The UW-Stout Emerging Center for Career and Technical Education Excellence is deeply committed to providing professional development opportunities to enhance educators’ effectiveness and supporting the pipeline of highly qualified teachers. For the third year in a row, UW-Stout has facilitated a fast-paced educational “boot camp’ session designed for Experience Base Licensed (EBL) Educators.
Over the course of this two-day “boot camp” seminar, Marketing and Business Education Program Director Debbie Stanislawski co-facilitated a cohort of Career and Technical Education (CTE) EBL Educators from Racine and Kenosha. The session focused on assessment and offered educators the opportunity to plan activities that could be immediately implemented in their classrooms and used for further analysis and reflection.
Learners began the seminar by exploring the purpose of assessment, including formative and summative assessment within CTE. The cohort examined new formative assessment techniques called CAT’s (Classroom Assessment Techniques) and discussed how they might integrate these new techniques in their CTE lesson plans. All participants completed a questioning strategy self-assessment that allowed them to consider their own use of wait time, complexity/level of Bloom’s Taxonomy of questions, use of probes after students answer questions to help students think critically. CTE performance assessments and rubrics were also discussed as a way to vary and assess student learning. Seminar participants also examined good criteria for rubrics and peer reviewed a rubric they have used.
In addition to application and reflection on practice during the seminar, implementation and reflection are a part of seminar follow-up activities. For example, participants were to choose a performance assessment in their CTE classroom and align the assessment to objectives and standards, then reflect on what the performance assessment tells them about student learning and possible changes needed when using the assessment again.
The second day of the session included examination of teacher made tests and application to participants’ classrooms. The participants had the opportunity to peer evaluate a CTE sample teacher made test based on best practices for selected response and constructive response items. In addition, they learned about analyzing assessment data. Follow up activities also include implementation and reflection on this learning related to their teacher made tests.
The final portion of the seminar involved exploration of grading practices which led to discussions about similarities and differences among grading policies within different schools. Lastly, the educators examined feedback provided to students and the impact of feedback (both positive and critique) on effort and strategies within the learning process.
The cohort of EBEs returned to their respective districts full of ideas to implement and strategies to try. The group will reflect on their experiences to share results and recommendations and will meet again as a group in the spring for the next “boot camp” in the series, CTE Foundations. For more information on opportunities for EBLs, contact the UW-Stout Emerging Center for Career and Technical Education Excellence.
