Observation: Assessment

   The first classroom that I observed was a 10th grade English class. The students were finishing reading the novel, The Lord of the Flies. The student teacher read the last paragraph of the novel out loud with the students. After finishing the book, the teacher asked the class as whole some very basic questions, in order to assess their understanding. The questions would probably fall at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy and were about details of the story. There were no questions about the deeper thematic elements of the novel. There were some students who were engaged, but there were many who were not paying attention. After this, the students watched the movie version of the novel.  I think, at this point, it would have been beneficial to the students to provide a questionnaire about the film in order to keep the students engaged. I've seen that film and it is very boring. Aside from engaging the students, it would also allow the teachers to have concrete evidence of whether or not the students understood the novel, and to what extent.
    The second classroom that I observed  was an 11th grade English class. They were reading the short story, "The Devil and Tom Walker," by Washington Irving. This class was a bit more structured than the last, and the teachers provided concrete ways to assess their understanding of the story. The students were given a worksheet with questions about each section of the story. As the students worked on the assignment independently, one teacher went around the classroom to check in on each student. Between sections, the other student gathered the class back together and read passages. He then would throw out some basic questions about the story for any student to answer in order to make sure they were engaged and on the same page (ha!). I think this was a more successful form of assessment, because it allowed the teachers to evaluate each students analytical understanding of the text in addition to the basic plot details.