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.

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.

In my last post, I wrote about the value of Assessment for Learning as an approach to supporting and engaging students. Whenever we talk about Assessment for Learning, we must also address its key element — timely, effective, and meaningful feedback.

Let me take you back in time once again to when I was a young English teacher, facing a loaded curriculum and a semester that, in my view at least, seemed very very short. I had a lot to cover and not much time. Back then, feedback in my mind looked like this:

In fact, this image above is a collage of actual corrected student essays (one image shows a scan of an essay corrected by me). Why am I sharing this with you? I’m sharing it because all too often when we talk about feedback, this is what we really mean: correcting – an activity that teachers don’t even particularly like. As a young teacher faced with a lot of material to cover, I thought the only way to give feedback was to read student work, correct it, and assign a grade. I was convinced that my students would read their corrected papers, take notes, and learn from my corrections so that they would not make the same mistakes again. Did they? I think I can safely say that this assessment or feedback practice by a young inexperienced teacher did not contribute to a lot of learning. It just wasn’t feedback.

According to Hattie and Timperley (2007), feedback “… needs to provide information specifically relating to the task or process of learning that fills a gap between what is understood and what is aimed to be understood.” “Specifically,” they add, “feedback is more effective when it provides information on correct rather than incorrect responses and when it builds on changes from previous trails.” Corrections, like the ones in the image above, never focus on things that a student performed well. They zero in on what went wrong. They are also very definitive and authoritarian. They show weaknesses in student work, they point out mistakes and errors.

Feedback, on the other hand, is about supporting the student in the process of moving toward the goal and closing that gap between where she is now and where she needs to be. As teachers, we must help our students answer three questions:

1. Where am I going?
2. How am I doing?
3. What actions do I need to take next?

In other words, effective feedback focuses on goals, progress, and next steps. It’s important to keep in mind that our role here is to guide, not to answer these questions for our students. Feedback that helps them answer these three questions will provide exactly the kind of guidance that’s needed. Over time, it will also teach the students to become effective evaluators of their own work and that of others because what they will learn from effective feedback is not just how well they are moving toward finishing that independent project on volcanoes, for example, but also — perhaps most importantly — how to exercise control over their learning, how to self-monitor and work independently. Maria Montessori was right when she wrote: “The greatest sign of a success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” You know you’re doing your job when your students and their work begin to demonstrate that your presence is getting more and more unnecessary.

Let’s look at an example. The following comes from a grade 8 science teacher in Vancouver, Canada, who is commenting on a student project on biofuels:

There’s so much more detail in this draft, Vanessa! Last time we looked at your project you just had an outline and some great ideas. Now I see you added your research. Remember when we talked about including specific examples and practical uses of biofuels? You made it happen here. That section now reads like something written by an expert!

I see that you organized the information more visually and added a chart. Have you thought of making it bigger? I think it would make a very nice large format pull-out/ insert. Ask some of your friends for their opinion. You could still keep the paragraphs you have but the graphic organizer you created could get lost in the middle of all that text. I could book computer lab time for you to work on that.

Any ideas on the video component? What do you think would be better – you, summarizing the information as the author of this report, or the Discovery Channel videos you found? Both?

Have you thought about re-writing the introduction – remember? We talked about how your focus has changed a little since you started.

Next conference: Monday, May 12th.

Doesn’t this written feedback make you want to be the one working on that project? What comes across most strongly, in my opinion, is that Vanessa is treated like someone who’s building her own expertise in a topic she cares about.

Let’s evaluate that feedback by looking at the list of key feedback components. According to Sue Swaffield (2008), effective feedback should:

• Focus on student learning
• Focus on the task rather than the learner
• Focus on process rather than the product
• Focus on progress
• Focus on particular qualities of the work
• Advise how to improve
• Encourage the student to think
• Require action that is challenging yet achievable
• Be specific
• Avoid comparison with others
• Be understandable to the student

I think Vanessa’s teacher scores rather high on the list above. I am especially fond of how well she suggests improvements. Notice that throughout her note, she focuses on helping the student think about next steps and asks Vanessa specific questions about her work. She doesn’t impose anything; the questions are designed to help Vanessa focus on very specific aspects of her work and to address them. When she read the note, Vanessa knew the answers to the three key questions:

• Where am I going? Finished project on biofuels that includes detailed research as well as multimedia components and solid organization.
• How am I doing? “That section now reads like something written by an expert!” “There’s so much more detail in this draft, Vanessa!”
• What actions do I need to take next? “Any ideas on the video component?” Have you thought about re-writing the introduction – remember?”

