Tag Archives: Assessments

Fun and Games

A few days ago, I was bemoaning the existence of exams, (Glad to see I am not alone in my dislike of exams by the way.) when Adrienne, bless her heart, said something like:

Reality is not all fun and games.

The conversation continued with a bit more detail–about the need for balance of assessments, the value in creating timed conditions for students to illustrate learning as a way to deal with future anxiety and stress, so on and so on. It was a great chat as usual, but I won’t say much more about it here, in case I misquote what was said. The gist of it, at least for me, the part that stuck in my head, was the quote from above: Reality is not all #funandgames.

My first reaction, the one that sprung from my gut was, “Sure it is.” Or “It should be!” or “You wouldn’t say that to a six year old.” At which point, I remembered that I have a six year old at home, and I often catch myself saying things like Reality is not all #funandgames to her all the time! Reality check. Damn!

It is okay to make a huge mess, but we have to cleanup afterward.

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, so we can do the things we want later.

There is time for play, but there is also time to pay attention and work hard.

You get the point. I get the point of balance and hard work. I have swallowed the bitter pill of reality my fair share of times. I have sat through meetings. I have wallowed in bureaucracy. I have given exams; I have taken exams. I get it–life can suck, but we learn from it. We just have to do it.

We all know that as mature, competent, “successful” adults we need to balance our fun and work. We know, usually, when to suck it up and just do it, so we can kick back and enjoy other things. We have learned, through years of schooling and work and university and exams and tax papers and bank accounts and DMV lines that reality is not all fun and games. We have learned to navigate this reality, and for better or worse we function in it. We thrive in it even. But why do we compare learning with reality? With work? With chores? Why does learning become another chore we must slog through to get to the good stuff? Why can’t it be the good stuff? What if we created schools that exuded the idea that Learning is all fun and games and kept reality out of it all together? I know, I know balance, quantifiable results, assessments of learning, test scores, GPAs, university, back to reality!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by rolfekolbe

I guess what I am grappling with is–How successful are we as schools, teachers, and parents at instilling this balance in the people with which we interact? We can all litter our walls with Learner Profile posters and scream till our voices are hoarse about balance, but do we practice what we preach? For me, school has always been a place where Reality is not all #funandgames, and I have always wanted it to be Learning is all #funandgames. I hope I have been clear that I understand the value of both, but I think schools spend more time preparing students for a reality of exams and bureaucracy and work and taxes and things we dread, than inspiring in them a love of life and learning and creativity and art and fun. Not all schools, obviously. And yes, of course schools are doing amazing things like service learning, outdoor ed, drama, art and music programs, sports and many other things, but for some reason in the end, it all comes down to grades, achievement, scores, exams- preparation for Reality. We use words like rigor and excellence and college entrance to convince ourselves and our students that they need this, but do they really?

Can’t we teach students the value of hard work and learning and education free from the grip of academic reality? Can’t we focus on learning and fun and games and leave reality on hold for awhile, because let’s admit it, they will be dealing with it soon enough and for long enough. I think children who are confident, passionate and creative do not need exams to show understanding; they usually succeed anyway. But too often, we use academic rigor as the most important criteria for learning and success, and this leaves many children behind. I know, because I was one of them. I never took the game of school seriously. Yes, I took the exams, I played my part. Some I passed, some I failed. In the end I got a 3. something from some Ivy League school, but that was reality and it was not fun for sure. I played the game to get the degree, and now have over $30,000 of debt to show for it. The learning, the who I am, has always been from from doing. It was all fun and it still is.

How long before we can look back on this system of preparatory education and create institutions where students are not preparing for a reality they find boring and riddled with anxiety? A place where they are not taking exams, but traveling, building, creating, living. Where in short they are having fun and playing games, but at the same time working hard and learning? I want a new concept of school. I think this new school needs more fun and games and less exams.

How do you find this balance in your classroom, in your school? Am I wrong in devaluing academic rigor and examinations? Why do you find it valuable? Curious to hear your thoughts on any of my ramblings. Sorry it took me a while to find my point. Good thing this wasn’t some English exam, I would most likely have scored low for not having a clear thesis and topic sentences.

