Reflections – Curriculum Mapping Marigay Schopp- Salem-Keizer S.D.

The curriculum mapping exercise is a great tool for looking at all the things we will do at a grade level. I think this will help me to look at the skills that I want to teach at each grade level with some of the same equipment. I think this gave me insight to look at the specific skills that I want to teach at each grade level so that I can better build upon what is taught from previous years and be sure that I am challenging students with new curriculum ideas. When I do the curriculum maps for the other grade levels, it gives me a better picture of where I want to go and what may be missing from my curriculum. I thought that this is a great tool although very tedious. It tied in nicely with the benchmarking exercise to crosscheck that different curriculum could be used to do different assessments. I found that because it does take a considerable amount of think time, it would be most useful to put together in the summer when I have more think time to do this.

Reflections- Benchmark Mapping

This is a great tool to see how we can put the benchmarks into action and where. It also is a great crosscheck on the curriculum mapping to see that all of the benchmarks have the opportunity to be evaluated and when I would evaluate each of the benchmarks. It made me realize that to do our benchmarks in Physical Education, the teachers in our district may be doing them at all different times unlike some other disciplines. This is due to facilities and how they would put their curriculum together. When I did this exercise, I realized there were several curricula that could be used to teach to particular benchmarks and that I had a choice of what ones I would like to assess. I enjoyed doing this exercise as it offers a crosscheck to making sure that the benchmarks are being taught.

Reflections- Instructional Model

After doing the first two exercises this one falls neatly into place as we get down to actually teaching a particular unit. It looks at student learning from the aspect of the teacher and the student. I really liked seeing how much time the student would have to practice a skill to prepare for an assessment. I think that our teaching will have to be more focused to ensure that our students are getting enough instruction and practice to improve on their knowledge and performance. I know that since I now see students three times a week rather that four or five, I have had to eliminated many things from my teaching just to get my curriculum to be complete. I can relate the instructional model to a unit plan with the assessment added. I think the instructional model gives a better look at the student aspect of things. I also believe that knowing which of the benchmarks we are focusing on teaching is critical to having students learn the components. Putting the assessment along with this tool helped me to see if the assessment matched what I was actually teaching to the students.

Reflections- Critical Elements

In my district, we had already started on this piece and had made some great strides. I think that we need to know that we are all looking for the same things from our students so that our teaching emphasis will be the same from school to school. I have found that perhaps we have too many critical elements in some cases and not enough of what is critical in others. I think that the important part is that we are looking at the performance, not the end result. I think this is an area that will be revised several times in our district to get to what we want it to be.

Reflections- Assessment Tools

I really enjoyed listening to the various ideas about assessment tools. I think that our discipline is one of the harder to evaluate because of the eyes and values of the instructor. Since many of our assessments are based on teacher observation, I believe there can be a great variance in evaluation of the performance. I have found that my students perform at a higher level on assessment days to show that they can do whatever it is we are learning about. In my district, I believe that we have a workable assessment tool for the psychomotor and the self management pieces but the cognitive domain still needs to be worked out.