I am optimistic that as educators we can find our way to common ground. I am optimistic that with students in mind, we can continue to grow; both learning from the past and looking to the future.
As an educator, my assessment practices have evolved and changed as I have become more comfortable in the classroom. In the beginning, I stuck with what I knew: quizzes, unit tests and in-class essays. I assessed using provincial rubrics in my English classroom. However, Physical Education was always a place for the freedom I felt assessment needed. In the great outdoors (okay in the great gymnasium... this is Alberta right?) my students were encouraged to 'give it a go' and were rewarded with participation marks and improvements in fitness (and fitness test scores). As time went by, I was introduced to Understanding by Design and realized that my two classroom contexts need not be so different.
*Please note: In Physical Education, we have tweaked our practices so that we base most of our marks on participation and effort. We still examine skill and fitness but do so in a minimal manner. A student who attends, changes out, participates and understands the given sport/activity will excel in our programs. It is for these reasons the majority of this post may focus on English Language Arts at the high school level.
Don't get me wrong, my English students still write tests, they still do in-class essays but they are development with the end in mind and there is flexibility there. Students who desire to improve can rewrite any written work in my classroom for a remark. I love the ability to revise and improve that this gives them but I have yet to help them realize the potential it offers. Unfortunately, I am still trying to find a way in which to align my newer assessment strategies with the traditional nature of grading. Students still look for their marks immediately, they want to know what percent they received and if they beat their desk mate. In an effort to avoid this, I do not hand out their written marks until after they have evaluated their own work and read my comments. This has helped but it is still a journey. We are finding the light together.
My school district does an excellent job of giving teachers across the district the opportunity to share and compare practices. We have district collaboration days and PD that focuses on the districts goals of literacy, high school completion and resiliency. In both English Language Arts and Physical Education, this has helped our two high schools to align our assessment practices with the goals of the district fairly closely. At the school level, we have been time to work on common assessment pieces for each grade level and we work on marking and evaluating our student's progresses throughout the school year. This has been an enlightening and rewarding process for me as I have learned much and I am also able to identify my own personal strengths and areas for improvement to help better my students.
An area where I think assessment practices sometimes clash is in the transition from middle school to high school. I do not know what the solution is but I do know that the transition to high school percentage grades and prerequisites is a tough one. In high school, students can receive zeroes and if they fail to do the work, they will fail the class and lose the credits. This obstacle is a big one for our district but with the focus on centring education around the learner of 2030 (as outlined in the Inspiring Education document) hopefully it won't always seem so insurmountable.
Provincially, my own assessment practices and those of my district align quite well. When I say they align quite well I mean we achieve well provincially. Our scores in standardized testing are quite often excellent. As someone who has sought to avoid teaching to the test, this has involved great manipulations of the the provincial rubrics and the use of parts and ideas of the structure so that my students can develop their writing and processing skills with a bit more freedom than they might see on a final exam. That being said I also use the exemplars and rubrics given by the government in their entirety at least 2-3 times a year (semester) to ensure my students have the same opportunities as their fellow Albertans.
I think it also important to note that I see the value in standardized testing. For my practices it has been invaluable to compare my students (and therefore my teaching) to those across the province. I hope for my practices to enable my students the future they desire, and today, in 2014, that means that they must be equipped for the test with the skill sets that their revisions, self assessments and formal evaluations assess. I want them to be equipped by the assessments I use because it is far better that they have a varied repertoire of skill sets than to be a 'one trick pony'.
As I continue on this journey, I am faced with different versions on the same three questions:
1. What happens after high school? Does this assessment provide my students what they REALLY need to go into the great BIG world?
For this question, I am reassured by the successes and (and even failures) of my practices. Can my students relate to the content? Can they utilize their skill outside of the assessments confines? For example, do my Physical Education students understand the concept of defence across all territorial games or only in basketball? Or, can my English Language Arts students successfully complete an job application or interview?
Hopefully, if I answer these questions objectively, I can reflect on the need for assessments (and therefore my practices) to be fluid.
2. How do we address the needs of all learners with any given assessment? *See the cartoon below*
Cartoon courtesy of: http://physicsfocus.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/exam-cartoon.jpg
As a newer teacher (I have only been in the profession for 7 years), I can finally say I DO NOT KNOW IT ALL. In the beginning, that would have scared me. I would have given the unit test, or speech to every student and marked them. However, research into the needs of the learner and books such as the Smartest Kids in the Universe and how they got that way have revealed to me that (cue the lightbulb) each student is entirely completely individual.
And so painfully (for my ego), I am evolving. I am looking for fair ways to adapt and be fluid for my learners. While there will always be skill sets students are assessed on, see reading and writing, there are limitless methods to do this. Perhaps my best source of reference here has been in assessing my technology driven students who have brought innovative means to my classroom via video journalling, online assignment submissions, and multimedia presentations far beyond my scope.
So now, as I stumble on this question for the hundredth time, I am on the way to an answer! However, I also now wonder if I am still assessing all the skills my students need (and thus encouraging them to develop and fine tune them). In adapting an assessment for the shy student or the one who struggles with grammar I must make sure I am meeting their needs but not denying them an essential skill for their future. Hence the cyclic nature of this question.
3. Why am I using this test /project/rubric/assignment? Is it meaningful? relevant? valuable?
The answer is in the question. If I can't reflect, I can't grow and neither can my students.
*I truly believe this question will enable assessment to drive instructional practices. If one can find the drive, time and passion to answer it.
