Alien Pedagogy

My understanding is that formative assessment tasks should not be for marks since it penalizes students for learning slowly, rather than rewarding them for learning. However, I’ve always attached some grade to formative tasks, fearful that students wouldn’t complete the assignment if I didn’t attach a grade to it.

In summer school, I decided to do formative assessment. I’m glad I did.

For one thing, the students often did pick up skills slowly. So having more than one opportunity to demonstrate skill and receive feedback before assessment was really helpful. So when students started getting high grades, they were quite surprised that their learning had been recognized.

I realized that formative assessment should have real feedback — perhaps more detailed than summative feedback. This struck me as counter-intuitive at first — shouldn’t the graded assessment have more feedback? However, if the graded assessment is the last time that we assess that skill then the time that the student is given to learn comes from the formative assignments.

I realized that formative assessment should be recorded. This fall, I’ll add formative assessment tasks to my gradebook but with a 0% weighting. In this way, it is transparent that students are learning, or that they’re not. I think it has additional benefits, including: increased student motivation, it imposes UBD planning on the teacher’s unit plan, and it provides diagnostic data for the learning community.

Coming to this point, I’m quite embarrassed that I didn’t get here sooner. If the last two years counted for marks, I suppose my teacher grade would take a hit because of it.

Currently, my gradebook is organized into these sections:

• Tests
• Exam
• Assignments
• Projects
• Participation

This strikes me as an arbitrary way to report student achievement as it has nothing to do with student objectives.

I’d prefer to organize the grading in this way:

• Writing
• Reading
• Speaking
• Listening
• Viewing
• Representing

This way, when students come to ask me how they can improve their grade, I can say “Work on your writing skills” rather than “looks like you’re having difficulty with tests.” While it doesn’t keep students from prioritizing grades over learning, it does limit the gap between grades and learning.

The only question it leaves with me is how should the six skill areas of English be broken into fractions?

For a long time, I’ve organized tests like this:

• Section One: Multiple Choice
• Section Two: Short Answer
• Section Three: Long Answer

I’ve come to view this as an arbitrary form of organization. The data that each section reveals has nothing to do with the standards of our curriculum.

So I’ve started to adopt a system more like this:

• Section One: Knowledge
• Section Two: Analysis of Character
• Section Three: Analysis of Theme

There are a variety of question types in each section.

I’ve begun spring break reviewing my daily lesson plans to see how they align with UBD. It’s been a surprisingly effective form of self assessment.

Changing the Lesson Plans:

To begin, our department records lesson plans (from top to bottom like a graphic organizer) like this:

• Topic
• Objective
• Activities
• Assessment
• Resources
• Reflection

I’ve switched my daily lesson plans to this format:

• Objective
• Assessment
• Activities

My resources are now listed in parentheses in the activities. They can be found on Rubicon (our curriculum database) and Moodle. I have decided to move towards more unit reflection in my records.

Reflection:

I’ve felt quite pleased with this year’s lesson planning. However, this process has helped me to realize that some of my lessons are not as direct as I had thought. Though it may seem like a trivial change, moving the asssessment task above the lesson activities really makes it obvious when my formative assessment could have more effectively connected my summative assessment and my lesson activities.

How do you record and review your instruction?

William and Ochan Powell’s presentation wasn’t the first time that I’ve studied differentiation, validity, understanding by design, or assessment for learning. Nevertheless, their delivery was by far the best I’ve encountered.

Order of Events:

The Powells began with paired discussion about assumptions we make about teaching, which was effective because few concepts are as poorly understood as differentiation. Moreover, many teachers seem even afraid to discuss it (other teachers are eager to brag about it, which actually isn’t productive in these sessions), so the one:one approach was effective (and in line with think, pair, share).

We made a list of assumptions with brief bursts of discussion. We concluded that there’s a difference of purpose between assessment and grades (Assessment is required for learning. Grading is not necessary for learning).

That grading is so often given priority over assessment / feedback indicates a significant problem in our educational system, it reveals that all stakeholders too often focus on rating rather than learning.

From here, they went on to give six recommendations via power point. You can download their recommendations here.

In Review:

• What stands out about this style of presenting is its non-confrontational approach. All too often, presentations begin by outlining what should NOT be done. The audience is invited to engage in two minutes hate. No one felt threatened during the Powell presentation and everyone left with an inspired determination to integrate their “recommendations” (rather than orders, which I thought was a very clever use of word choice).
• That the Powells have delivered this presentation more than once was apparent. However, rather than being impatient or tired, they consistently came across as professionals. I loved the way they looked after each other when teacher comments became a little stressed.
• Their advocacy of “professional judgment” was something I haven’t considered.
• The idea of reporting on “effort, timely completion of work, class participation, attendance, attitude, homework, behavior” without having these things affect the student’s grade was excellent. I also liked how they suggested that these things are more important for succeeding in life than grades but that they still had no business being on an academic rubric (they could be an a study skills rubric that would be listed on a report card without affecting student GPA).

Again, I have studied these concepts before but it’s very useful for all of us to re-attend sessions on these concepts. This style of teaching represents a sea change in our reporting systems and even purpose. It’s very easy to veer away from teaching that is in line with differentiation, validity, understanding by design, or assessment for learning.

I left feeling a sense of pedagogical oneness — a Jedi-like focus.