Data and Feedback

TFA places a heavy emphasis on data and that's a really good thing. I just graded our diagnostic tests along with the first vocabulary test. The results were not great; they show me that I have a lot of work to do. But it's good to have tests this early because I can get immediate feedback on my teaching and what my students are able to do and not able to do. The students will be tested each week (quiz or test) so that not only I can get quick feedback on my teaching but so the students can master a small amount of material at a time. The tests will have cumulative parts; I'll be able to teach the importance of remembering past material.

The vocab test performance was under my control and it showed me that I need to do something different this week in teaching. Group work where the students taught each other did not work well except in one class. The idea was for each student to learn 1-2 words on his or her own and then share those with examples to each member of the group. It might've been too soon to try this type of activity. Furthermore, the students in those classes were all on the same level; there were very few students that could teach the others as almost all struggled with the material. The reading scores should have indicated this to me along with the amount of misbehavior during the assignment. Misbehavior can be a signal that the students are frustrated with the assignment and they decide to do something off task.

Tomorrow, I'll reveal the grades to the students and we'll discuss what both the teacher and the students could've done better on the test (as the students did decide to waste a lot of time by talking while I was explaining things). Friday will be a retest over the same words but with a different test (as we are going over the answers). As much as TFA's "teacher impact model" where "teacher actions leads to student actions" is drilled into our heads at Institute, it didn't make sense until this set of tests. I chose the method of instruction; I chose how each class went; I chose the questions for the test. As much as the tests measure the students' performance, they also measure the teacher's actions that led the students to that performance.