Mr. Yuk Box & Assessments

Phew! Today was a full day. It's good to have a few minutes to reflect on class this morning, even if it feels like it was days ago already.
We had our presentation and I feel like I took away a lot from it. One thing I wasn't expecting to experience were those "teaching moments" that come up. I think our class did such a good job of putting themselves in 1st grader mode that they actually had some very realistic questions that, in a real life context, would have been very important to answer. For example, in my small group, I think it would have been helpful to go over what to do in an emergency if the emergency is still happening. If you're drowning, your house is on fire, etc, you clearly don't want to call 911 first- you want to make sure you're safe, and then call 911. I wasn't anticipating a lot of that, and it honestly just threw me for a loop. It definitely kept me on my toes! Overall I had a good experience with the micro teaching lesson and I appreciated all of the constructive feedback.
Another thing that really stretched my thinking today was going over all the different ways to assess students. Originally, I mostly thought of assessments being at the end of the lesson- i.e. how much did this student take away from this lesson or what did they learn. Then, I thought about assessments from a two-pronged approach, where students ought to be assessed before a lesson to see what knowledge they already have about the subject, and then later determine what they learned. Now, I'm thinking about assessments as a constant, integral part of lessons, which really makes sense to me. Especially when you think about those teaching moments that I wrote about above, it's important to gauge what information students are understanding and what is still unclear so that you can use that moment to help clarify what students will need to know to be successful.