The Final Step: A Capstone in Education

Chapter Four Case Study Scenarios

Edgar Martinez

Ashford University

Interdisciplinary Capstone

Benjamin Hegedish

June 24, 2013

One of the many gifts a teacher must possess in order to be successful in the classroom, is the inherent ability to be able to make quick assessments and provide guidance based on individual students' performance traits. Again, like I have stated before, one must be able to accept daily challenges and face them with a smile. Chapter four of our book, "The final step: A capstone in Education" teaches us the importance of assessment in our classrooms and makes us question exactly what do know about assessments? We are exposed to theories behind assessing that vary from feedback to monitoring and a teacher's required ability to be able to record, observe analyze and respond to their student's responses in the attempt to improve student learning. The importance of descriptive feedback is once again enforced by its innate effect on student learning.

Taking a look at Andre's social studies class and how his minor dilemma is trying to figure out what to do with the last 10 minutes of his class' time. At the end of the unit, his students face a 50 question test that will assess their knowledge of his student's textbook reading of the French Revolution. One activity that Andre can incorporate into his last ten minutes of class is to engage the students in a question-answer comprehension round. Without giving the students a clear heads up that the questions posed are closely related to the 50 questions the students are facing, he can formulate questions that are based on their daily reading assignment.

He can divide the classroom into groups based on rows (i.e. row 1 = team one, row 2 team two etc) and use a round-robin style of questioning whereas he answers a question, the students get together and when called upon, each team must answer correctly or else the question and points are awarded to the ensuing team that answers correctly. Andre could perhaps also incorporate a reward system for most questions answered by a team in that the team that wins the round, for the following day, the winning team is excused to lunch 10 minutes early.

Middle school teacher Jeff from Charlottesville has a room chock-full of diverse students that face a fun filled assignment that will have his student summarize what they have learned throughout their school year, focusing on what they felt their failing points were as well as their success points with a brief description on how their knowledge gained this year will assist their future endeavors. As a final project, he