People say I’m lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well, they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me

When I tell them that I’m doing fine
Watching shadows on the wall
Don’t you miss the big time, boy?
You’re no longer on the ball

I’m just sitting here
Watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll…

John Lennon

Deflated

23 Replies

I should be writing report card comments. I should be correcting, marking, assessing, evaluating, judging (I don’t even know the verb anymore) summative assessments, but to be honest, those teacherly duties kicked my butt today, and I need a break to re-charge, re-evaluate what it is I do and why I do it.

Report Card Comments- Feel a bit outdated? No? Here we are talking about student empowerment, 21st century learning, constructivist pedagogy, student centered inquiry based learning, enhanced with the power of collaborative technologies, but we still spend countless hours and energy at the end of every term dictating our profound wisdom and expertise about who students are, what and how they learn in 500 words or less. Seems to me that end-of-term report card comments are a carry-over from a dying era. Relics of a time when the teacher was the all-knowing power tripping ego holding all the cards.

I am bitter. Maybe I don’t know how to write comments. Maybe I don’t know who they are for or what purpose they are meant to serve. Maybe I am writing this post so you can help me. Just seems to me that very little can be accomplished by a few lines at the end of a term that could possibly give anyone any indication of the magic that happens in a classroom on a daily basis. Even as a parent, I am seldom enlightened to anything new through report card comments. I can read the angst and pain through every line. What is it I want? I want to know what Kaia does every day. I want to know what makes her happy. What excites her? What kinds of questions does she ask? How I can expand her learning at home? Can I write reports like that for grade 10 MYP students? Do I know them well enough? Do I know what excites them? All I do is say that they are strong writers who may need some help with basic grammatical structures. Perhaps they should speak up more in class! What parents doesn’t know this about their kid? Are these comments useful to anyone? Why do we write them then?

Okay, enough whining! What is my solution? I would rather give snippets of comments throughout the year, share rubrics with parents as units are completed, give non-critical feedback on blog posts, and critical feedback on shared rubrics through google-docs. I would rather have students assess themselves and write their own reports. (Something I have actually done this year. I have had all my students write their own reports in the third person, and I am simply looking them over and checking for agreement of what they say. They are more often too hard on themselves.) I want to share videos about what we do in class and produce content that is public and shareable for parents to see for themselves. I want to Tweet out updates of inquiry in class and have parents interact with their kids and our content while we are learning, not after it is done. Is this too idealistic? Do parents want to be this involved? Can they be? Do I have the time to do all of this? I am lost.

Honestly, I don’t have a solution. That is why I am writing tonight. What do you do? How do you make reports meaningful for parents, students, for yourself? How can we bring reporting to the 21st century? Does it still play a role in education? I suppose this is a larger question having to do with assessment. All I know is that I feel very deflated today. I know my kids have done some amazing things this term, and also I know we have stumbled and come up short. I am certain we have learned a lot, but somewhere in the maze of assessment criteria, grades, reporting, comments, feedback it has all become a murky mess. If I cannot point to a rubric, leave a comment on a report card to prove what kids have learned, have they learned anything?

Back to marking some assessments and report card comments…

Rome:Student Created Assessments

1 Reply

My seventh grade students have at long last finished their final assessments on Rome, and upon reflection, I see that it was quite successful. I am currently experimenting with new methods of designing assessments. In an effort to make my assessments more student-based, I am handing the reins of what the final assessment will look like over to the students themselves. In essence, I am asking the students to create their own individual assessments and the rubrics by which they will grade themselves. My role is to simply give them the following three components: the essential question as laid out by my team and documented in our curriculum; the Standards and Benchmarks I am expected to assess; and a list of verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The object was for the students to design and implement a project that would demonstrate their understanding of this essential question-

1. What are the lessons from the Roman Empire and have we learned from them?

While also illustrating mastery or at least proficiency in the following benchmarks:

1. Use cause and effect to identify patterns of change.
2. Demonstrate how knowledge of the past can help explain current events.
3. Examine how different types of government gain, use, and justify power.
4. Use appropriate sources and tools to create, change, and understand information.
5. Describe ways that human events have influenced, and been influenced by, physical and human geographic conditions.
6. Can identify and clarify a problem or issue
7. Can construct, support and begins to evaluate arguments

After spending time in class discussing and defining the list of skills above and translating them into “student friendly” language, the students where asked to use Bloom’s Taxonomy to lay out a list of seven steps they would have to complete in order to prove understanding of each benchmark.

