the journey is the reward

In class today, we discussed our individual experiences with assessment.  Though I didn’t speak in class, I thought I’d blog about my most recent experience with writing assessments.

Over the past year, our district has asked teachers to review and revise our writing curriculum.  We began by identifying our goals for the writing sequence, reading some position articles from professional associations, and examining some of the skills identified in the American Diploma Project.  A relatively small group of teachers then spent about four days over the summer identifying standards and sequencing them in a way that we felt better suited our goals and yet still aligned with the state standards our students are expected to meet.   Over the school year, we turned that sequence into a more detailed unit guide for the writing portion of our English curriculum by determining mastery points for each semester and accumulating resources and examples of best practices that would help teachers implement the curriculum.  This summer, we have begun working on the common assessments that the all teachers in the district will use to measure student progress toward these objectives.

Working on these assessments led this group of teachers (including me) into debating many aspects of assessment.  Some of the teachers wanted many common tests and wanted them to be administered on the same days across the district, while others wanted fewer common tests and wanted more freedom over when to incorporate them into their class plans.  We also debated whether or not EVERY standard had to be commonly assessed, that is, could we trust teachers to teach skills that wouldn’t be commonly assessed.  Over the course of these debates, we also looked at assessment for learning and assessment of learning as defined by Rick Stiggins.  Our adminstrative leader encouraged us to move away from the mainly summative testing we had been doing and toward improving our use of formative testing to provide students with timely, relevant feedback that may actually help them improve their writing skills before the summative essay at the end of each term.

The end result of this experience has left us with many compromises on both sides.  At the freshman level, we will now have four formative assessments (rubrics) that will be used prior to the summative essay rubric that will be used at the end of semester one.  Hopefully, these formative rubrics will be used FOR learning, as they’ve been designed.  These rubrics don’t have numbers attached (which was another huge debate), they have deadlines but not “administer on” dates, and they do not assess every standard in the writing curriculum.

While I see these rubrics as an improvement over our previous summative rubrics, I have some concerns over the implementation of them that will occur in the fall.

• Because there is an increase in common assessments, there will be resistance on the part of many of our teachers for that fact alone.  Many of our teachers see common assessments as essentially mistrustful of their professionalism and as a way to judge teachers, not assess student growth.
• Without numbers attached to the formative rubrics, how will that affect student motivation?  Will that lead to students and teachers to undervalue the formative assessments, and therefore not use them in a way that will really help students?  Will teachers put numbers on them to motivate students, but then turn them in to summative assessments?
• Not every skill that is assessed on the summative rubric is assessed on the formative rubrics.  Is this misleading for students?  Teachers must work in their own formative assessments (that are not common) to give students feedback on these skills.  If we don’t “force” teachers to do this through common assessments, will that happen?
• Conversing with Rita also led to me to realize that these formative rubrics are still leaving the kids out of the equation in terms of determining their own learning goals.  While the rubrics are meant to give them feedback, it is still feedback toward teacher/district/state determined goals, not student goals.

Working on this committee has been frustrating because we not only debated issues that needed debate, we also debated over whether the standards would be typed in capitals, bolded, or italicized and whether we should use calibri or times new roman font.  In any case, it was an interesting experience, and I am glad I participated.