Students maturing into their full potential under the guidance of caring adults; that’s the true definition of education. The old joke goes that the best three things about teaching are June, July, and August, but in reality, the three best things about teaching are students, families, and community.
As a new teacher, I spent most of my time focused on instruction, my primary concern being what I needed to teach and how I was going to teach it. Assessment and grading was at best a nuisance and at worst a necessary requirement. Needless to say, my consideration of assessment and grading was an afterthought, usually poorly developed and poorly constructed measurements of student learning.
In a recent article, Stephen Chew and William Cerbin claim, “Teaching and Learning are lost in a buzzword wasteland.” Teachers struggle to figure out what works and what doesn’t, some quickly adopt any new strategy while others are stuck on worn out ideas that long ago ceased to work. Our students don’t recognize the buzzwords, but they’ve been subjected to numerous educational innovations in various classrooms leaving them with no uniform understanding of how their learning actually works. We certainly don’t know everything, but we can start by making sure that all teachers and students understand the basic processes behind encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories.