blog of proximal development

Cross-Posted to GETIdeas.org

A few years ago, after facilitating a session on assessment in the 21st-century classroom, I was approached by one of the workshop participants and asked what initially prompted me to start reconfiguring my classroom practice and my approach to classroom assessment. I said: “I asked myself a few basic questions: What do I want my students to be now and when they’re older? What skills do I want them to have? Who do I want them to be as human beings?”

“What was your answer?” She asked.

I found the answer to my questions in an early childhood education curriculum and policy document, titled Te Whariki, developed by the government of New Zealand. It’s a bicultural and bilingual document (English and Maori) founded on the following aspirations for children:

… to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.

That sentence captures what I hope my students will and have become. It drives my classroom practice, my approach to student engagement, and my assessment practices. It now also powers my understanding of teacher development and my research in this field. Why? Because it focuses on things that are important to me as an educator:

• Competent and confident learners and communicators
• Healthy in mind, body and spirit
• Sense of belonging
• Valued contribution to society

These are key to my understanding of education – its role in our lives and its transformative power. The passage from Te Whariki is a maxim I use regularly to guide my classroom practice and my work with teachers around the world. It is the lens through which I view education and teacher development. I believe every teacher needs to have such a set of guiding principles that helps us overcome challenges, stay focused and committed, and steer clear of distractions. Above all, that passage from Te Whariki that I selected as my professional mantra guides my views on assessment – once I defined the purpose of education in my classroom I was able to best decide on the tools and activities needed to ensure that the children get there.

And that is where another element of the Te Whariki approach comes in, an element that I have found to be key in helping me re-think assessment and student engagement and support strategies: It is known as Learning Stories (Carr, 2001). Although used almost exclusively in early childhood education, it has played an important role in my professional development and in helping me learn how to best support young learners in middle school and high school classrooms. Learning Stories is an alternative approach that

… involves observations in everyday settings aimed at providing a cumulative series of qualitative snapshots or written vignettes of individual children displaying one or more of the five target domains of learning dispositions. These learning dispositions are based on the [curriculum] strands of Te Whariki: Mana Atua (well-being); Mana Whenua (belonging); Mana Reo (communication); Mana Tangata (contribution); and Mana Aoturoa (exploration) (Rameka, 2007, p.132).

Learning stories are about documenting, through narratives, what children can do and what they are learning. They represent learning as essentially a dynamic, evolving, and ongoing process. They do not reduce learning to a score that children get at the end of the unit or semester … or a level that defines them as they start a new school year, with a new teacher. As opposed to our well-established modernist approaches to assessment, Learning Stories do not highlight deficiencies, weaknesses, or mistakes. They recognize that each child is a unique individual who interacts with the world around her and learns differently, through a process that is uniquely her own. Learning Stories view learning as a holistic endeavour, not a collection of subjects or skills that the child must master, and they therefore focus on learning as exploration and a process of inquiry. Teachers who use this approach are also well aware of the fact that learning takes place all the time, not just in the classroom, and they involve parents and other family members in documenting the child’s development and commenting on narratives written by the teacher.

Even though Learning Stories is an approach used in early childhood education settings, I have always been very interested in how the key principles behind Learning Stories could be used to revolutionize how we assess and evaluate students when they’re older. Over the past few years, I have had a number of opportunities to build on the Learning Stories approach in middle school and in high school settings. I’ve worked with teachers who were open to experimentation and whose assessment narratives – often co-constructed with parents and the students themselves – made an impact on student motivation. I’ll share some of them in my next post.

Below, you will find a number of Learning Stories exemplars that inspired me to modify this approach for use with older students. As you look through some of the exemplars below, think about how this approach could be used in your context, be it middle school, high school, or even post-secondary. Imagine documenting – with your students and for them – their learning and development as learners, thinkers, creators, contributors, and communicators through narratives and “qualitative snapshots.” What would these stories look like? Would they involve parents? Other teachers? Could they be multimedia texts? How would they fit into your assessment and evaluation practice?

“Oh, no! That’s not right!”
“I’m getting better and better.”
A Budding Archeologist
Teaching Others
The artists
Mahdia’s Story

References

Carr, M. (2001). Assessment in early childhood settings. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.

Rameka, L. (2007). Mäori approaches to assessment. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 30(1), 126-144.

Cross-posted to GETideas.com

A few years ago, I ran into an old colleague of mine at an educational conference. He was using the lunch break to catch up on his marking. His backpack, placed on the chair beside him, was full of what looked like 2- or 3-page compositions.

“Don’t you need a quiet place to focus to mark these?” I asked.

“Nah … I’ve been doing this for years. I don’t mind the noise around me, and I know very well what I’m looking for in these essays. After reading once, I already know if it’s a D or an A or somewhere in between. Then, I read again and focus on sentence structure and other details.”