With baby steps, I have used Understanding by Design in some of my units only to discover that some of my assessments are not as meaningful or relevant as I once thought. In looking at the end, the core ideas and concepts have become more clear to me, especially when teaching things like Shakespeare and To Kill a Mockingbird. I want my students to be able to understand the deep underlying themes in these texts and be able to convey them (be it in a written work or visual piece). Thus, my instructional practices are changing.
My school is fortunate enough to have an administrative representative for each major department and during our department meetings we often have our administrator present. He/She works alongside us to deliver new ideas and support our new endeavours, especially in the area of assessment. Our grade 9 English Language Arts team owes a lot of thanks to our administrators for helping us get common marking time where we develop, revisit and refine our common assessments each year. These assessments are modelled after the provincial achievement test but also allow us to pinpoint any possible areas of improvement for our students throughout the year. In terms of both of my departments, I would also note that I am fortunate to work with administrators who support the further education of their teachers especially in the area of assessment. Knowing that we can collaborate and develop (and revisit) with encouragement and support is what allows us to find success in assessment for our students.
The long and short of this lengthy (sorry!) blog entry is this...
To me, assessment is fluid.
There will never be an end all be all.
Our students are fluid, each one on an educational journey filled with obstacles, roadblocks, triumphs and pivotal learning moments.
To improve assessment, we must be along for the ride. We must know that what worked during the Industrial Revolution may not work now, although some of it might. We must also know that we do not need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to put some air in the tires and be ready.
Cheesy figurative language aside, this means that to improve these practices, administrators and teachers must be willing to put the learner in the centre of their experience. In today's world this means we must do all of the following:
1. We must embrace and utilize technology. Fear of it will only alienate our students.
2. We must begin with the end in mind. What will our students NEED in order to be successful when they leave our room? our school?
3. We must be willing to make mistakes AND learn from them. Why not try some project based learning? Or Google forms for polling? If we want our students to enter into education fearlessly, we must do the same.
With optimism and just one more cartoon I leave you.
Picture courtesy of: https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/3597759744/h70B61172/
Where can I find that?
The following documents helped me out today:
Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans
https://education.alberta.ca/media/7145083/inspiring%20education%20steering%20committee%20report.pdf
Making the Most of Understanding by Design, John L. Brown (2004)
The Smartest Kids in the World and how they got that way, Amanda Ripley (2013)
Loved the blog. I agree with adding technology. My class (grade 4) used google forms to collect data to create charts. It was a fun and quick way for them to understand what data analysis can mean.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog! I too look back at my old teaching assessment and wonder what was my purpose for all the quizzes and pointless book reports. We were told by administration to have at least 15 assignments, per term, in our grade books to ensure that we had an accurate score for the students. I have fewer marks now but more one on one conference notes. These mean so much more to me. I know exactly at what reading level my students are at, just by conferencing with them, rather than testing.
ReplyDeleteCan't agree more. I have been a PE teacher since my first year teaching and so often I was looking for ways to change the model from the way I was taught, to something that worked better for students, and found so often that the model and the marking criteria was just to rigid.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest pet pev was the fact that we seemed to be following the yearly athletics program as an extension to volleyball or basketball practice. The fact that skills training takes over for health and real fitness was bothersome. I also found that we put so much emphasis on changing and looking for perfection in students that were struggling with puberty always made PE one of the hardest subjects to teach.
Another area that I have fought battles over was taking PE away from students to get caught up on core subjects. Some kids, like me, need to burn off a little steam and I can't remember taking away a math class to get caught up on a game a student missed in the gym.
I ramble on because I am so happy to see that a shift is starting to taking place to value the importance of fitness at every level and that we are looking at students after they graduate and not just time in the day to go "play" a game for the fun of it and using the time as a break for teachers (not all teachers but some use this time as a doge ball watching time.)
FIT FOR LIFE is the true purpose of physical education and that should be the focus.
Great blog
Hi Sheila,
ReplyDeleteAn excellent blog on assessment practices! I agree with all of your comments, but I especially enjoyed your "cheesy figurative language". So obvious you are an English teacher! The idea that assessment as well as students are "fluid" is so true - we don't want to be bogged down by the same ol' assessments year after year and certainly, our students change year to year as well, which leads us to the notion that maybe, perhaps, teachers should be fluid as well?
Thanks for the thoughts, enjoyed your blog!
Sheila,
ReplyDeleteI really loved this blog post and I see that we share many of the same thoughts and you did a great job at summarizing your post with the three items of what we all must start doing, if we haven’t already:
"1. We must embrace and utilize technology. Fear of it will only alienate our students."
Absolutely agree. This is a huge hurdle for many to get over. At St. Thomas the majority of the staff are great with technology and are advocates of its use in the classroom. My bigger struggle has been with parents. If a child grows up in a home with a fear of a technology they have major struggles with the tech use in schools. In the last few years I’ve had at least 1 student in each class that does not have a computer, tablet, or equivalent tool at home because of parent choice, not because of financial reasons. I’m not sure how to remedy situations like this other than giving these students positive exposure to technology use as much as possible at school.
"2. We must begin with the end in mind. What will our students NEED in order to be successful when they leave our room? our school?"
This makes a lot of sense. I think it’s important for us to remember what will truly be important for our students to learn and know.
"3. We must be willing to make mistakes AND learn from them. Why not try some project based learning? Or Google forms for polling? If we want our students to enter into education fearlessly, we must do the same."
Awesome point. If we are expecting our students to be engaged and have entrepreneurial spirits then we should be modelling those attributes.