The chapter we read by Brenner Pearson and Rief on assessment was full of new perspectives I hadn’t thought of. My favorite move they make is to think of the different audiences served by different assessments. In the past, when I would think about designing assessments, I wanted my assessments to serve everyone’s purposes. I wanted them to be able to tell the student where they were, tell me where the student was, tell the parents how their child was doing, and tell the administration and the public that the kids were succeeding. Thinking of them each as different “clients” with different specific things they are looking for in assessment can, I think, be really useful. Moving forward, I want to design assessments with an awareness of who they are intended for. When I need to reassure the administration, I can use assessments that show how prepared my students are for state testing. For the students, I can use assessments that are focused on their personal growth, letting them know the progress they have made and what the next steps are. For myself, I can use assessments that focus on growth, but also assessments that give me an idea of where my students are in relation to each other. Having these different audiences and different purposes removes the stress of designing one assessment to satisfy everyone, an impossible goal due to the conflicting messages Kylene, Bob, and Linda outlined in the first part of the chapter.

I felt validated when I read the section on how good curriculum and good teaching practice lead to higher test scores without necessarily spending a lot of time on rigid test preparation. Teaching students how to write for one specific audience (the test graders) without making them aware of writing for different audiences severely restricts the variety and quality of their writing. If I can teach my kids about audience, and how different situations require different styles of writing, then when it comes time for the test they will be able to identify precisely what audience they are writing for and be able to write effectively. Even though I am primarily interested in private schools right now, I am excited to get a chance to work in a public school and try my hand at navigating the test-prep game. I do believe that, if a study were done, it would confirm what the authors and myself believe about good teaching leading to good test scores. The problem, as they point out, is that these studies aren’t being done right now.

The biggest challenge raised in the chapter, for me, was how to use old assessment standards to gauge learning and progress in new medias. Standards, as they are currently used in public school, are conducive to rubrics. With specific, state mandated goals, it seems appropriate to assess those goals on a grid, with specific and clear expectations. Rubrics, though, are inherently limited. I loved the quote in the chapter, “If we already know what we’re looking for, and look only for that, we might not see other evidence of learning”. I totally agree with what they’re saying, but the problem is that if we AREN’T clear about what we’re looking for beforehand, then the students will have no idea what standards they are being judged on. This is another time that I think modelling can be helpful. If we show students what good work looks like and sounds like, and show them what unsatisfactory work looks like and sounds like (as well as giving examples in the middle) then, without creating a strict formulaic rubric we can give students clear guidance regarding what is expected of them without putting ourselves in a situation where we might miss signs of progress and learning that we weren’t expecting or hadn’t encountered in the past.

The biggest challenge we face in moving to this new, more flexible and responsive style of assessment is that it requires a lot of trust in the teachers. Without a rubric to indicate the universal standards and expectations, it would be easy for teachers to be unfair in their assessments. Do we give the best grades to those who have the best final product? Those who tried the hardest? Those who have shown the most progress? I image that parents in particular would get all in a tizzy over why their child got a worse score than another when their final product is clearly superior (as every parent thinks of everything their kid does…). Because a system of more flexible assessment might make the assessment process less transparent and obvious to the parents and administration (who wouldn’t be in class when you illuminate the standards to the students), those outside of the classroom would have to really trust the teachers and believe that they were doing good work and that their child was learning. Right now, I don’t think the general public has that trust in teachers. In my experience at PHS and PMS, as well as my experience in my own town, people are generally pretty wary of teachers and require excessive proof that the school isn’t wasting kids time. I don’t know how we reverse this culture of distrust, but I can already tell that when I am ultimately in a position where I have to deal with it, it will likely be incredibly frustrating.