Assessment has become the key phrase in education as of late. The general idea behind it is sensible: how do you know that students are learning, and how do you know that they way you are teaching is aiding vs. inhibiting that learning? Of course as with all things that force you to look at yourself in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, it involves a ton of resistance and paperwork. Honestly my resistance is largely to the paperwork. I am not good at it. I do not want to get better at it. I do not want to waste my life doing it. There is no need for TPS reports in my reality. Or fax machines. Regardless, the era of assessment is upon us, and the people in charge are exactly the people who find immense joy in this stuff but act like its a chore because they want to make sure they’re still one of the cool kids.
Assessment at my school basically breaks down to measuring one specific outcome through an assignment (which will grow to multiple outcomes through multiple assignments and make me groan and quit). So, we are supposed to take an assignment, view it through a shared rubric, write down some numbers and move on. Except we aren’t supposed to move on. We have to talk about it and analyze it and share it in a circle, passing the talking stick amongst each other until we’ve all stated how we can grow. This is a universal model of reflection on assessment and I’m not a fan. I suppose I’m more of a hermit in my assessment. I want to see how the students did, think about what I did, and fix it. In my dark office. Alone.
I don’t want people telling me how to teach. My preference is to get a bunch of input and see a number of people teach and pick and choose the stuff I like and apply that. This is the model I tried to bring to the college, but this isn’t the model that stuck.
So here we are.