Journal+for+Week+3

> Plan for implementation of a Student Needs Assessment**
 * **Examine constructivist practice in your own classroom**
 * **Consider various examples of needs assessments**
 * **Think through the needs assessment process with your team.
 * **Communicate with other teams about needs assessment.**

This week we read several articles on constructivist practices. I believe in constructivisim, I think that children truly learn through experiencing things in the classroom and reflecting on those experiences. I have studied Lev Vygostsky, Jerome Bruner, Jean Piaget, and John Dewey. In my classroom I perform a variety of pretest to determine my students zone of proximal development as defined by Vygostsky. I choose a great novel to start the year and pick great writing projects. I am enthusiastic and know that this will be a great year and then I look at my curriculum. Everything begins to change one month into school. Students are not passing district assessments, they do poorly on practice Ohio Achievement Test, I begin to panic. What will our test scores be like? How will the state rank us? Will we meet AYP? Suddenly constructivist practices disappear and we begin drilling basic skills. But wait, this is not why I went into education, I want my students to leave my classroom as thinkers, teenagers who ask questions, who have the skills to learn on their own, topics of their choice. So things change again. We begin reading and writing about things that interest us. We work in literature groups and discuss our books (we share our ideas on a wiki page) We are really learning, even though the test is coming, even though we have to post our scores on a graph and share them with our parents............... As we worked as a team developing our needs assessment we decided to break it down into two parts. The first section will deal with the type of technology the students have at home. This will include Nitendo DS, cell phones, video cameras, etc... The second section will deal with the skills our students have and can apply to use in our classroom at school. This information will greatly benefit us as we move toward projects and a constructivist apporach to using computers in the classroom. I am interested in reading more on Seymour Papert's research.