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.

http://www.onlinemet.com/

This website is an online edition of a quarterly journal. The articles are only available to subscribers, but based on the list of articles in the current addition, it is a periodical I would be interested in having access to. There are sections on technology, reading, writing, and language. There is also a section for reviews of books, something I think would be really helpful in finding new books for a curriculum.

http://www.cambridgeenglishteacher.org/

This is another service you can pay for which seems like it could be very helpful. It seems like the site places an emphasis on fostering discussion between its members as well as providing resources for the classroom. The news article on the service (http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/home/news/article/item6869146/?site_locale=ar_TN) says that it is “an online environment that offers teachers the opportunity to become part of a community of peers across the world, undertaking flexible professional development courses and building an online presence that showcases their careers to date. 

 The site also allows members to interact with fellow teachers, the authors who produce the materials they use in the classroom, and other leading names in the world of global English language teaching.”. You can buy the courses individually and get a discounted price for being a member. I think its a cool idea to make professional development accessible and organized. I wonder whether or not schools in the US would support their teachers taking these classes designed in the UK. Regardless, it is an interesting site to explore even if you can’t access everything without paying to be a member.

Kevin and I have been diligently taking clips off of youtube and collecting them to put into our final video. The process has taken a lot longer than we wanted though, so I’m starting to get worried that we won’t be able to finish on time. Last week, though, Kevin was clearly getting more excited about our final product, and he had a lot of creative ideas about coordinating our footage with the music he chose. Hopefully this week we’ll make serious progress and we can start familiarizing ourselves with the video editing program we’re going to use to make our final project.

Triplett’s article on struggling readers seemed, to me, to be stating the obvious. When teachers establish personal relationships with their students, the students are more likely to engage. When a student feels like they have agency in the classroom and some level of control over the texts they are reading and using, they are more likely to have a positive, productive school experience. The fact that this article was published, however, made me think that these ideas, ones that I take for granted, might not be valued by many teachers. It seems like teachers often end up categorized as that friendly teacher who pals around with kids, doesn’t have high expectations for them, and doesn’t really challenge them, or they get categorized as the demanding teacher with high expectations who doesn’t foster personal relationships with students, wanting to be their teacher more than their friend. In my fieldwork at the high school and middle school, the teachers that kids liked tended to be less demanding, while the teachers they didn’t like were the ones that had high expectations, but little empathy for their students. I hope to avoid falling into either category. I think that students can enjoy being in class and have positive relationships with their teachers even when the teacher is demanding. Making school easy can win over students, but so can making school engaging.

One thing I found really interesting in the struggling readers article was Mitchell’s perception of his teachers as not enjoying teaching. I had never really thought about this. If a teacher clearly doesn’t want to be in the classroom, how can they expect the students to want to be there either? Looking back on my own experience, the teachers that I liked the most and from whom I think I learned the most were always engaged and excited to be in the classroom. The article made me think about first impressions both at the beginning of the year and at the start of every class. When I have a class of my own, I want to use my body language and energy level to immediately communicate to my students that I am excited to be there. I want to treat school like something interesting and exciting that we all get to do together instead of treating it like a chore we all have to deal with. In my fieldwork, a lot of the teachers took the attitude of, “Well we’re both stuck here. I don’t want to do this just as badly as you don’t want to do this. Don’t be mad at me, I hate this too.” While this definitely had a positive impact on how the students treated the teacher, it also made the entirety of school a chore, and nobody likes doing chores. Commiserating with students can be helpful sometimes, but I think empathizing is more effective. Instead of saying “this sucks for everyone”, I think it would be more productive to say, “I understand why you’re upset/struggling/angry, what can we do to make this more positive?”

All of this might seem really simple or overly optimistic, but I think that the little things like body language and a positive attitude, when communicated genuinely, can be really impactful.

This week we found some really good goals and really good saves from FIFA to include in our video. We watched the long Madden highlights video and marked the times of the clips that we thought would work in our video. Over the next couple of weeks, Kevin is going to get some footage off of his own PS3 for us to use.

Next time we meet we’ll post some of the videos Kevin films of himself playing, and hopefully some video of his trip to visit his brother in Missouri.

Time to go play some video games.

Reading Singer’s and Shagoury’s piece on Stirring Up Justice, I was struck by how big of a difference it can make when a teacher establishes a very clear purpose for student writing. Instead of asking students to write pieces exclusively for the teacher to read, judge, and grade, the students were aware from the beginning that they were creating something for a larger audience. More than that, they were creating something with the specific goal: “to teach others about how to make positive change in their area of concern” (330). When a student writes an assignment and knows that their sole audience is their teacher, I think the process of writing can too easily become centered around pleasing the teacher or writing what the teacher wants to hear. There isn’t a clearly defined goal or purpose, other than “get a good grade” or “impress the teacher” or “write well”. In expanding the audience for what students are working on, it opens up space to consider a wider array of purposes for writing. I love the idea of having students work towards teaching their peers and communities. Asking students to move beyond content absorption into critical thinking and communication helps get students invested in their own work, and the work of the other students in the class.

The teacher in the article also made an effort to give the students an audience for their work by starting the year with blank walls and bulletin boards and filling them with student work as the year went on. The spaces on classroom walls are often filled with famous quotes, or exceptional work from past students. Putting student work in these locations that students associate with knowledge, learning, and wisdom can, I think, be really empowering. Having current student work dominate the walls of the classroom embodies the idea that the classroom is theirs, and reenforces the idea that it is their perspectives that matter most in the class. It also makes literal and tangible to concept of building a classroom environment. The students literally create their own classroom space. I also love that this allows for a fresh start to each year. I think it would help me go into every year with an open mind, ready to work with new students and not just continue to do what worked with students in the past.