do matter.
Expenditure is an area where more research is needed but it appears that high-
performing systems spend money differently. For example, they don't spend as much
of their budget on buildings, sports, administrative positions, or separate special
education functions. They also tend to make different trade offs between class size and
time for teachers to devote to professional development.
Most fundamentally, high-performing systems have relatively equal expenditures
across schools, as well as mechanisms to target more resources at the students who
need them most.
Q.5 a) Discuss the need of new professional profile of teaching staff in order to
survive in this competitive era
A teacher profile is a concise paragraph or bulleted list at the beginning of your
teaching resume that summarizes your top qualities. You can use it as an introduction
to the employer, allowing you to highlight some of your best attributes before the
employer explores the rest of your resume. Teacher profiles are typically short,
consisting of only five or six lines.
How to write a teacher profile
Below are eight steps you can use to help you craft a teacher profile for your resume:
1.Research the district
Administrators at the district level are typically the ones who hire teachers, rather than
the schools themselves. Before you start writing your teacher profile, conduct some
research about the district. Read their website or talk to teachers who either currently
work there or have worked there in the past. Find out what kind of attributes or skills
this district is looking for in its teachers. Then, write these attributes down and to
review as you are working on your profile so that you can include the same words.
2. State who you are
Start off your teacher profile by stating who you are. This should be no more than one
sentence that summarizes your teaching experience. For example, you could write
"Elementary school teacher with over five years of experience." This allows the person
reading the resume to immediately know who you are and a little bit about you.
3. Add your objective
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The objective of your resume is to help you state your goal of receiving a certain
teaching position. State this objective within your teacher profile so that the employer
can see which job you are applying for. You can either add your objective as a new
sentence after your opening statement or you can combine them into one. For example,
you could write "Elementary school teacher with over five years of experience seeking
a full-time math and sciences teaching position." As you apply for different jobs, you
will want to adjust the objective based on the job you are applying for.
4. Describe your personality
The teacher profile section of your resume is a good place to describe your personality.
During this section, mention what it is about you that makes you the right candidate.
When doing this, list each trait along with why that trait is beneficial.
For example, you could write "I am an engaging teacher that has a history of
increasing classroom participation" rather than just including "engaging" among a list
of personality attributes. List your best traits, especially if they align with the ones you
found the district is looking for during your research.
Since your teacher profile should only be a few sentences in total, keep the number of
personality attributes you highlight to just a few.
5. Highlight your skills
Along with your personality traits, discuss your specific skills and how they relate to
teaching. Some skills you may be able to mention during your teacher profile include:
Multilingual ability
Proficiency in specific teaching methods
Experience with educational tools and technology
Ability to work with special needs students
To keep your teacher profile short, consider combining your personality traits and
skills into single sentences. For example, you could write "An enthusiastic and
compassionate teacher with seven years of experience working with special needs
children."
6. Make it unique
When writing your teacher profile, keep it unique from the rest of your resume. Use
this section as an opportunity to talk about things that might get left out of your work
experience or skills section. Also, try to make it unique from the other candidates for
the job by using more specific words to describe yourself.
7. Format your profile
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After writing your profile, format it to appear pleasing on the page. This typically
includes centering it on the page, using a legible font, bolding keywords and finding a
space for it near the top of the resume.
Decide if you want it to appear as a paragraph or bulleted list. Both options are
acceptable and it will mostly depend on personal preference and the amount of space
you have available. Try out both options and see which one looks better on your
resume.
8. Review and edit
Before sending out your resume, take the time to review and edit it. Read your teacher
profile again, looking for typing, spelling and grammatical errors. It's also a good idea
to have a peer read over your resume and look for mistakes you might have missed.
b) Explain how action research by the teachers in class helps in effective teaching
and improved learning outcomes.
When teachers redesign learning experiences to make school more relevant to
students’ lives, they can’t ignore assessment. For many teachers, the most
vexing question about real-world learning experiences such as project-based
learning is: How will we know what students know and can do by the end of
this project?
Teachers at the Siena School in Silver Spring, Maryland, decided to figur e out
the assessment question by investigating their classroom practices. As a result
of their action research, they now have a much deeper understanding of
authentic assessment and a renewed appreciation for the power of learning
together.
