Monitoring, Assessing, and Enhancing Learning

An effective teacher maintains a constant awareness of student performance throughout the lesson in order to guide instruction and provide appropriate feedback to students.  In this context, the term monitoring refers to any methods the teacher uses during the lesson to collect information about his or her students’ understanding of the content. Assessing includes any formal or informal measurement tools, activities, assignments, or procedures a teacher uses during the lesson to evaluate the students’ performance and their progress toward meeting the learning objectives. Enhancing learning refers to actions a teacher takes during the lesson as a direct result of monitoring and assessing in order to improve or extend student learning.

Appropriate Questioning

Most of the Lessons implemented used PowerPoints.  Within the PowerPoints, there were questions that were created to assess the students' comprehension of the content.  Following, the answering of the questions, the students were prompted with hot questions such as "WHat if" or "What might have happened" so that they are able to critically think about the events or content and develop of enhance their problem solving skills.

Observation/Review of Work/Corrective Feedback

As the students are working, I am always walking around to observe the work of each group.  The students, often times, had to explain to the teacher what they were discussing or explain a concept to the teacher.  When assignments are given, I review the assignments ang provide corrective feedback.  This is to aid the students in developing a more clear understanding of the content.

Review/Extend/Closure of Lessons

The lessons were usually reviewed with a game that was created for questions provided in previous lessons or the review games were online.  The students enjoyed the games and were informally assessed according to the number of correct responses.  The students ususally see or discuss a concept covered in a previous lesson, so they have to constantly use the information.  The constant usage of information allows the students to process the information in their long-term memory.  So, most lessons are extended into a new lesson.

Strength:
Using appropriate questioning
Observation of work
Making adjustments
Reinforcing and extending learning
Reviewing and Closing lessons