These prompts are providing the guidance and the encouragement she needs to keep going and keep thinking about her work. There is also nothing quantitative here — no letter or number grades. There are also no meaningless comments, such as “Good Job, Vanessa!,” which focus more on the learner than learning and the task at hand. What this note from Vanessa’s teacher shows to me is a conversation with a student about the work she’s doing. The date of the next student-teacher conference confirms that this note is part of an ongoing conversation.

I don’t really see Vanessa failing, abandoning this project, or getting a C, do you?

References:

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

Swaffield, S. (2008). Feedback. The central process in assessment for learning. In Swaffield, S. (Ed.). Unlocking assessment. Understanding for reflection and application. New York: Routledge, pp. 57-72.

Whenever I think of assessment in the classroom, I am reminded of a rubric I created a long time ago to go along with a short writing assignment for my grade eight Language Arts class. You can see it below. Many would agree that rubrics are excellent tools — they show the students exactly what the expectations are and the scale we’ll use to assess their work. True. However, as a young teacher many years ago, I used this rubric alone and nothing else. I did not have an assessment and evaluation strategy to support my students and learn from my classroom practice. My students submitted work, and I evaluated it. That was it. What I’ve learned since is what every experienced teacher knows very well: that assessment for learning — an ongoing process that provides students with timely and meaningful feedback, informs us about how well the students are doing, and gauges the effectiveness of our classroom practice — must be an integral part of our role as classroom teachers.

Let’s look closely at my rubric. What exactly is it telling Terry about his work in my classroom and his grasp of the content we’re studying? Here’s one point of view: Terry received a rubric with detailed descriptors. If he takes the time to read them, he will see what he did well and what prevented him from getting a better grade. He can also see that he received a very good mark (80%) and a nice comment. Doesn’t this note contribute to Terry’s understanding of how well he’s doing in my class and how well he’s grasped the material? Perhaps. But here is another point of view: What does “Well Done!” really mean? What does it really teach Terry? How helpful is it in ensuring that he does well on the next assignment? Is it a scaffold that he can use to improve, to scale new and more challenging heights in Mr. Glogowski’s class? Is Terry (who is 13 years old) going to take the time to read the descriptors carefully? Does he truly understand how he achieved that A-, and how to repeat that success next time?

My point of view is that, based on this rubric, Terry now understands one thing very well: That assignment is now behind me, I’ve jumped through yet another hoop, and quite well. In other words, as a teacher, I missed an opportunity to engage Terry in a conversation about his work and his learning because the one thing that this rubric does very well — when used alone and not as part of a larger, more complex assessment strategy — is the following: It terminates opportunities for conversations with students about their work. The work is done, the grade assigned. It’s time to move on to another topic, another assignment, another hoop.

What if, instead of writing that short comment and assigning a grade, I took the time to write the following:

Terry, you took some risks with organization but it worked out beautifully. I know you know that topic sentences need to be at the very beginning, but by starting with an anecdote you totally pulled me in! Let’s chat about this next time we discuss your writing.

I also want to ask for your permission to share your work with the class tomorrow — there are some good examples here of how to be an effective storyteller. Is that OK? Talk to me if you think this would make you uncomfortable.

Finally, when I read this piece I see another important thing: Ever since you stopped giggling with Michael in class during writing time, your work has improved significantly. Did you notice that too?

Be ready to discuss your next draft with me tomorrow.

Is this assessment? I certainly think it is. It points out to Terry what makes his work good, provides loads of constructive encouragement, and shows that writing — and learning — is a process, one that involves conversations. Of course, in order to make this work, I would first have to ensure that the assignment requires several drafts, but that’s just basic common sense. How else is Terry going to become a good writer unless he understands that writing is a process? But what did my original rubric teach him? That school is about handing things in and getting a grade. My second attempt shows a very different conception of school and learning.

In too many classrooms, work is assigned, handed in, receives a grade … and any opportunity to engage students in thinking about and learning from their work is lost. In a classroom devoted to meaningful, timely, and effective feedback, and to assessment for learning, not mere assessment of learning, we engage students in conversations that provide them with the support and guidance they need to be successful. These conversations and the feedback we give also provide us — the teachers — with valuable information on how well we’re reaching and supporting the learners in our classrooms. And yet, in many classrooms around the world, assessment for learning is just not present, which begs an important question: what’s stopping us from providing this kind of ongoing and meaningful support to our students? Why is it so challenging to implement?

Take a close look at the photograph above. What do you see? School courtyard? Teachers? Children?

Let me tell you a little about what I see when I look at this photograph. This is East Africa. The photograph was taken a couple of years ago, at an elementary school in a small town. I was standing inside the school’s staffroom, looking out the window at the school’s playground.

