Assessment: Catching Kids Acting Smart?

Assessment is one of the trickier areas for us as new teachers to approach. For so long, assessment was done roughly the same way. On the high school level, at least, it was about grades, report cards, taking tests, and fitting oneself into a curve.

Things have changed drastically over the past fifteen years, so it’s important to realize that our own experiences in this area may not be completely reliable guides for our professional actions in the future.

Take the issue of grades. We spent a bit of time in class trying to disentangle issues of grading from issues of assessment. While the two are no doubt linked, it is important that we do not let the current (and perhaps archaic) grading system totally determine our assessment practices. At the end of the day, we will likely be required to give a student a single grade of either A, B, C, D or F. But that should not prevent us from providing that student and his or her family helpful and targeted information that will lead to a better appreciation for what needs to happen in the future. It should not prevent us from communicating strengths and areas of needed growth, in the domains of knowledge, skills, interests, disposition, character, and leadership. It should not stop us from telling students whether or not they have met specific state-mandated standards.

Assessment can be one of the more inspiring areas for us as educators. It’s where we get to search out the hidden talents and gifts that each human being possesses. It’s where we help children connect what they can do (or what they are interested in doing) to the needs of the world. It’s where we help children discover their passions and help them reach out for them.

But it’s important that we don’t tell easy truths in this search for inspiration. We need to trust that kids can handle the truth. But to get to the truth, we need to be smart. We need to realize that no one instrument can tell us everything we need to know as teachers (even the best written test can’t do that).

So we need multiple forms of assessments, with multiple instruments: some standardized and some classroom developed, some authentic and performance-based, and some objective. With this rounded picture of summative assessment tools (and with the help of a ready stock of formative assessment strategies—something we will continue to talk about throughout the year), we, as teachers, can help take us out of the past of education and into its future.

To Arrive Where We Started . . . Changed

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

What have we learned through our exploration of lecture these past two weeks?

First, we have thought about the temporal flow of a lesson (a unit, a semester, and beyond).

We start by building purpose. That involves a complex bringing together of prior knowledge, interest, excitement and, perhaps most crucially, a sense of disequilibrium. For a purpose to be set, there has to be some sense that effort is needed to reach a goal. That the world needs another look. That is how we invite students into the world of learning.

We then move into the “body” of our lesson. With lecture, we are not only conveying content, we are building up various organizational schema that allow students to arrange their knowledge. Hierarchical outlines, timelines, and Venn Diagrams are not just graphics onto which we take notes, but are powerful heuristics that should help students interact with meaningful content.

Of course, as with any other instructional strategy, lecture can potentially forward our goal of critical thinking by exposing students to multiple perspectives and interpretations of events.  Indeed, perhaps more so than many other strategies, lecture is actually ideally suited to do so.  The roots of lecture come from the Latin, lectura and legere, meaning: to read. In that way, we can think about a good lecture as a concise summary of years of reading.  We share with the students some of the fruits of our labor (understanding that it is ultimately the student’s labor that matters). We seek to inspire by giving them a glimpse of the possible.

We conclude our lessons by returning to those places where we began, understanding that we should be different people because of the experience we have just undergone. We assess knowledge, skills, and dispositions. We seek evidence of growth and change. We try to understand if our teaching has made any difference.

Teaching, as we said, is both a circle and a line. Combining those images, we can see it as a continuous spiral, a projection and retrospection, all as we seek to deepen and enliven our present.