Rethinking Assessment
There are millions of articles discussing assessment. We have formative and summative and standardized, and observational, and on and on… From being different roles within schools, student, parent, teacher, coordinator, I know sometimes the whole why of an assessment gets lost. Are we showing data to show what students can remember on a test, to show how great of a teacher we are, or is this really being used to inform our teaching and connect with our students? While I know I will visit the idea of assessment many times on this blog I wanted to start with two BIG ideas on assessment.
First, Trevor Mackenzie has a new book I have just started to read, Inquiry Mindset, and it gets to the core idea of not only what our assessments should be used for but more importantly WHO should be at the center of not only using the data but also creating the assessments. This fantastic book has many reasons why students should be co-creators of our assessments and main assessors of their own work. Creating units and outlines for assessments upfront is a fantastic way for immediate ownership for the students and not something a teacher is imposing onto the class. Together the class can discuss what will be important by taking into account the standards but also their own thoughts. Additionally, the assessments can morph as needed AND allowing students to be the developers of the assessments allows teachers insight into what experiential knowledge may exist in the room as the unit is starting.
My favorite idea from the book was fostering a culture of togetherness through our assessments by co-designing and co-constructing. I will argue over and over again that a strong classroom culture is one of the most important pieces to a successful year- and when I read that I was again reminded why I adore Trevor’s outlook on education.
The other big assessment idea I wanted to touch upon was to remember what it is that you are in fact assessing! Earlier this year I led a PD on this idea and it was surprising how much struggle the teachers had when I had asked them to assess for the content of a student’s understanding of a scientific concept. I had handed out to all the homeroom teachers a paper written about the idea of a life cycle for a frog. The main ideas and concepts were mostly solid by this imaginary student- however, the spelling, structure, and grammar were not all to grade-level standards. Now, remember I asked the teachers to look and give feedback on the student's understanding of a life cycle. When I went around to see how it was going there were so many marks on the pages that had NOTHING to do with the student’s understanding of the concept. If I was this imaginary student I would have gotten back from most of the teachers a paper full of red showing me my errors in spelling and grammar. How do you imagine this student would feel about their understanding of the life cycle? The student had in fact had a strong understanding but the writing got in the way of them feeling like a success. Should this student not write? Not if it was their choice in how they wanted to explain their knowledge- we need to separate what it is we are assessing when we look at student work and evaluate the thing we are in fact assessing.
I have anxiety just looking at that red pen. Think before you ink ; )
One thing that came up in this discussion was- parents will think I don’t know what I’m doing if I leave the grammar and spelling unchecked. Sure- this can happen and when a parent or guardian asks you to explain, you say you weren’t assessing grammar and writing structure on this and instead were checking for understanding of a scientific concept. Help the parent to understand that while we are helping to build strong writers we are also hoping to foster a generation of thinkers that can research, analyze, and explain phenomena. As a parent myself I know I can get on board with that thinking. There is of course a time for grammar and writing- but let’s keep that feedback and assessment for when the writing is what we are taking a look at.
