Connecting Assessment with Teaching in Literacy.

How to Learn from Someone Else's Practice.

, Mills College

I co-teach with Fredi Breuer, a reading specialist in the Piedmont Public Schools, a year long course on the teaching of reading and language arts preschool through elementary school. In addition I teach a seminar that focuses on student teaching practice and connecting that practice to theoretical and methodological coursework at the college. These courses are all either Masters level courses or required for the credential (at the graduate level). There are only graduate students enrolled in these courses.

Guiding Questions for Using the QUEST sites

1. How can we learn from the practice of others?

2. How can we connect assessment with teaching?

3. How do different teachers enact specific literacy practices? What are the effects of these enactments on children's literacy learning?

"I teach students who are teaching pre-K through fifth grade. There are diverse needs. There's always a struggle for them learning things they know they will never need to use. The websites are a way for them to see classrooms that they would never have the opportunity to see otherwise. "

-January 2006

Using the QUEST materials:

In learning to teach literacy to young children, teachers are faced with a number of dilemmas. First, they must understand what their students already know about the literacy processes. This means they need to know how and what to assess, and what those assessment mean. Second, they need to know what to teach, given that assessment. In the context of scripted programs that require strict adherence to method and schedule, teachers are routinely discouraged from developing these understandings.

A major goal in this class is to help students develop the tools, skills and knowledge to actually assess and teach their students to become literate in a thoughtful and knowledgeable manner. While each student is participating as a student teacher in two different classrooms throughout the year, for the most part they do not know each other�€™s sites well, and we, as instructors, can only depend on them for reporting what they see and understand. The K-12 websites gave us the opportunity to use classrooms we could all observe to address the questions of learning to teach literacy effectively to all children.

We used four classrooms: Gillian Maimon and Mattie Davis classrooms from Philadelphia, PA, Jennifer Myers from Morgan Hill, CA, and Michelle Quraishi from the lab school at Mills College, Oakland, CA. In Gill's, Mattie's and Jenn's sites we looked at literacy learning, instruction and assessment. In Michelle's classroom we focused on assessment and portfolios for assessment and evaluation.