The opportunities to observe and rate students on SKBs should be integrated into the classroom and not be interpreted by the student as an assessment situation.

Discussion Response- Dempsey

Please use attached guide

Our Pre-K assessment is called the Early Learning Assessment (ELA).

“The Early Learning Assessment is based on research-supported Learning Progressions that are aligned to early learning standards and based on seven domains of school readiness: The Learning Progressions define the pathway of skills, knowledge, and behaviors that children develop between the ages of 36 months and 72 months, including children who may be at earlier developmental levels than their typically developing peers,” (Electronic Learning Company, 2011).

This is an observational assessment. The opportunities to observe and rate students on SKBs should be integrated into the classroom and not be interpreted by the student as an assessment situation. As a teacher my training was thorough and overwhelming, but after floundering through the assessment in practice, I learned how to best observe my students for certain SKBs.

The problem with the initial training in the ELA is that it was only for teachers. Teachers were expected to train para-educators on how best to support us in observing the children demonstrating SKBs. Putting the responsibility to train paras in an area that they themselves were less than proficient caused an ethical dilemma. Do we train our paras to the best of our understanding and risk relaying inaccurate information or do we take on the responsibility to collect evidence to support the assessment on our own and let the para-educator take on more direct instruction responsibilities. This ethical dilemma caused diversity in the classroom between the lead teacher and the para-educator. The para-educator felt equally left out and taken advantage of in these situations.

This diversity between the two instructional leaders in the classroom that was caused by an ethical dilemma of the lead teacher is a common discourse I found throughout Early Childhood research. Souto-Manning, Cahnmann-Taylor, Dice, and Wooten detailed it best:

“While early childhood education programs seek to provide the tools to work with children and explore content, many fail to address the social and emotional contexts in which early childhood education occurs. This is evident in the seldom addressed topic of collaboration between lead teachers and assistant teachers in the early childhood classroom. In this study, we found that as new early childhood teachers enter schools, they interact with teacher aides and parents daily, yet do not feel prepared for negotiating these professional adult relationships. These underlying tensions then affect children’s development and learning,” (2008, p.309).

The large scale solution to these problems is to provide incoming educators with a class addressing social discourse in the classroom, highlighting conflict-management techniques to solve ethical and diversity driven conflicts. The smaller scale solution to this particular problem was to provide the same training the classroom teachers had on the ELA to the para-educators. When both educators had the same understanding of the assessment and its administration it allowed for productive conversations to happen. The ethical dilemmas around how to administer the ELA were now shared between the educators and a common solution could be established. This alleviated the diversity between the educators because they now had a common understanding of the expectations and demands of the ELA.

 

Requirement: PHD Writing

Answer preview…………………………..

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