Sometimes we hear education buzzwords and descriptions of practices, but don’t always understand “how” to engage in a particular practice. Given the work involved in teaching a classroom of students, it’s hard to find the mindspace to understand enough to engage in new ideas. I recently had a conversation with colleagues about the difference between differentiated, individualized, and personalized learning, which not only included discussion expanding our understanding of each idea, but also our wondering of how widely known these differences are, at our school in particular, and among educators in general. Here’s a place to start if you’d like to explore more yourself. Or, take “student-centered” for example. What does it really mean to be student-centered? To have a student-centered classroom, or approach? How do you ensure that’s what you’re actually doing in your classroom? How do you maximize your time, effort, and impact on student learning?
In my last post, I shared some thoughts on assessment, and in particular the summative assessment task’s role in defining the entire learning path for the student. If our assessments aren’t student centered, it will be difficult to find other opportunities to be student centered. So, how do you ensure that your assessments are indeed student centered assessments?
One possibility is to use some sort of guiding statements. As an internship activity for my M.Ed., I’ve proposed leading the creation and adoption of our school’s own Learner Centered Assessment Criteria.
By establishing, as a faculty, learner-centered assessment criteria, our teachers will have a agreed upon guidelines for developing assessment tasks that are learner centered. The criteria will define a vision for assessment in our school. In their creation teachers engage in discussion around assessment, and agree on what high quality assessment looks like. This will help teachers to more consistently develop engaging, authentic assessments that focus on student growth. We’ll have common language to engage in further understanding of what assessment should look like. This common approach will also support the development of common internal assessments, facilitating the work of grade level and subject area teams. Teaching teams can refer to the criteria when writing unit plans. The criteria will provide clear guidelines for assessment development. Using the assessment criteria will also help bring coherence to our school wide comprehensive assessment program.
So, what do you think? Is there value in this exercise for our school? Does this help get at the how? Does you school do something similar? If so, how do you incorporate the criteria into your practice? Do you refer to the criteria often? If you school doesn’t have specified assessment criteria, do you keep your own? If not, how do you ensure you are providing high quality assessment? What elements should be part of the criteria? What are the non negotiables, what must you have in student centered assessment? What are the pitfalls of student centered assessment to avoid?
