Assessments are an essential part of today’s education. Many people think of assessments as a way to find out how much a child learned from the instruction they received. At Lockhart we not only use summative (end of instruction) assessments but we also use formative (before instruction) assessments. These formative assessments allow teachers to be strategic when planning their classroom instruction allowing them to design lesson that meet all students where they are at rather than teaching everyone the same thing at the same time.
Although formative assessments are essential to meeting all students needs they also are very labor intensive to administer to every student three times a year during the school day. So, this coming year our staff has decided at the beginning of the year to do it a different way. Instead of taking the first two or three weeks to carve out time during the instructional day to assess every student, our teachers are going to use two of their highly valuable teacher workdays to assess all of their new students.
More information about this alternative to “Meet the Teacher” will come home with report cards as well as a mailing with more information will arrive to all families in mid July. I thank all of you in advance for supporting this initiative that will support all of our Lockhart Lions!
How will this work? On the last day of school your child (Rising 1st-5th Grade students Only) will receive an appointment time to come to school to “Meet their Teacher” either July 24th or 25th. At your appointment time you will arrive and your child’s new teacher along with the other members of the grade level will complete all Beginning of the Year assessments with your child. Parents during this time will be able to relax, fill out all of the paperwork needed, get a carpool number, add money to their child’s lunch account, as well as learn more about the curriculum and benchmarks for their child’s new grade level.
This is a huge undertaking by our staff to organize and we are working hard on being strategic with how it is conducted. For example we are working hard to make sure if you have multiple students who attend Lockhart that their “appointments” are close to the same times.
We have always known how dedicated our staff is to our community and I believe this is just another opportunity to see how lucky we are to have teachers that are willing to give up two of their very valuable teacher workdays to save instructional time.
Daniel Zoller
Although formative assessments are essential to meeting all students needs they also are very labor intensive to administer to every student three times a year during the school day. So, this coming year our staff has decided at the beginning of the year to do it a different way. Instead of taking the first two or three weeks to carve out time during the instructional day to assess every student, our teachers are going to use two of their highly valuable teacher workdays to assess all of their new students.
More information about this alternative to “Meet the Teacher” will come home with report cards as well as a mailing with more information will arrive to all families in mid July. I thank all of you in advance for supporting this initiative that will support all of our Lockhart Lions!
How will this work? On the last day of school your child (Rising 1st-5th Grade students Only) will receive an appointment time to come to school to “Meet their Teacher” either July 24th or 25th. At your appointment time you will arrive and your child’s new teacher along with the other members of the grade level will complete all Beginning of the Year assessments with your child. Parents during this time will be able to relax, fill out all of the paperwork needed, get a carpool number, add money to their child’s lunch account, as well as learn more about the curriculum and benchmarks for their child’s new grade level.
This is a huge undertaking by our staff to organize and we are working hard on being strategic with how it is conducted. For example we are working hard to make sure if you have multiple students who attend Lockhart that their “appointments” are close to the same times.
We have always known how dedicated our staff is to our community and I believe this is just another opportunity to see how lucky we are to have teachers that are willing to give up two of their very valuable teacher workdays to save instructional time.
Daniel Zoller