Interest Surveys

The information that you can get from the student surveys would put you at such an advantage when you are trying to differentiate. It gives you information like whether they like to move a lot, what noise level they can tolerate, whether they like to work with people or make things. I love the format of the first survey where students are able to take phrases and decide whether they sound like them or not. I like that format because a lot of the time students can struggle with coming up with things to say on the fill in the blank surveys. Even though the phrases aren’t really personal, you will be able to get just as much information about the student by the things that they may think that are like them or are definitely not like them. I also like the other survey and feel like the information could also be very useful, like knowing the things that students would like to learn about or what is hard for them, what they are good at, how they think they learn best, and some of their favorite things to do. This can give you good insight and can guide your instruction by what they say, but through observing the student you will get to know even more about them and who they really are through they way they act compared to the way they answer the questions.

I also liked a lot of the forms that I read in the pre assessment file and I think that I definitely will be able to use some of them in my student teaching. In all of our classes when we talk about lesson planning they talk about taking anecdotal records and different points throughout the lesson, but I never really have known exactly what the write. Having a list of focus questions for the different levels and subjects would be so great in helping me to know what to look for while I am ‘evaluating.’ There were also observation charts that I really liked and I will definitely use the writing sample that was described. What I liked most about that format was that it talked about not judging the students, it is just a way to gather information that will help you to scaffold their instruction. The ‘writing sample’ is something that can be seen as their opportunity to put down anything that they want and they wont be graded on their conventions or their ideas, it is a time to be completely themselves. That’s what I liked best about the questionnaire that we did for this class because I knew that no matter what I wrote I wasn’t being judged or compared to other students. Because I knew you as a teacher from last semester I knew that we were doing all of those questions so you would know how to help us instead of just wasting our time like some get to know you assignments seem to do. I think that my students can feel that same way if they can tell that I genuinely care and that whatever they say is going to help me to be a better teacher and know exactly, or to just have a better idea of how to help them learn best