{"id":534,"date":"2021-05-01T20:15:27","date_gmt":"2021-05-02T03:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/?p=534"},"modified":"2021-05-01T20:15:27","modified_gmt":"2021-05-02T03:15:27","slug":"534","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/2021\/05\/01\/534\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Assessment is often a source of great stress and self-doubt for students. Unfortunately, assessment is often used as a motivator\/demotivator, punishment, or source of condemnation from teachers to their students, when in reality, assessment should be an informative, helpful, and descriptive process that allows students to progress in their learning. Feedback loops and formative assessment should direct students at the skills and learning targets they need to eventually meet summative assessment targets. My role as a teacher is to invite students into the assessment process, actively engage in the process in a descriptive way by giving students tips on how to develop their skills, and also use assessment information as something that informs my next instructional steps. Assessment is not an evaluation of personhood — it should be an informative cycle that guides next steps and honours each student\u2019s individual abilities along their learning journey.<\/span><\/p>\n

Artifact #1: <\/span>Star\/Step Feedback Single-Point Rubric<\/b><\/h3>\n

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In English 9, I regularly used single-point rubrics like the one pictured here to give students peer, self, and teacher feedback opportunities. Peer-feedback workshops on student essay plans was a helpful way for them to grapple with the learning targets for an essay outline and also offer their peers support. In a second round of feedback, students tool on the role of the teacher to give feedback on each others\u2019 full essays using the comments feature in Google Docs. Another way I used self assessment was after group discussions, for which we came up with a list of criteria for success as a class and conducted student-led discussion activities to practice them. The students completed a Google Form with the discussion criteria, identified a specific skill they were proud of achieving, and set a tangible goal for future discussions. As I designed activities to develop competencies in the unit, I wanted students to have a voice in the assessment process and in how they applied their learning to creative contexts. I wanted students to develop their metacognition and ownership of learning. And by doing that, I was making my role as the teacher more manageable and strategic, because they were partners in the assessment process.<\/span><\/p>\n

Artifact #2: <\/span>Final Unit 2 Presentations of Learning<\/b><\/h3>\n

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I designed my units with overarching guiding questions in the hopes that doing so would better honour each student\u2019s assessment journey and give them their own agency to find ways to answer the guiding questions for themselves. This Presentation of Learning performance assessment is an example of a culminating assessment that brings together multiple skills developed throughout a unit in response to a guiding question. My unit design was inspired by my English 9 School Associate and Laurel Pope\u2019s session on inclusive assessment practices at the BCTELA Pro-D Day in October 2020 (see <\/span>my live Tweet thread here<\/span><\/a>). Allowing students to explore one big idea or question, sets us up to ask the question: <\/span>How does my feedback allow S’s to move towards the final piece, to answer that question? <\/span><\/i>The learning journey is better honoured by thus giving us opportunities to triangulate assessment, accounting for all conversations, observations, and products identified along the way in the unit. By wrestling with learning targets through peer and self assessment tasks, students practiced the routine of reflecting on their own learning. Choosing which scaffolded avenue to take in some activities (straight ahead, curvy, mountainous) also allowed students to take ownership of their learning by setting their own goals based on what they are comfortable with. I wanted to eliminate the notion that I was the \u201call-knowing\u201d teacher who was the only voice in the assessment process. While it\u2019s true that the teacher has the last say in what grade gets recorded in CheckMyProgress, I wanted to hear back from students about where they were at in the learning journey.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Planning, instruction, and assessment practices are the \u201cnuts and bolts\u201d of the teaching profession, forming a centrepiece to what teachers are expected to do on a daily basis. Assessment can often be a lengthy, challenging, and controversial topic in education, yet throughout my practice I\u2019ve come to appreciate more compassion and empathy-driven approaches that engage student voice, focus on providing useful feedback, and inform next instructional steps. As I step into the teaching profession, my greatest curiosity for inquiry is how to visualize students\u2019 self-assessment results and actually bring in the student voice for their final assessment. One strategy I would like to experiment with is converting my various assessment strategies into the basis for \u201ccelebration of learning\u201d conferences with my students at the end of the course. With all the marks of various assignments (including formative and summative tasks), self-assessment tasks, and other activities, students would come with a grade proposal worded in the way, \u201cMs. Sommer, I think I deserve [this grade] because of [evidence 1], [evidence 2], and [evidence 3].\u201d Together, we would discuss the mark and come to an agreement about their final mark for the course. My hope is to try to integrate one form of this \u201cexit conference\u201d during my next longer-term teaching assignment. Whether that is to negotiate a grade for one unit or for the entire course, I would love to take my practice of giving students a voice in assessment a step further by sitting down for one-on-one conferences with them.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Assessment is often a source of great stress and self-doubt for students. Unfortunately, assessment is often used as a motivator\/demotivator, punishment, or source of condemnation from teachers to their students, when in reality, assessment should be an informative, helpful, and descriptive process that allows students to progress in their learning. Feedback loops and formative assessment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":925,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rs-5","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/925"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/mssommer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}