Guiding Preservice Teachers to Making a Shift in Thinking: Developing Skill and Confidence in Assessment through Thematic Integrated Units

In this paper we present our journey as elementary education methods course instructors through a practical action research design refining a model thematic integrated unit for our preservice teachers in an elementary education methods course and how we revised our model unit to incorporate the assessment cycle in our model unit. We present our initial model thematic integrated unit encompassing language arts, history, mathematics, and science, our initial model unit lesson, our concerns with that unit lesson, our insight with respect to the missing component of the assessment cycle in our model unit lesson, and how that insight connects to our education of philosophy and teacher education program prerequisite courses. Successful teachers must be able to analyze student assessment data in order to meet the individual needs of all students. Our preservice teachers were asked to evaluate two sets of hypothetical student assessment data in order to identify the learning objectives that needed to be revisited. From their analysis, they broke into small-group pull-out sessions, taught the reteaching lessons based on their analysis of the hypothetical student data, and reassessed learning objective competency. Thus, our preservice teachers were allowed to experience the plan-teach-assess-reflect model necessary for their own individual journey toward becoming a successful professional educator.