At first glance, there’s probably nothing extraordinary about this photograph: it looks like it’s recess and the children are enjoying their time away from their desks and textbooks. There are two teachers interacting with the students.

But look closely. Look at the teachers’ faces.

This story begins with those faces because they are not happy faces of teachers interacting with their pupils at recess. Both faces are serious. The teacher on the left seems lost in thought. She seems sad.

Let me tell you why.

Only 10 or 15 minutes before I took this photograph, these students were in class. Many of their classmates remained in class. But these students, the ones you see in this photograph, were asked to assemble in the courtyard. If you look closely you will see that the teacher on the right seems to be checking something, perhaps a clipboard or some notes. What she is holding in her hand is a list of students who have been asked to leave their classrooms and assemble here. The reason they had been instructed to leave class and meet the teacher here in the courtyard is because their parents have not paid their school fees. These students are being sent home.

Why am I telling you this? I wanted to share this story because today is Human Rights Day. As a teacher, whenever I think about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whenever I think of Human Rights, and whenever Human Rights Day comes along, I think of Article 26:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

And that’s exactly what I kept thinking about on that cloudy morning in East Africa, standing in front of that window, looking at a group of elementary school children pulled out of class to be told that they were being sent home. I wanted to help, and I knew I couldn’t really do much. I was angry. I was devastated.

All of this took place in a country that had abolished school fees several years prior to this morning assembly that I recorded with my camera. Yet, this was not an isolated incident, and later on the teachers explained to me that this happens throughout their country and many others in their part of the world. Yes, the tuition fees have been abolished, they said, but parents are still asked to pay for meals and for uniforms. In some cases, they have to pay to help cover maintenance fees. In many areas, parents chip in to cover the teachers’ salaries. So, yes, it’s true, the teachers said to me, the tuition fees don’t exist anymore, but education still costs money.

I live in a country where Article 26 is taken for granted. It is taken for granted by teachers, parents, children, teenagers. I also know of many other places around the world where Article 26 is taken for granted. But, I also know of and have visited places around the world where Article 26 and many, many other articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are fundamental human rights only on paper and where, for many different reasons – some of them very complex – human rights, including the right to education, are not respected.

As someone who cares deeply about education, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do and what my colleagues – teachers around the world – can do to ensure that education is not taken for granted and that access to education is respected around the world as a fundamental human right. I believe that it is our responsibility as teachers – the largest professional group in the world that currently includes almost 60 million of us – to teach, every day, about Article 26 and the other, equally important articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Whenever I raise this issue, I am often asked to recommend organizations that accept donations to help improve access to education around the world. I am not going to do that here. In fact, I want to challenge you today not to donate money. Instead, I hope that you will do what you do best: teach.

Make sure that the students in your own classroom know about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that they know that education is a fundamental human right (most of them don’t, believe me), and that they also know and are deeply troubled by the fact that there are children around the world who do not attend school and who, for reasons beyond their control, cannot attend school. In doing this, you will be helping to build an army of human rights advocates, of young people who will grow up valuing their education and committed to human rights and global peace. That alone, that focus on human rights in your classroom, will do much more to advance human rights than your cash.

Think also about your own professional development. Teacher professional development needs to be more than attending conferences, reading professional journals, and engaging in online communities to exchange lesson ideas or links to valuable resources. Teacher professional development includes a responsibility to raise awareness about issues that affect teachers, classrooms, and students around the world. If our colleagues working in states run by dictatorships or rebels, in places plagued by conflict or poverty, or in places affected by natural disasters, cannot count on their fellow teachers around the world to make their stories heard and work towards global peace, who can they count on?

The photograph I shared with you at the beginning of this post does not depict an isolated incident. You and I know that access to education is being curtailed around the world. According to estimates by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 68 million children of primary school age were out of school in 2008. The reasons are varied, but this fact remains the same: millions of children around the world do not have access to education, to a fundamental human right.

Take a look at that photograph again and imagine being one of the teachers in that courtyard who have been told to interrupt their class, stop doing what they so passionately love, assemble a group of students, check off their names on the roster, and send them home.

Then, imagine walking back into your classroom to face their classmates, those fortunate enough to be allowed to stay, and to learn.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but I am hopeful that we’ll manage. After all, there’s almost 60 million of us.

Then another issue arose quite quickly – assessment. Once I started responding to student work in a readerly fashion and participating as a contributor, reader, and not just an evaluator, I realized that it would be unfair to the students to reduce all their rich interactions and complex online presence to a B+ or a 13/15. I realized that I needed to develop an assessment strategy that would take into account the complexity of student interactions online and recognize the process as much as the final product.

