Stephanie Watson

Data analysis and reasoning from Advanced Practicum placement with Catie

Miller’s ninth grade World Literature and Speech classes.

In this practicum I was assigned “Book III” of The Odyssey to teach for

my lesson. The students had been reading Greek Mythology by Edith

Hamilton for homework previous to the unit starting and acted out The Iliad,

the Odyssey, and All of Greek Mythology in 99 Minutes or Less in class at the

beginning of the unit. The first two books of The Odyssey were read in class

and focused on comprehension and helping the students become close

readers. Since the students had been working on comprehension for the first

two books of The Odyssey, for my lesson I asked them to go one step beyond

simple comprehension and summarize “Book III” with the appropriate

scaffolding and support. Since the class is also a speech class, I also chose to

have them give oral presentations (acting/narration) to meet both literature

and speech requirements. My first formative assessment was intended to let

me know that the students were, in fact, ready to move beyond

comprehension to summarization of the text. Students were given a rubric to

follow when planning their presentations. I used the same rubric to

formatively assess their ability to summarize so. If they illustrated

proficiency with the summarization activity, which they did, I would know

that they were ready to move even more step up in terms of Bloom’s

taxonomy and complete the summative assessment I planned for the end of

the lesson.

The summative assessment I assigned, which was based on the data I

gathered in the formative assessment, asked the students to make an

evaluation about the text. If I had found that the groups were having trouble

adequately summarizing the text, I would have changed my plans for the

summative assessment and gone back to an exercise that would help them

comprehend and summarize again. Since each of the groups was proficient

in summarizing, I did go ahead and assign a homework essay that asked

them to make an evaluation of the text because it was more cognitively

challenging.

I also graded the students’ summative assessments in which they were

asked to choose (evaluate) which of the lessons the characters Telemachus

learns is most important to him and which is most important for the

progression of the story. If I would have been teaching the next lesson I

would have used the data I collected from grading them to know that while

the students were able to summarize the information just fine, they still

needed help thinking more deeply about the text. In fact, some of the

students summarized what the character learned instead of making an

evaluation at all. The data I gathered from the summative assessment

indicated that the teacher needed to explain what it means to make an

evaluation as well as to continue to have students practice that skill.