How many of you have dragged yourself into yet another workshop on assessment and wondered why am I here? Go ahead raise your hands. You know you all have. 45 minutes of canned presentation that your school district thinks will invigorate rigor in your classroom. Most of it is mind numbing garbage. You dutifully take a handout and make notes, but you already do most of what the presenter is talking about and you can see that it's not really working for your students. Now ask yourself the big question. Why?
Assessment requires you to make a judgement on what your student is learning. The reason why those canned assessments don't really work is because they don't measure what a student knows. In our school we do a lot of project based learning. Students are given a rubric that defines what learning is for them. Most students work toward an A on their rubric. Rubrics are a useful tool and project based learning can help your students become strong work-ready people. But they do not really measure what a student knows, just what the student can do. Frustrating isn't it? Even when you think you have a foolproof measure of student learning, you don't.
As a society we need to make a paradigm shift from our old industry geared education to learning that requires students to be active participants. We need to assess learning by measuring the formation of thought. When a student is capable of forming an opinion on your subject that is a true assessment of learning in your classroom. Therefore the best form of assessment is still Socratic. When you guide student learning without giving them the answers you provide them with a gateway to learning, that paper tests and projects can not measure. So spend some time brushing up on guided questioning in your classroom. Teach your children to think.
-AMA
Hi there,
ReplyDeleteYou are correct that guided questioning in which students get feedback from their teachers in real-time is a form of assessment -- called formative assessment, in fact.
The President's Race to the Top program emphasizes this type of assessment and multiple measures to gauge a student's proficiency.
I would argue that rubrics can be helpful in setting expectations for student writing. These rubrics show students what good student writing looks like and puts it in their power to put in the effort required to score high on the rubric.
--Krysten