Before I started my freelancing business, I taught English at a regional governor’s school. I designed my own curriculum and teaching materials, and I approached each delivery of my content as a test. Afterward, I would audit it to identify problems and potential solutions to implement in future iterations. In this way, each time I updated my materials and approach, I eased pain points, improved usability, and addressed the challenges of students with special needs.
This page contains several tools I created to test the learning and user experience of my students.
Lesson Design
Here’s a sample flow that demonstrates my iterative teaching style. At several points during the lesson, I built in places to test student understanding and step back to reteach and scaffold. By teaching in this manner, I was able to fix existing pain points and predict and problem-solve future issues before they occurred.
Formal testing
I developed various types of questions to formally test student achievement. I wanted to see if they could both recall learned content as well as delve deeper into the material.
Test: multiple choice
Here are examples of multiple-choice test questions I wrote for high school seniors taking my dual-enrollment course in British literature. The questions are designed to test factual recall about history, elements of literature, and overall understanding of selections we studied during the semester.
Test: short answer
These short answer questions were designed to delve deeper into patterns we studied during the course. Students were expected to demonstrate understanding as well as support their ideas with evidence and examples.
Writing assignments
Rubric
Whenever I assigned a major project, I included a rubric so that students would know what I would be focusing on when I assessed them. They could ask questions about anything they didn’t understand. We used the same rubric when doing peer review workshops and evaluating rough drafts. The students would see the rubric a third time when they turned in their final drafts. I would also make extensive edits and marginal comments in the body of the paper.
Self-analysis
Whenever I collected a major assignment, I had students respond to a series of assessment prompts. Not only would this help me focus my feedback in written comments, but it would help me improve my lessons, explanations, and materials for future iterations of the unit. This, taken with classroom observations, and the evidence measured in written work, gave me a strong picture of where my instruction was succeeding or needing to be rethought.
