In an earlier conversation about using the Teaching Strategies Gold, I asked about benefits and challenges. Here is a list of these compiled:
Benefits
- authentic assessment that relies on power of observation
- widely held expectations for children birth to kindergarten so can be more inclusive for a wide range of children's skills in all domains of development
- research based and aligned to state and national head start standards and common core for kindergarten
- provides tools to create portfolio of children's work
- provides a plethora of ways to report individual child's progress and growth and family friendly ways to share this
- provides teachers with ways to analyze and track student progress and plan intentionally using this information and gives activity ideas
- provides administrators with ways to analyze school wide progress and universal needs; additionally, reports can help determine what students require tier one, two or three support where response to intervention (RtI) is used.
Challenges
- can be overwhelming for teachers to collect documentation on all objectives and indicators; professional development is necessary to support teachers understanding of how to decide how much to collect
- interrater reliability support is provided by Teaching Strategies but this is a long process and time consuming; ongoing professional support with ongoing discussion and review of objectives/indicators and different skill levels is necessary
- family child development report is long and generic in tone; can be individually customized, but this is time consuming
Thoughts? How do you use this tool? What do you use instead?
Assessment: To use or not use the Teaching Strategies Gold? http://ecsmart.blogspot.com/2012/12/assessment-to-use-or-not-use-teaching.html