Week Eight

 Throughout my time at Central, I've struggled with assessment. Most of the first week, the students had work days. I then had my first taste of leading a class, which was when a student smacked me. From there, I've been focused on classroom management and regaining what I lost when I failed to respond to the student who smacked me. So, on white days, I've been working on managing group work and maintaining order and have kind of failed to work on assessments as much as I should've. 

That's not to say assessing doesn't happen. I've been giving students a lot of writing assignments between quick writes or full essays. All of these bits of writing have been getting turned in to me and then their successes or failures drive the next day's lessons. I just don't know what else to write, though. 

I've had them write and then I've collected it. My mentors have bellwork for them as grammar review and my white day mentor has vocab quizzes and tests, but other than that, the units have mostly been my responsibility and so the assessments are my writing assignments. 

I will say, my purple day classroom largely doesn't do work. They never do homework, they have to be pushed into doing bellwork, and most of the writing assignments are done only if I'm next to them basically narrating what to write. So, I think assessment is probably hard with them. They're not responsive to informal assessments. They hate the formal ones. It's an uphill battle, so I think my teachers have focused in on bellwork as a means to get something out of them.