Assessment Disobedience

As global disquiet mounts about the way schools evaluate the education of young people, it is clear that the school system is too narrowly fixated on test results as a measure of achievement. Learning is a biological, evolutionary necessity for survival, as opposed to an institutionalised practice. Unlearning requires challenging our ingrained assumptions and sense of identity, around narrow notions of assessment. Small acts of pedagogical disobedience can support the professional academic freedom of teachers. The following eight small acts of assessment disobedience can help teachers to focus on learning, not doing school.

Ungrading as Assessment Disobedience

Obsessively grading and marking student work doesn’t make you a better teacher. Grading is the most expensive public relations exercise in history. It serves as a mask which teachers can hide behind. Any teacher knows that as soon as a grade appears on student work, all the student is interested in is how they compare with their peers. “What was the average?”, “Was my grade a good grade?” When student work is numerically graded, interest in learning diminishes and the thinking becomes more superficial. Why are we even talking about grading instead of feedback? Distinguish between task-related feedback and ego-related feedback.

Peer Feedback as Assessment Disobedience

Students can provide each other with very effective feedback, and this squarely places the responsibility for learning onto them. Students need to be explicitly taught how to give each other feedback and how to receive it. They tend to want to avoid offending their peers and their feedback can lack specificity. Simply pointing this out can significantly improve the quality of the feedback that they provide to each other. Students need to be taught to ask clarifying questions, to focus on what they value in each other’s work, and to suggest clear ways that work can be improved. It is part of human nature that we defend ourselves when we perceive a threat. Lowering the guard so that we learn to value and accept feedback from others takes self-awareness. Knowing how to provide others with appropriate feedback is a powerful skill to learn. ‘Austin’s butterfly’ demonstrates the power of developing a classroom culture of critique.

Questions as Assessment Disobedience

In the 1970s, Seymour Sarason noted:

Teachers ask between 45-120 questions per half-hour.
The same teachers estimate that they ask between 12-20 questions per half-hour.
Between 67 to 95% of all teacher questions require straight recall from the student.
Every half an hour two questions are typically asked by children in the class.
The greater the tendency for a teacher to ask straight recall questions, the fewer the questions initiated by children.
The more a teacher asks personally relevant questions, the more questions students ask in class.

Questions build classroom culture, linking students, teachers and content. All teachers would like to ask good questions, the sort that drive learning and stimulate deep thinking. When questioning swings away from the most prevalent lower procedural and review questions – towards the higher generative and facilitative and constructive questions that push student thinking – student learning improves. Given the importance of curiosity to learning, perhaps the only assessment we really need is to analyse the frequency and types of questions that students are asking in class. When students ask generative, facilitative, and constructive questions, learning improves.

Documentation as Assessment Disobedience

Documentation is a process of reciprocal learning and institutional memory. Reggio educators refer to documentation as “visible listening.” When we listen to in order to make student thinking visible, it is like putting a dipstick in to check the oil. We can immediately see what students do and do not understand, and it is a cue to what we need to do next. Documentation expert Mara Krechevsky calls assessment, “an act of love”.

Simple strategies for commencing the practice of documentation are:

Noticing moments when things are going poorly or well and stepping back to closely observe.
Taking a photograph of an especially powerful learning moment to revisit with students.
Jotting down a provocative or insightful quote from a student and sharing it with the class or writing it directly onto a laminated speech bubble.

Public Audience as Assessment Disobedience

Ron Berger writes about the importance of students producing beautiful work, “Students crank out endless final products every day and night. Teachers correct volumes of such low-quality work; it’s returned to the students and often tossed in the wastebasket. Little in it is memorable or significant, and little engenders personal or community pride.”

An authentic public audience is powerful for learners and it is built into project-based learning approaches, neatly captured in the film, Most Likely to Succeed. Technology now enables us to use the world as our refrigerator. A few years ago, my Grade 9 History class wrote stories about World War One for a kindergarten class in Australia’s Northern Territory, who then illustrated the stories, and we made it up into an audio e-book. My teenage students arrived early to class and stayed behind, because they wanted “to get it right for the little kids”.

Another form of public audience is a Presentation of Learning which involves students in presenting their learning to an audience, in order to demonstrate that they are ready to progress. Effective Presentations of Learning include both academic content and reflection on growth, and they can be significant rites of passage for students.

The walls of schools also send messages about what we value. In many schools, the only representations of learning made public are grades and marks. However, quantification is not the only way to share evidence of learning. Qualitative forms of sharing evidence like student work, photographs, and video are powerful ways to provide a more complete picture of both the process and product of learning. We publicly display what we value, and students pay attention to this.

Rubric Criteria as Assessment Disobedience

Assessment is usually something that is done to students. An empowering shift is to co-construct assessment rubric criteria with students. This puts assessment criteria into student-friendly language rather than teacher-designed robot-speak. Simple prompts for students might include columns for ‘Haves’ and ‘Amazing’ or for ‘Awesome’ and ‘Junk’. When combined with time to explore samples of exemplar work from previous years, students can end up doing much of the assessment process themselves. They learn what quality work looks like and they have input into designing how they will be assessed.

Reflective Conversations as Assessment Disobedience

The Latin root word for assessment is ‘assidere’, which means “to sit beside” (although in all honesty, from its early origins in Greek law courts, there was an element of judgement involved as well). Joe Bower was a leading light for ungrading in schools, arguing, “assessment is not a spreadsheet — it’s a conversation.” Individual Feedback Sessions and one on one conferencing center on discussions with students about their thinking, rather than lengthy written comments on their work that are often not read despite the hours put into them by teachers. Reflective conversations enhance student ownership of their learning, while teachers model the attitudes and abilities they want to see in their students and build stronger teacher-student relationships. This can be time-consuming, however it is possible to get through a whole regular class with speed coaching-style questions. I ask students to write responses to four questions and then bring their answers to me for a speed interview:

How is this class going?
What is your biggest challenge?
What do you want to get better at?
How can the teacher help?

It is an easy way to get a personalized snapshot of each student’s learning and for the teacher to know what to do next to move the learning forward.

Feedback to Teachers as Assessment Disobedience

Perhaps the best form of assessment is when it is from student to teacher, rather than from teacher to student. The greatest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, when teachers become students of their students. I can pretty much guarantee that your teaching will improve if you ask your students the following questions and then discuss their responses with them and act on their advice.