Tuesday, March 28, 2017
With Apologies to Shakespeare: A Reflection on Yancey (2009)
During the years I taught at the secondary level, I felt subjected to "the slings and arrows of outrageous assessment." Particularly as a teacher with a high percentage of at-risk students and students with special education IEPs, I viewed assessments designed by anyone outside my school system as, at best, inaccurate reflections and, at worst, unfair judgments. The Yancey article helps me view assessment with a lens wider than my teacher's desk, and the historical perspective she provides gives me a more positive and hopeful outlook on what is possible for assessment.
I first find Yancey's wave concept helpful as I can hold that timeline against that of my own educational experience. I remember filling in endless bubbles as a student in the 70's and early 80's and when both I and, as Yancey says, writing assessment was "young, complex, conflicted" (132). Even then I understood that those tests were not strongly connected to the "real work" my classmates and I did the rest of the time, and I see in Yancey's description that while this was in large part so, important knowledge grew out of that first, bubble-ridden stage (133).
The second wave is one I rode during my time as a secondary teacher; I remember endless sessions of multiple readings and holistic grading, and I remember the bitterness of finding a student into whom I had poured proverbial "blood, sweat, and tears" had written just a handful of sentences. I see now that those students likely realized the thoughts their teachers entertained: "[T]eachers saw the difference between what they taught in their classes--writing--and what was evaluated" (134). Though this realization is one Yancey attributes to the first wave of assessment, she also acknowledges waves as overlapping (134). I think part of that overlap was attitudinal. As I had experienced assessment as an "add on" when I was a student, and as a student teacher encountered nothing to counteract this experience, I likely did a poor job convincing my students of the importance of assessment. While the high school at which I most recently taught briefly joined the third wave by attempting student portfolios (138-141), the faculty quickly realized how unsustainable that practice was with a highly transient student population. Wherever assessment moves from this point, I see Yancey's assertion that all assessment "must be specific, purposeful, contextual, ethical" (146) as one that should guide all stakeholders.
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Ami, your experiences with assessment as a student mirror, I imagine, many of the rest of our student experiences. As a result, we carried these same assessment practices with us when we moved in front of the classroom. When I think about being taught assessment practices, I really can't recall any vivid workshops or coursework. As I wrote about in my blog post this week, the most influential part of my education which influences/directs how I assess student writing comes from my time as a writing center tutor—when I was reading and responding to student work on the daily. While I did not assign grades in my writing center work, I did begin to understand student progress, challenges, and performance in written work. I then adapted my tutoring techniques based on frequent interactions with the same students. The informal assessment I completed in these tutoring sessions informed me about how to better tutor students just as much as I was able to assess student progress. Similar to you, I see assessment needing to "guide all stakeholders." When administrators and teachers understand that assessment isn't just about students' performance, I *hope* we can begin to have a fourth wave of assessment which is much more meaningful to both students and teachers. I believe that we have moments of this throughout education; yet, the narrative of assessment as "bad" or "evil" holds strong for many in education.
ReplyDeleteAmi, I enjoyed your overview of the "behind the desk" perspective on this. When I was in my masters, I remember writing the quote you offered (134) several times, over and over, in a paper for my comp theory class about my own grading and assessment experiences. I'm honestly not sure that what we *wish* to teach can truly be assessed in any effective and formative way. And that's not to say we *aren't* teaching it--but the challenge, as ever, is to acknowledge how slippery a fish "learning writing" is once you get it in the boat.
ReplyDeleteFor me, a lot of my own answers to the assessment question are found in George Hillocks, Jr.'s various approaches, especially the sections on assessment in "Reflective Practice" and "Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching"--which effectively argues that no matter how we are trained, we each re-formulate our own conceptions of assessment that first time we put the proverbial red pen to paper.
In this way, I often wonder about how much we can move the "waves" of assessment beyond the personal scope. I have to think that each of us must move through our own waves, in sequence, until we swim out the other side.
-Alex
If we assume that assessment is a guide to all stakeholders, that would mean the university, the teacher, and the student must all be involved in the procedure. As instructors we often fail to include our students in the assessment practice. And I certainly know the excuses why we don't include them (because I use these excuses), in that you have to prepare in advance, the students don't always know what they need, and you have to establish uniform rubrics for grading to be fair across the board. In a perfect world, the students would be involved in their own assessment / grading.
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