Example of final product: One of the final products the students came up with was to organize and plan a debate discussing the positive and negative impacts slavery had on the Roman Empire and connect some of those arguments to the use of slavery today.

Example of instructions:

1. Use cause and effect to identify patterns of change. Argue and Defend whether the slave trade had a negative or positive impact on Rome
2. Demonstrate how knowledge of the past can help explain current events. Compare and Contrast slavery form the past and slavery today.
3. Examine how different types of government gain, use, and justify power. Restate four ways the slaves affected government authority and power.
4. Use appropriate sources and tools to create, change, and understand information. Identify sources and list them in a bibliography
5. Describe ways that human events have influenced, and been influenced by, physical and human geographic conditions. Indicate how the expanding geography of Rome increased the need for slavery.
6. Can identify and clarify a problem or issue. Discuss five ways the growth of slavery was a problem for the Plebeians and Patricians.
7. Can construct, support and begins to evaluate arguments. Argue negative and positive factors of the statement above.

After each group had designed a project complete with instructions and rubrics, they exchanged the project with another group and completed the new project. The group who had originally designed the project would than grade it based on the rubric they created. Overall, I think the students learned more by designing the projects than actually doing them.

Here is a list of all the projects:

Plan and organize a debate that argues about the positive and negative impacts slavery had on Rome and the lessons you have learned from them.
Compose a song that shows what lessons were learned from the spread of the Roman Empire and what we learned from them.
Create a Rap song about the lessons you have learned from Roman Laws.
Create a puppet show that explains the lessons about Roman daily life and whether or not we have learned anything from them.
Perform a skit which dramatizes how religion was used in Rome to consolidate power and whether that is being done today.

All of these projects were conceived and implement by students. I simply guided them on their journeys.

Labor Art

2 Replies

The Labor Art project was created after our eighth grade students finished reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We wanted the students to use art, in this case poetry and songwriting to: raise awareness, inform the public, and inspire action on social issues. We wanted them to focus on the discrepancy between the haves and the have nots. We wanted them to take a close look at labor and class. Who builds the building we inhabit? Who profits? Who manufactures our goods? Who sews our clothes?

After doing research on global and local labor laws, human rights and working conditions the students will write a song or poem addressing the information they discovered. They will present these works live to the class and hopefully record a podcast for presentation on the wiki page. Although this project appears to be a writing assignment, the students are actually being assessed on their ability to use resources, sort information, and determine appropriateness of both sources and information.

The Benchmarks being assessed during the research phase are as follows:

• Use a variety of resource materials to gather information for a research topic
• Organize information and ideas from multiple sources in systematic ways
• Determine appropriateness of an information source for a research topic

1. We wanted the students themselves to prove that they have understood or completed each benchmark, so we asked them to use the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy below to explain how they could show evidence that they could:

Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state.

Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate,

Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.

Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.

Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write.

Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.

They were to make a series of instructions that they would carry out using the verbs form above. See student examples here at our wiki. We will also assess one writing and one presentation benchmark to be mentioned later.

The students were also asked to brainstorm essential questions they wanted to answer through their research. We again used Bloom’s Taxonomy to make sure they were critically looking at this entire process.

1. How effective are the questions you are trying to answer? Take a look at the list of questions you have brainstormed.

• Put them in order of most important to you to least.
• Label the questions using labels like political, class, personal etc…
• Review your list and identify five questions you would like to answer
• Explain why you think the answers to these questions will make for good material for a poem.

We are now starting our research and thinking about our poems. I have also been sharing a song or two which deals with social issues with them everyday. We have listened to Bob Dyaln, Bob Marley, and Rage Against the Machine so far.

Please comment on this blog post if you or your students have any insight or information about class and labor in your community that they can share with us. Perhaps we can invite them to edit our wiki with first hand accounts, pictures, or helpful websites . Maybe we can arrange a skype forum to discuss some of these issues.

I will be out of town for a week starting Thursday, but I am keen to involve some kind of collaboration when we get back.