Whatever your thoughts on my colleague’s approach to assessment, one thing is clear: What he was referring to when he said “I know very well what I’m looking for in these essays” is the evaluative knowledge he had acquired over the years as a teacher. Teachers tend to be very proud of this expertise. There is no question that, over time, we develop the ability, in our subject areas, to assess specific examples of student work with just a quick glance. Our understanding of good work, of specific standards, of quality, is generally tacit knowledge — it’s been called our “guild knowledge.” It’s an integral part of our profession, generated through years of practice and experience. When my colleague said that a quick glance was enough to determine the quality of each essay, I was not surprised at all. Had he given me one of those essays to look over, I probably would have taken under a minute to respond with something like, “This one is definitely a B-.”

Whenever I think about our guild knowledge and assessment, I am reminded of the following statement by D. Royce Sadler:

“… the guild knowledge of teachers should consist less in knowing how to evaluate student work and more in knowing ways to download evaluative knowledge to students” (Sadler, 1989).

In other words, teachers should help their students become competent and confident critical thinkers and evaluators of their own work and the work of others. We should be experts at ensuring that our students leave our classrooms with the kind of evaluative knowledge they will need in order to be lifelong learners who make judgments, reflect, interpret, and ask critical questions. In addition, in order to succeed in the 21st century, young people need to be skilled in exercising control over their own learning. Effective ongoing assessment can help them learn how to ask critical questions, how to monitor their own progress, and how to pay attention to how they learn and what happens when they learn and engage in what we commonly refer to as schoolwork. Effective, timely, meaningful formative assessment, delivered through a variety of means — but mostly through ongoing critical conversations with our students about their work — will help engage them in developing metacognition: knowledge about themselves as learners as well as self-regulation knowledge (planning, monitoring, self-assessment, setting goals).

We need to use classroom assessment to engage our students in interactions (with us, their peers, and their own thoughts, goals, and ideas) that help them independently define their own learning goals, monitor their progress, engage in ongoing assessment of and reflection on their work, and make adjustments to their learning trajectories and their work itself. The kind of feedback I shared in my previous post is a key ingredient in this approach because it gradually encourages the development of self-monitoring and critical thinking about one’s work.

But let’s now look at the big picture: How do we create the kind of environment where students are encouraged to be independent thinkers and critical evaluators of their own work and that of others? If it is our responsibility to “download evaluative knowledge to students,” then how do we reconfigure classroom instruction to create an inquiry-based, student-driven culture of learning where the teacher assumes the role of a more experienced peer and conversation partner, and not the omniscient evaluator and sage? How do we create environments in our classrooms that nurture the development of self-monitoring and self-regulating learners?

I can think of one example that worked quite well in my own classroom: Several years ago, I taught grade eight language arts using blogs. The students had their own blogs connected into a class community of bloggers/writers. All of their work was posted on their individual blogs and an engaging and supportive learning community emerged, mostly as a result of all the interactions inside the class blogosphere.

But I want to focus today just on how I got this community started. When I first introduced blogs to my students in September, I did more than just present blogging as something that would replace the students’ notebooks … as a mere digital portfolio, let’s say. Instead, I focused on how our blogging community had the power to reconfigure how we understood teaching and learning. There were two key explicit messages in how I introduced our reconfigured classroom to my students: First, we are a community and blogs help us learn from and with one another. Second, your blog is something you cultivate all year. It’s not just a place to post assignments; it represents you and your learning. It’s a long-term commitment.

To get them started, I handed out the following diagram and pointed out the timeline (September to June). “This is a living entity that you will grow for the next ten months,” I said. Then, we looked at the three sections of the flower in the diagram – The Goals, Habits and Commitment, and The Right Habitat – and discussed the specific questions in each section. I then gave my students plenty of time (well over a week) to formulate their answers.

(For a high-resolution version of this diagram, please click here. For a more extensive discussion of this tool, please see my blog post, How to Grow a Blog.)

As a result of this approach, I got to know the students very well throughout the year, and learned how to best support them as individuals. Over time, they started looking at schoolwork as their work. Their blogs became sites of inquiry and engagement. In growing their blogs throughout the year, they developed their own understanding of what it means to be a writer, a reader, and a learner. They started thinking about how they learn, how they write, what they find challenging and why. They started reflecting on their own work and provided readerly critique in response to the work of their peers. They learned to self-assess, set short-term and long-term goals, and to track their own progress.

And here’s what I learned: By reconfiguring what learning looked like in my classroom, I realized that my primary responsibility was not to evaluate everything they did, but to provide ongoing support and opportunities for them to plan, talk, think, revise, make mistakes, and reflect.