Assessment – Page 2 – connect. create. question.

I’ve tweeted it before, last time back in June:

I regularly ask my students to reflect on their work and our class in general. Embedded in this reflection task is my not-so-subtle request for feedback on how I’m doing as a teacher: Are you learning something? If so, what?

… and I hope that the answer is something along the lines of what I think I’ve been teaching. Honestly, the response usually is, and so I give myself a pat on the back and move on.

But every time – and I do mean every time – I ask my students for feedback, I get at least one surprise, sometimes several. In fact, now that I think about it, I realize that perhaps this is the main reason I continue to ask my students for “please-may-I-get-inside-your-head” feedback: because my students (especially the middle-schoolers) always surprise me, and I get such a thrill from it. I mean, yes – I am asking for feedback to inform and guide my teaching. Everything from next week to next year is considered and reconsidered as I chart, graph, and make notes about what my students have said. But sometimes I am merely charmed by the simplicity and honesty of my students comments. Further than that – and this is when it really gets good – is when I’m challenged by them.

My mid-year feedback and reflection requests are very open and not at all numerical, incidentally. I allow students to respond in any number of words, in a Zoomerang online survey with an open text box. You can see here what my questions look like.

Note that if you’d like to see an entire sample survey, check one out here – you’ll have to fill something in the boxes to get past each page but don’t worry; I’m pretty sure I’ll know you’re not one of my middle-schoolers!

I’ll share some examples from the most recent batches, submitted this week, as we roll into the second quarter of our school year at UNIS Hanoi. First, Rebecca in 7th grade, who knows what she is getting from English class, as she responds to my first sentence-starter, What I have definitely learned this quarter is…

I learned how to write good blogs by using textual evidence and refering to what the author is doing. When i read ‘Dragons Gate’ in class learned alot about how hard it was when the chinese had to go work in America and how it affected their lives. When doing DLAs i have also learned important grammar rules like when you are talking about a book or a movie, play that is named you have to either put it in italics or underline it.

(You’ll notice that I’ve typed Rebecca’s comments “as is.”) Not only is Rebecca able to articulate what she’s getting out of our English class (remarkably concise for a 7th-grader!), but she obviously also knows herself as a learner and she decided to share this tidbit with me, too, when prompted with Other thoughts I have that will help Ms. Michetti help me to learn:

I am a visual learner and i find it hard to learn things or understand things when they are presented in large blocks of text.

Initially, I was concerned about this and wondered what that meant for learning in our classroom (by nature of the subject area, rather text-heavy). A conversation with a different Rebecca (@FrznGuru, a member of my PLN on Twitter) made me realize I needed to chat with Grade-7-Rebecca to find out what her reason was for including this tidbit of info:

So I chatted with Grade-7-Rebecca. Turns out, she’s not bothered by the amount of text in our class; she was quite open in telling me that she’s having no problems in English A class with our texts, but wanted me to know for any “future projects or things like that” so that I could help her by giving her visual cues. Fair enough!

My primary concern was wondering how to help a visual learner in a course where the strands of writing, listening, reading, speaking, and representing are also important, but Rebecca seemed to understand this quite well and knew that although reading and writing might not be her strengths, she needs to work on them. We ended up having a thorough (and useful, at least for me) conversation about learning in English class.

Other than Rebecca’s generous comments, I get plenty of tidbits from students offering suggestions, which I note, as to how I can help them and others learn more in class, such as these articulate ones:

Other thoughts I have that will help you helpme learn, are having reading classes. I really enjoy them, and it is nice to take a short break once in a while. We are then ready to learn after having a short break.

And:

I think spending a bit more time explaining what you need to do for blogging in the unit, such as the fact that you need to post your roles on the blog before each meeting would help me understand the unit quicker.

Both of the above examples are comments I appreciate very much because they are reminders of the finer aspects of my teaching I need to be mindful of as I plan.

Ah, but what about those comments that really make me go, “Hmmmm”? Next, an example of a student who challenges me to do more:

I think we should do more activities that are off our bums! I want to move more in english, and play games. I’m sure more people would like that too 🙂 It’s also a really entertaining way to learn! I also think that we could interact with more groups of people. If we get to talk with our friends it MIGHT (yes, I’m saying MIGHT) make us feel like English is more enjoyable, so we will look forward to it more than we already do! 🙂

So now I understand that perhaps in our first quarter, for this student, we weren’t doing enough to physically move around and socialize. And I’m already thinking, How can we move around more in our next unit, and beyond? These are the kinds of comments I love because they really do challenge me to reflect on my own practice and make changes to adapt to my students’ needs.
Other gems I appreciate are the comments where one of my students tells me that what they’ve learned this quarter isn’t in fact related to any of our curriculum content, but rather is about how they learn or why we learn. Some examples:

I have defenitly learned how to properly blog and reflect in this unit. I have also learned that when your in a group or group work going for one thing that you should make sure that your all on the same page or else if you contradict that person then the person that is assessing you they might see that your not prepared.

And this one from Grade 8:

In this quarter I feel that i have really got a better understanding of the topic theme: ‘Identity and Belonging’. I also feel that I have also learned more about myself in a sense that I have gotten to appreciate books such as ‘The Outsiders’ more.

Of course there are always the “Life is so hard” adolescent whinges here and there, like this one from Grade 9, in response to the sentence starter “What I don’t like about this class is…:

I didn’t like that we did not read the book, Animal farm, very often in class even though we were expected to read it at home

And again from Grade 9:

that it still is work.

