One of my all time favourite books is 'The Little Prince,' by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and if there is one book that I would frame the ecology of quality teaching and learning around, it would be that one. So I will. Here is one on assessment.
We were halfway through a science inquiry looking at animal characteristics, habitats and the inquiry provocation was "Should animals be kept in zoos?" It was time to apply our learning and create solutions, at which point in a guided inquiry we discussed what they wanted to do and learn more about. They wanted to learn more about different endangered animals and design an enclosure that would best meet their needs. They also wanted to create models because they'd seen the ones that my previous year group had made. So in heterogeneous learning groups, they adopted an endangered animal, researched, wrote reports, designed and made their enclosures. I showed them how to make mock relief structures and off they went.
The deal was that we would spend the first hour of the day making the models so they would dry by our window sills during our cooler winter days. The kids (7-8-year-olds) were in charge of setting up and packing up the copious ensuing creative mess so we could then do the other learning stuff.
Every morning they would come in before school and set everything up so no time was wasted getting started. Tables covered, displays carefully arranged at the tables, discussions about what they needed to do next and who was doing what would happen the minute they set foot in the door. By roll time they would be sitting like coiled springs with their art shirts on ready to start.
For two weeks in the morning, I roamed the room at first feeling fully redundant and then realising one very important truth: children love learning, and it is only the barriers that I create that hinder them. At that time they had no barriers; they had agency and couldn't wait to learn, think, measure, read, write, discuss, create, and make every day. Learning had meaning for them.
There is a lot of discussion and debate about student disengagement and how to overcome it through personalised learning, yet unless learning becomes a meaningful collaboration between teacher and student all that we produce is either compliance and replication or disengagement. Trust is one of the requisites for effective collaboration, and students trust us to care about what happens in the classroom.
How do we reciprocate that trust? Assessment. If we pare back all that drives teaching and learning, then assessment is at the core. Why? Because it can prove progress and level of mastery. It proves that learning has occurred and so teaching has been successful. It is how we communicate success to students, to each other, to ourselves. Assessment is our roadmap for learning.
If at this point dear reader, you are thinking about at all the negatives of assessment, I alert you to the fact that it is because the assessment system you may have had as a learner or currently have to administer is toxic. It doesn't have to be.
My challenge is to find the well. Let's take a walk.
Assessment lays at the very foundation for schooling, and so it behooves us to consider very, very carefully the implications of why, how and what we assess. And I don't just mean the impact on students. The impact of assessment permeates teachers' belief about what learning is and how we measure our own efficacy. Assessment is also used as a punitive tool to compare teachers and schools. I have seen how assessment can both grow a collaborative partnership between teachers and students (and parents) or paralyse teachers who become trapped in product-based dogma.
So assessment is a way of thinking and acting; of measuring success for ourselves and our students. But we don't often ask students to assess our teaching, our impact. We create ways to measure their performance and base this as a guide for ours, but then, how do we know that we are removing any barriers that could hinder students showing us what they're capable of doing?
I've found that when I create collaborative assessment practices my teaching becomes more precise and better tailored to students' needs. This is a work in progress and began when I decided to hack the classroom with my first junior class (6-year-olds). I asked them to assess our learning environment, our systems and suggest ways to improve it. A new chapter of collaborative teaching opened: collaboration with students. I blogged about this here.
Assessment has been shaped into a meritocratic or hegemonic cultural tool. I blogged about previously here, and looking into the work of Dr. Ann Milne is well worth it.
Assessment can also shape education as a trust-based collaborative environment. This blog post by Jesse Stommel on collaborative assessment is also well worth reading.
This year my journey is inquiring into how to best use feedback as a formative assessment tool for students and by students in writing.
How often do we give feedback at the end of learning? How useful is that? I was grappling with the fact that students do better with 'in-time' feedback that can be used and acted upon during the learning process. This is hard to do with a large group. But why did I feel that I was the only one capable of giving useful feedback to act on? Could growing students' agency to give and receive feedback as formative assessment create a more effective way to develop writing skills?
How might I create the conditions for students to drive the assessment? We're going to journey and look for that well, together. Here is my starting framework.
Assessment, in all it's myriad of forms, is the soil upon which the ecology of learning sustains itself, and it can be a tool that grows a love of learning and nourishes new clear and sparkling learning possibilities.
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