Their research process offers a replicable model for other schools interested in
designing their own immersive professional learning. The process began with a
real-world challenge and an open-ended question, involved a deep dive into
research, and ended with a public showcase of findings.
Start with a n authent ic need to kno w
Siena School serves about 130 students in grades 4–12 who have mild to
moderate language-based learning differences, including dyslexia. Most
students are one to three grade levels behind in reading.
Teachers have introduced a variety of instructional strategies, including
project-based learning, to better meet students’ learning needs and also help
them develop skills like collaboration and creativity. Instead of taking tests
and quizzes, students demonstrate what they know in a PBL unit by making
products or generating solutions.
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“We were already teaching this way,” explained Simon Kanter, Siena’s
director of technology. “We needed a way to measure, was authentic
assessment actually effective? Does it provide meaningful feedback? Can
teachers grade it fairly?
Focus the research question
Across grade levels and departments, teachers considered what they wanted to
learn about authentic assessment, which the late Grant Wiggins described
as engaging, multisensory, feedback-oriented, and grounded in real-world
tasks. That’s a contrast to traditional tests and quizzes, which tend to focus on
recall rather than application and have little in common with how experts go
about their work in disciplines like math or history.
The teachers generated a big research question: Is using authentic assessment
an effective and engaging way to provide meaningful feedback for teachers
and students about growth and proficiency in a variety of learning objectives,
including 21st-century skills?
Take ti me to p lan
Next, teachers planned authentic assessments that would generate data for their
study. For example, middle school science students created prototypes of
genetically modified seeds and pitched their designs to a panel of potential
investors. They had to not only understand the science of germination but also
apply their knowledge and defend their thinking.
In other classes, teachers planned everything from mock trials to
environmental stewardship projects to assess student learning and skill
development. A shared rubric helped the teachers plan high-quality
assessments.
Ma ke sen se of data
During the data-gathering phase, students were surveyed after each project
about the value of authentic assessments versus more tradition al tools like tests
and quizzes. Teachers also reflected after each assessment.
“We collated the data, looked for trends, and presented them back to the
faculty,” Kanter said.
Among the takeaways:
• Authentic assessment generates more meaningful feedback and more
opportunities for students to apply it.
• Students consider authentic assessment more engaging, with increased
opportunities to be creative, make choices, and collaborate.
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• Teachers are thinking more critically about creating assessments that allow for
differentiation and that are applicable to students’ everyday lives.
To make their learning public, Siena hosted a colloquium on authentic
assessment for other schools in the region. The school also submitted its
research as part of an accreditation process with the Middle States Association.
Strateg ies to share
For other schools interested in conducting action research, Kanter highl ighted
three key strategies.
• Focus on areas of growth, not deficiency: “This would have been less
successful if we had said, ‘Our math scores are down. We need a new
program to get scores up,’ Kanter said. “That puts the onus on teachers. Data
collection could seem punitive. Instead, we focused on the way we already
teach and thought about, how can we get more accurate feedback about how
students are doing?”
• Foster a culture of inquiry: Encourage teachers to ask questions, conduct
individual research, and share what they learn with colleagues. “Sometimes,
one person attends a summer workshop and then shares the highlights in a
short presentation. That might just be a conversation, or it might be the start of
a school-wide initiative,” Kanter explained. In fact, that’s exactly how the
focus on authentic assessment began.
• Build structures for teacher collaboration: Using staff meetings for shared
planning and problem-solving fosters a collaborative culture. That was already
in place when Siena embarked on its action research, along with informal
brainstorming to support students.
For both students and staff, the deep dive into authentic assessment yielded
“dramatic impact on the classroom,” Kanter added. “That’s the great part of
this.”
In the past, he said, most teachers gave traditional final exams. To alleviate
students’ test anxiety, teachers would support them with time for content
review and strategies for study skills and test-taking.
“This year looks and feels different,” Kanter said. A week before the en d of
fall term, students were working hard on final products, but they weren’t
cramming for exams. Teachers had time to give individual feedback to help
students improve their work. “The whole climate feels way better.”