Sunday, April 15, 2007

Back in the Saddle

I've had a week back after maternity leave. Looking back, I realize I did very little actual teaching during the week, but it is probably best to ease back into things.

I did do individual interviews with the majority of my class in math (I'll do the last few tomorrow). I wanted to assess what they understood about probability and graphing, which they studied while I was out. I didn't want to give them a test for two reasons; they have already been tested on this material and I'm not convinced a written test would have given me the information I was looking for.

I designed an in-depth interview based on the SOLs in these two areas. I found graphs to show them and have them explain to me. I wrote up sets of data for them to describe how they would graph. I had a list of possible events for them to explain the likelihood of. Each interview took between ten and fifteen minutes. I had to bite my tongue on occasion to keep for turning interviews into lessons and stay focused on the assessment. However, on the whole, I am thrilled with how they have gone. In that short time I have learned a lot about what my students do and don't understand about probability and graphing. We'll see if I'm still this happy with the interviews after I record them tomorrow and can watch them!

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