But despite even these comments, I certainly find that the surveys I get from my students help guide me as a facilitator of their learning. I feel I not only have a better pulse on each of my classes, but I’m challenged to think of ways to reach each student that perhaps I would not have thought without their input.

And so, I’ll continue to solicit their feedback! However, I think next time I do, I might change the way I do things and take Kevin‘s advice about using GoogleDocs Forms. Thanks, Kevin! And of course, thanks to all my students for their honest and detailed feedback — especially Rebecca, who agreed to have me write about our conversation and her comments!

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All this talk about writing, grade books, and “the unthinking habits of grading” has given me so much to think about. My mind is swimming.

The thing is, I think about this stuff all the time. It is only recently, after reading hoards of comments and postings (and all the bits in between) that I begin to understand my naivety. Or is it ignorance? (Hint: not everyone thinks about this stuff all the time.)

First, a bit of background, for the sake of context

I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and attended Catholic, publicly funded schools. The teachers I had, with two notable exceptions¹, all used criterion-referenced assessment to grade my work. I always (other than with the two notable exceptions) knew how I was being graded, even if they did average my scores and turn them into percentages. I graduated from an unusual work-at-your-own-pace high school in 1992.²

After completing an English Lit degree on the West coast, I entered Education. I did not realize at the time (1997) that the program I was in was progressive compared to most Ed programs out there. Thinking, ignorantly, that what I learned was what all teachers-to-be learned, I eagerly entered the world of K-12 education, armed with what I thought was Everything A Beginning Teacher Should Know.

One Epiphany (of many)

Fast-forward to 2001: I entered the realm of international education, working at an MYP school. Before this moment, what I knew about MYP could have filled an ant’s mouth. Sitting in an MYP training session, my then-mentor flashed the subject-specific criteria for Language A (MYP’s equivalent to English Language Arts) on a projector screen.

Thought #1: “Hey, that’s cool! That’s the same criteria my grade 7 teacher used to grade my writing, and it’s the same criteria I have always used to assess student work.”

[insert hmms and haws of other training participants here, as they ponder the criteria on the screen]

Thought #2: “Wait… doesn’t everyone use this?”

It wasn’t long after Thought #2 occurred that I learned the answer: No, not everyone is using this. Plenty of conversation and interaction with my then-colleagues (from various backgrounds in education, as expected in an international setting) taught me that what I had taken for granted my entire (short) life was indeed not “the norm.”

The Interim and a Confession

Over the past 7 years, plenty more colleagues, students, and their parents have shown me that other ways of assessing are indeed rife and plentiful. Just yesterday I engaged in three different conversations with three different families about this very topic (parent conferences were timely). Witness a verbatim quote from one of those discussions:

“Wow, this is so different from what we’re used to. You mean you want your students to come show you their work before they finish? You won’t take points off?”

[I won’t even get into the connotations implied by the use of the words “want”, “before”, and “points.”]

Don’t get me wrong — I do not think the same way about this issue as I did 10 or even 3 years ago. I have learned more than I can express on this small page about how to assess meaningfully. I have spent many, many teacher days fantasizing about not assessing at all, and like Dana Huff, I still have those days. I am guilty, in past years, of assigning my students the most boring five-paragraph essay you’ve ever read, just so I could be bored to death reading it and they could be bored to death writing it.

A Question … and Answers?

I have offered some of my thoughts about assessment before — indeed, the reason I initially began this blog was to reflect on what I was learning in an IBO PD course on MYP Objectives and Assessment. Now, having learned so much, I feel my philosophy of assessment is still evolving, and I do think long and hard about why I assess my students’ work and how I do it.

(And, please know that I mention MYP only because I feel it is one of the best educational systems out there for student learning. Is it the only one? No. Are there others that do the same? Yes. Is it just about best practice? Yes.)

So here’s the thing: I know there are other methods of assessment. I know about them well enough because I took the required courses in university, and I have seen them used in classrooms. But here’s what I still don’t understand — and please don’t mistake this for a rhetorical question:

Why are we still using them? (Do they facilitate learning?)

I’m starting, today, with just this question about criterion-referenced assessment, but know that I’m not limiting my thoughts to only this aspect of assessment. I anticipate that those thoughts — and more questions — will follow as my assessment philosophy further evolves.

Mid-evolution

So far, here is what I believe. Assessment is…

primarily for learning; the assessment of learning is secondary.
real and not “fabricated” just to put a number on a paper or in a box.
goal-focused, and those goals should be based on where the students are at in their learning.
varied, with a wide variety of opportunities given for students to reach their goals.
frequent and woven into every aspect of what we do, while we are learning. (I am uncomfortable with the thought of students being either too excited or filled with dread at the mention of assessment; I want my students to see assessment as something we do all the time.)
part of the natural learning process, not something tacked onto the end.
not driven by reporting terms, boxes that need to be filled, administrative software, or any other nonsense that has nothing to do with the learner.
applied when needed for learning, and not at calendar dates specified a year in advance.

¹Okay, so really it was three notable exceptions. And they were notable because they were exceptionally bad teachers. I’m not naming names, it’s water under the bridge, yadda-yadda-yadda — and the truth is I learned many life lessons from these poor teachers.

²The dates are important, because I refuse to believe that the concept of criterion-referenced assessment is “new” and “progressive“. The dates, although applicable only to my personal experience and not bodies of research, further give credence to my personal belief that education is painfully, mind-bogglingly slow to change.

Photo Credits: Nice Hat by cwalkatron; Question mark by Leo Reynolds

connect. create. question.