As a teacher, it’s of the utmost importance to adjust one’s teaching to the performance data of students on certain assessed objectives. Clarksdale is very good in this regard in that it requires teachers to administer a 4.5 week and 9 week test every term. This offers teachers a huge swathe of data which tells him or her what objectives need to be gone over again and which no longer need to be reinforced. At Clarksdale, the high school performance goal is 75% objective student mastery. This means that we are highly encouraged to reteach all material on which students don’t score at least a 75%. With this in mind, I had to use my 2nd term 4.5 week exam data to determine that I needed to reteach sequences of transformations (61.19% mastery), similarity transformations (68.33%), and AA triangle similarity (64.04%). I then spent the next 3-4 week focusing heavily on this material while also slowly moving through the pacing guide (since a teacher still can’t simply not cover all the other untaught material due to students not performing as well as they should on older objectives). To my dismay when I tested my students again on the 9 week exam, some objectives even regressed! Parallelograms went from 78.33% to 63.68%. This taught me that a math teacher can’t afford to neglect older objectives even if they were at one time mastered. Otherwise, it’s clear the students will soon forget all the hard-earned lessons. The 9 weeks exam revealed that the following objectives had not been fully mastered: transformations (41.32%), parallelograms (63.68%), similar figures (53.16%), trigonometry (61.49%). This news is definitely disheartening seeing as I had worked day in and day out so hard on trying to get my students to understand these concepts we had gone over ad nauseum. However, another way to assess less-than-favorable data is to say that each objective that hasn’t yet been mastered is yet another opportunity to keep up the good fight and not succumb to teacher complacency – a crippling syndrome of teachers assuming falsely that just because an objective it has been taught it has been mastered.
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