Chapter 1: Making Classroom Assessment Work
Hopefully, this book will give me some insights on how to become an effective assessor and evaluator. Here at the beginning of this course, I do not have too much experience when it comes to these things. The first chapter, entitled “Making Classroom Assessment Work”, introduces the reader to the basics of classroom assessment. How are we supposed to make assessment meaningful to the students yet effective to us as teachers? I believe that is important to avoid large-scale evaluations which focus on a simple way of testing the students. They should be given ample opportunity to show what they have learned. These opportunities should be varied as well – each student has their strengths and weaknesses. As an assessor and evaluator, we must first get to know our students and see how they work and what they are interested in. In order for an evaluation to be accurate, the student must be involved. In order for this to happen, we must find their “spark”.
This chapter does a good job of showing how different forms of assessment can be misleading. In order to have accurate readings, one must assess and evaluate constantly in order to get accurate results. There must be equal assessment throughout the learning process. This chapter also shows the importance of have students evaluate each other. Having them do this provides more information for the students’ improvement, with less work for the student. It should not be strictly teacher – student learning, but students should also learn from each other. Having them do workshops with each other’s work allows for more ideas from different sources. This also creates more ownership for the students since they are showing their work to their peers – a definite plus!
Chapter 2: Building the Foundation for Classroom Assessment
I was one of those students who always believed that it was bad to make mistakes in class, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. It seems that this is how schools have constructed the thinking and feeling about mistakes. To go along with this, if it wasn’t the school, it was my peers. Who wants to raise their hand in front of 25 of their peers and get a question wrong? No one does. I always waited to hand things in until I found out what I had been doing wrong with them, I never asked beforehand. I think it was because I was scared of making mistakes. This lack of motivation to get helped may have rooted in the lack of parental involvement. Back then, there were no Teacher Logic/Home Logic programs for teachers and parents to communicate. It is important for this connection to keep students on track and focused. Checking in is also a huge part of this, if you have regular check-ins with your students to keep track of where they are and help them work through any issues they may have with assignments.
The textbook brings up a daunting issue: Time for the full learning. Students need time to set goals, reflect, self-assess, receive feedback and grow from the feedback. How can there be enough time for all this with such a vast curriculum to attend to and teach. In order to achieve this, proper set up is needed. Making sure students know their goals, final outcome, and the steps involved to achieve their goals and outcome. Students can’t get somewhere if they don’t have a road map and destination.
Chapter 3: Beginning with the End in Mind
Following up on the ideas from last chapter, students can’t get somewhere if they don’t have a road map and a destination. This chapter focuses on the last point. It is important to give students ideas and sample of how to achieve their goals. It is not simply telling them, but giving them hand outs of expectations as well as exemplars of what good, bad and mediocre assignments look like. Modelling is the only way students can have a solid understanding of what it is that they are working towards. This combined with why they are working towards it and how it will benefit them, gives them most of the tools they need in order to complete assignments (hopefully) to be on par with the teachers expectations.
In the ELA 10B class I taught during pre-internship, we were working towards an in-class essay which the students would complete over two classes. The students were told this at the beginning of the unit so they had a clear idea of our goal. To help us work through thesis statements and general brain storming, we did a Mind Map activity which involved their essay topics and thesis statements. I told them why they were doing this and how it would help them. With this in the mind, most of the students worked hard during class time and ended up with valuable insights to help them write their in-class essays. While most did this, every student completed the assignment by the due date and did a 2-minute presentation. Each of these was a success as the students heard other essay topics and different insights about their own essay topics. The reason I did this assignment, was to reach the goal of the essays. With the end in mind, this assignment went very well and helped the students as they approached the big day.
Chapter 4: Describing Success
In order for the students to complete their Mind Maps, I had to describe what success looked like. Had I gone into the classroom without some exemplars and a clear understanding of what I wanted and why they were doing it, I would have had a terrible time getting across my intentions. Luckily enough, this was not the case. My co-operating teacher was generous enough to let me use Mind Maps from his previous classes in order to provide exemplars for my students. After explaining with examples, I felt much more confident that the students understood what I wanted and how to get there. Any questions that followed could then be simply quickly answered or else I went with the students to the examples and we worked through their questions with a visual of what I was expecting. This along with a rubric and handout made me confident of what the students were doing and how they were getting there.
I don’t see how a teacher can assess if they have not done these prior steps properly. To me, it is not fair to assess a student on something they did not really understand. This does not give the student a proper chance to show their skills and what they have learned if they do not completely understand the assignment.
Chapter 5: Evidence of Learning
This chapter suggests triangular perfection when it comes to evidence of learning: observation of process, conversations, and collection of products. The triangle suggests that each component is important in order to receive information for evidence of learning. This comes as such a relief to me that as we advance through our education philosophies and methods, we are trying to move away from classic simple evidence of learning involving only tests and essays – how nice! These conversations of learning are another way to involve students in the learning process. Inviting students to think about assessment and how they feel about the work they are doing, gives them time to think about learning in a different way – they are part of it instead of simply looking to get that essay done the night before it’s due. They have a chance to think and reflect on it in a different light. These conversations do not simply have to be between student and teacher, but peer feedback is just as important. I feel like often times, a student will more open to what a peer has to say as opposed to always being bombarded by the teacher’s expectations and criticisms. Having evidence from different points in the learning journey is so important because it gives you an idea of where a student was and how they got to where they are now – a very valuable idea to have when evaluating as well as to inform your future teachings of similar subject matter.
