Student Growth
Why do we teach? Why are we going into a profession that requires so much of us? I think that most people would answer this by saying that they want to help young people grow. We want to help boys and girls become intelligent men and women. How do we know that we are doing this? I think it is just a gut feeling we get at the end of the year, but people keep telling me it is measurable. Crazy. Truly, student academic growth truly is one of those few things in education that you can capture and track. I have seen this even in my personal life. While in high school I saw my father become the first principal in Prince William County to hire a full time employee whose sole job was to collect and organize data on each individual student. Everything is run by data now. While sometimes data allows some students to slip through the cracks, it fills a lot more than it fills.
In my internship, I think the data supports that I did make a difference. On the two main assessments that I gave scores vastly improved from the first to the second. I believe this was partly due to a familiarity with my style of test, but I like to think that it had something to do with my teaching as well. I was also required to incorporate a writing SMART goal into my ten weeks. I chose to focus on a DBQ of political cartoons and speeches. I gave a baseline, midterm, and final prompt and monitored growth over the course of the three assignments. Students improved in this category as well. An analysis of my seventh period can be found on the link to the left and an analysis of two individual students can be seen to the left. Under these links is a video of my analysis.