Pre-Assessment, Day 1 - Brainstorming Extreme Sports

I have taught three lessons out of the five that I turned in for my Content Area Unit- Assignment 2B. For this blog entry, I’m deciding to zero in on the very first pre assessment I administered to the classes, the one that kicked off this whole Unit on Extreme Sports.

This assessment was given to four different 9^th Grade classes, some in the morning, some in the afternoon, mixed skill levels, and socio-economic levels. I had to know right away what their back ground knowledge was on the subject of extreme sports before we started. Did they need vocabulary?

 I started class by telling the students that we were doing a Unit on extreme sports and the first thing they needed to do was to brainstorm and write down 10 words on their paper that came to their mind when they thought of the words extreme sports. No right or wrong. After I said this to the first class I noted a lot of puzzled looks on student faces and pencils that were still. So I added – these could be sports that you think are extreme, or words that describe an extreme sport, or words that describe feelings people have while participating in extreme sports. This helped all classes to overcome their inhibitions and start to brainstorm.

    
I circulated in each class while they brainstormed in order to get to know the student’s skill levels better and to keep them on task and find out if anyone needed clarification - and found that only about 9-10 students per class were able to independently find the full 10 words that defined extreme sports. On average they ran out of ideas at about the fifth word.

Each class was a bit different. The first class was the most talkative, it was easy to get a class list of words from them during share out. Second block (first class of the day) was practically mute during the discussion, getting a class list of words from them during share out was like pulling teeth. Oh, and I made a fatal error- 6^th block was the last class I taught this lesson to, and I forgot to erase the brainstorming list generated from 2^nd block before 6^th block arrived! I explained the activity and got them started, turned around and gasped when I realized all the words from before were still on the board. I went on and on to the class about how terrible it was that I left that, I couldn’t believe I’d done that, how I was going to tell this story to the other teachers at lunch so they could laugh at me. Some of the students laughed. But I noticed it did effect the lesson, later during the share out of words I had to reject a few words because they’d obviously been culled from the prior list.

One good thing about doing the same lesson to four classes is that with each class I taught the lesson better. I always call the first class the guinea pig class, and after the first one I know what to tweak for the others. In the first class I noted that someone asked if football was an extreme sport. I explained it wasn’t and why and then I told that to the next three classes. Someone else asked if Rugby was an extreme sport, someone else asked if Dodgeball was extreme. I included these questions and the answers to the next classes in order to make the pre assessment more effective and clearer for the students.

The rubric for this assignment was a simple 10 points according to filling out each of 10 words. If they wrote a list of 10 words they got 10 points, 7 words, 7 points, etc. I didn’t really need to adjust the rubric. But, it was a good thing that I circulated and checked for understanding, therefore knowing how many per class were able to write out the full ten words independently and how many needed to add from the classroom chart. The way that I did it, the final assessment showed me only if they’d did as asked and filled in their list if they didn’t have 10 words with words from the class list. It didn’t let me know how many words they knew prior to the share out. Despite this, I felt the assignment was effective. The very next activity was a quick write about extreme sports, which they all had the vocabulary to complete.

   
*I completely forgot to have students take pictures of me while teaching! I’m so sad.