Chapter 6: Involving Students in Classroom Assessment
After students have a solid idea of where they are going with an assignment, how they are going to get there, and why they are doing it, it leaves them asking “how am I going to get marked on this”. Involving your students is actually quite simple. The text book suggests that it is important to figure out what the students feel is important about a certain project like an essay or poster presentation. Allowing the students to brain storm and refine their thoughts into a rubric, lets the students know that their input is important. This continues to create the student’s ownership of the work they are doing. Of course, as teacher you may have to add in some little things that the students may have forgotten so that the rubric does end up similar to what you had in mind and involve those crucial points which are necessary for the assignment.
During my three-week block, I knew that I was working towards an in-class essay with my students on the final two days of instruction I had with them. With this in mind, I always tried to make sure my assessments were reflecting the students’ ability to comprehend the content and do some critical thinking. I did this primarily through questioning and checking for this, as well as a few smaller activities and group work where they presented ideas relating to the essay topics. I found my actual criteria for and the evaluation of these assignments reflected highly on the importance of the final product of the in-class essay. Unfortunately, I did not do too much in regards to involving the students with what they felt was important components of presentations and their projects, but I still had a large amount of hard work which lead to some successful completed projects. In the future, I hope to use some more strategies from the text which will include my students some more and hopefully increase even further their ownership of work and their drive to get it all done with satisfying results.
Chapter 7: Using Assessment to Guide Instruction
Going along with the theme of the text book, this chapter stresses using student involvement to create assessment tools but adds the idea of using assessment to guide instruction. This chapter shows many example of how teachers can use assessment to help with instruction. It does this by getting the students to once again come up with important factors for certain activities. This is exemplified most meaningfully to me when it is used in an English class. Together, the group decides what makes a person effective at reading out loud. They come up with a checklist of things to look at in pairs while each person reads out loud. This strategy gives the students something to focus on as they read if they need work in some places, as well as what they do well as a reader.
During my three-week block, students were most engaged in reading Macbeth when I had two students who were very eager to read. These two students took on English (I realize the play is set in Scotland, but the accents helped nonetheless) accents as they read. This immediately got the entire class engaged in the reading. This lead to more answers for my questions and in general a better classroom atmosphere. Although I did not use the strategy explained in this chapter and the students kind of just took off on their own, I can definitely see the benefits of using assessment to guide the practice. Had we made a rubric for reading out loud, perhaps “using accents” would have been part of the criteria and would have happened more than just once over the course of the three weeks I was teaching.
Chapter 8: Collecting, Organizing, and Presenting Evidence
This chapter explains the importance of creating a way for students to collect, organize, and present their evidence of learning. This process is suggested to be simple, involving, valued, and reconsidered. The second last point is the one which jumps out at me the most: value the collected evidence.
Through my three-week block, I was able to get a look at how my co-operating teacher gathered the learning evidence for the students. The evidence was collected in folders which where situated in a different cardboard box for each period throughout the day. These boxes were then stored beneath a table and somewhat forgotten. The only time I saw these folders be utilized was during parent-teacher-student conferences. Most of the time, the students did not show up so it was simply parent-teacher. When my co-op showed the parents the work, it did not seem high on their list of priorities. Each parent had some issue or anther to discuss with the teacher and only having 10 minutes, this was the way most of the time was spent. The parents did not seem to value the importance of this evidence, and the teacher did not do an extra special job of making it seem important either. I would have liked to have seen more celebration of the evidence and the students’ accomplishments. In my classroom, I will hopefully be able to accomplish this.
Chapter 9: Communicating About Learning
This chapter has some great things to say about celebrating and communicating learning. It provides many ways to get students excited about their learning and how to present it in a meaningful way, both the students and parents but to the teachers as well. Parental involvement seems to be a theme throughout this book. It stresses how important it is for not only they students and teachers should know what’s going on, but the parents as well. I like this idea of communicating learning because it gives students a purpose to why they are doing a project. When a student is working on an essay which will simply be completed and then handed in, there is not much motivation to go that extra mile to “wow” the audience. If say, the essay was going to be put in a class production and sent to parents and maybe published and sent around the school, there would be a better chance that the student would put in the extra effort to please and impress the intended audience which includes their peers and parents.
As a pre-service teacher, I believe that there is always more I can be doing to involve my students and get them involved in assessment. Since I have only completed my three-week block, I am moving into pre-internship with the hopes that I will able to create healthy environments where students value the importance of communicating learning. I hope to create many different ways to communicate this as well to accommodate different learning styles of each student.
Chapter 10: Evaluating and Reporting
The last thing teachers must deal with in assessment and evaluation is evaluating and reporting. Now days, the teacher is held responsible for so much and they need to be able to back up marks with reasons and proof. Years ago when it was the student’s fault for not trying, this was easier. But not days, it is the teacher who is held responsible and attacked by frustrated parents whose kids may not be doing their part in the work. This is why we need rubrics and strict guidelines for assignments as well as justification from the curriculum as to why we’re doing certain things within the classroom.
Using the tools such as contracts, goal-setting, and student involvement among many others, we can create solid plans to get students to take hold of the material and assignments and make it their own. Having the parents involved from the start will make the evaluating and reporting stages a little bit easier if the parents have a history and understanding of the content as well as a relationship with the teacher. You can do this by having reporting periods, and programs such as Teacher/Home Logic make this process much easier. Helicopter parents have somewhere to land their questions and give the students and teachers a little bit more space if they can sometime answer things on their own.
Using all the tools from chapters 1 – 10 in this textbook will help me as I move into my internship. Keeping in mind all the strategies I’ve learned, I will be able to implement them, including parents and students in the assessment and evaluation process. The simplicity of the text combined with the many examples from real-class situations makes this book a great asset to have and I would definitely suggest reading it to anyone just coming in to the profession, or even someone who has 25 years experience. A great, informational read.
Shane Markham 