In past blog posts I have talked about grading students worksheets in order to assess myself in how I am teaching during my library instruction periods. However, I realized that I had not fully explained my process or why I think this is an important tool.
My process of grading the worksheet is relatively simple. For each question I give the students a score that ranges from 0-3. The score is given based on a set of criteria that I determine before hand. While the criteria changes with the worksheet and the content of the class The basic standards for each score are described below.
0- The students did not write anything down. I do this because if all the students have a 0 on questions that are later in the worksheet then it tells me that did not give the students enough time to work. I then can either rearrange the lesson plan to give the students more time to work or change the worksheet by either having less questions or changing what I ask (perhaps the questions are too hard). Luckily I have not had this problem. Some students do get a 0 for some questions, but I have not noticed a pattern in any of the classes.
1- The students only answered part of the question. Many of the questions I give the students have two or more parts. The parts are not difficult something along the lines of where I as the student to identify the name of a resource and then highlight why this source is important or can used in a paper. You could say that I am a fan of identify and describe questions.
2- The student answers all part of the questions, but they just do surface answers. The students do everything asked in the question, but they just do the bare minimum and use very broad answers. For example they may answer a question with the name of a resource and say that they can use it to provide a statistic for their paper.
3- The student answers all parts of the question and are specific. I want to see these specific answers because that means the student is engaged with what we are doing and that they understand what they are looking for in each question. For example, the student names a resource and then quotes or paraphrases part of the source identifying what they might like to use it for in their paper.
By scoring students answers I can judge how I taught that class. If the majority of the class get mostly ones on the questions then that tells me that I either did not clearly communicate what I wanted them to do or that I did not engage the class enough for them to care about what we were doing in class. If the scores are mostly twos then perhaps I need to engage the class more or try to direct them into thinking more deeply about the questions. Twos are great, but it does not show great understanding of what we were doing, but just scratches the surface. If I can get mostly threes then I would be ecstatic because that means I was able to connect with the class and they understood what we were doing.
All of this can inform me on about my teaching, it affects the activities I do in the classroom, and how I structure lecture for the class. After each class I have made some alteration to my lesson plan such as adding a small activity at the start of a class after my first solo teaching lesson. A more recent example comes from teaching two classes this past Tuesday. The first class had a little too much time that I planned on using for work time (the students finished faster then I thought they would and I ended up letting them out early). So before the next session in that day I had the students do a free write to start exploring their topic based solely on their own knowledge to see where their gaps were. I am constantly making some kind of change to the worksheet or lesson plan and I think each change has increased the knowledge output the students leave the classroom with. I am not an expert in the classroom in anyway, but I am slowly finding my way and learning what does and does not work for me after every class.