Differentiated Instruction and Pre-Assessments

For this reading, I think it would be most beneficial to do a summary of some key points and list out some types of pre-assessments. Learning about these assessments already gets me excited to start teaching and how I’m going to implement them.

Key Points:

1. The goal of differentiating instruction is to learn what students need to learn, how they learn, and how they show what they learned.

2. Pre-assessments are the foundation for differentiated learning

3. Pre-assessments help the teacher gauge what students already know, what they’re interested in, and what they best connect with.

4. Pre-assessments show your students that you care about what they think

5. Pre-assessments can help incorporate students’ culture and community into the classroom

Types of Assessments

· People Puzzle

Create puzzle pieces and hand out to students. Students can write on the back their name, interests, favorite things, and anything important for the teacher to know. On the front, they can decorate the piece with their name and drawings to express their style. This assesses their interests, styles, level of art skills, and emphasizes the theme of unity

· Expressive Group Puzzle

Students in groups decide on a shape (ie. Dog) and draw an outline as big as they can and cut that out. They then cut it into small pieces for each member of the group. Then they follow the instructions of the “people Puzzle” for what to put on it.

· Personal identity museum

Students take home a brown paper bag and fill it with items that mean a lot to them or express who they are. They then set up their items in a part of the classroom like a museum and they will fill out a sheet describing their project for those to view. Students can go around looking at museums. It teaches them about museum curations and how to express themselves through art.

· Palette of Choice

Have a list of all of the things you want to teach them this year. They can be categorized into media, artists, big ideas or themes, and project types. Then have the students each circle three choices from each category and if there are a couple more they can circle those too. On the back of the sheet, they can write anything else they want to explore and information about them or what they want you to know. Lets you know their interests.

Exquisite Corpse Drawing

I’m especially excited about this one as I used to do it all of the time growing up. Tell the students about the surrealism movement. Have students get into groups of 3. Have them fold three pieces of paper hamburger style 3 times evenly. Give each person in the group 10 minutes to draw on the top of the page or the first section a head and then two lines slightly on the next session then folding the paper so the others can't see. Then they give the paper to the person on their left. Now give each person 10 minutes to draw a torso connecting it to the lines made from the head and have them draw lines on the last section as well. Then have them give it to the person on the left again and have them draw the legs. After the 30 minutes are up they can all look at the drawings and hang them on the wall. This lesson introduces the students to the idea of choice and teamwork/collaboration.