The students themselves helped me arrive at this realization. Only two days after I asked the students to compose a written response to the work we had covered, they began to use their blogs not only to brainstorm but also to request feedback from their peers and engage them in discussions about the work they were doing for this assignment. The assignment itself gave my students a lot of freedom – they could compose a personal reflection, an essay, a narrative account of their engagement with the material, or even a creative response in the form of a short story or a collection of poems. Two days after we discussed this task in class, I noticed that they turned to the class community for help. What follows is a list of individual blog entry titles that I found in the class community two days after the task was assigned:

Here’s my plan – could you comment?

Work in progress. Please comment everyone.

Rough draft. Comments would be greatly appreciated.

My essay unfolds … any thoughts?

Thesis improved (again). Tell me what you think.

Essay … it’s coming along. Pls post ideas and suggestions.

Improved introduction (after some comments and suggestions)

New and much improved planning post – expecting comments. Thanks.

I was very impressed – the students had turned to the community of their peers to request feedback. Then, I realized that none of the children asked me for feedback. It didn’t take long to realize that, a) they didn’t see me as a contributor in the community, and b) they associated me with corrections and grades. At this stage, they were not ready for corrections yet – they were simply interested in having conversations about their ideas. They needed somebody to talk to and, as their teacher, I was not at the top of their list.

Hardly surprising, I know. But this experience helped me realize that we don’t spend enough time providing feedback for our students and that most of what teachers consider teaching and assessment consists of marking and correcting student work. This kind of practice does not engage our students in those rich interactive processes of talking about their work and their ideas.

Initially, my role as a teacher was limited to first presenting the material (and engaging the students by initiating conversations) and then marking their work. I was absent from that rich part that happened in the middle where the students continued our classroom conversations online by brainstorming on their blogs, requesting and providing feedback, and engaging in conversations about some of the key ideas in the course. Instead of engaging with them, I just waited for them to submit their work.

As my research continued, however, I realized that I needed to spend more time with them in the community that we had created together. I needed to not only give them the freedom to interact online but also support them as they engaged in virtual conversations about their work and posted planning/brainstorming entries. That complex and interactive process of knowledge building (represented by the middle square in the diagram above) required more of my involvement. It offered a great opportunity to support student learning and to learn more about the students as learners and individuals.

Unfortunately, teachers often don’t know how to participate in that process and tend to focus on assessing the finished product. They tend to concentrate on the two areas in the diagram above where their roles are clearly defined. They focus on presenting content and then evaluating the quality of student responses to assigned tasks. These roles represent familiar territory, but they fail to take into account that teaching, learning, and assessment are interrelated. The problem with limiting ourselves to teaching and evaluating is that these roles alone ignore the potential to initiate and sustain rich interactions with knowledge. They ignore the opportunity to support our students as learners.

These traditional roles of provider and evaluator also reinforce the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student. However, a teacher who enters a community of independent learners/writers/researchers to support and encourage student learning removes that hierarchical structure and encourages students to become more involved in the assessment process. Assessment in this situation can become more collaborative because the teacher and the student have opportunities to discuss/co-construct the task itself, the criteria, the process of learning.

Annabel (SL: Annabel Recreant) has been busy creating a very unique project. As a teacher of history, she is interested in creating a virtual learning space where visitors can learn about “settlement / colonisation in the south east of Australia.” Specifically, she is interested in creating a space where students can explore and experience “the impact that colonisation had upon indigenous communities in Australia.”

Annabel wants to create a space where the students can interact with the virtual land, where they experience the life of early settlers:

My idea is that when someone first visited the site they would be faced with a simulation of the Australian bush as it appeared pre settlement. Uncleared. Perhaps with evidence of Indigenous inhabitants. Features of the natural landscape.

Visitors may have read documents in class (hence the working with not around) or read some of the documents provided in another part of the space regarding elements of Frontier life such as the process of settling on a new land, difficulties faced, the ways these were solved (if at all) etc.

Once armed with some of this foreknowledge, visitors would be invited to clear the land themselves taking into account the topography, geography and physical elements of the landscape. Provided with a ‘box’ visitors would be invited to build their own hut, or settlement.

What I like about her project is that Annabel wants her virtual learning space to be a place where the visitors can build and create, not just view, watch, or listen to whatever has been prepared for them. She wants the visitors to not just read about early settlers in Australia but also to interact with the virtual landscape, to make it their own and, in the process, learn about issues faced by settlers. This idea emerged from some very critical questions about the educational potential of Second Life:

[...] I think I became a little disengaged at the end of last year with Second Life … because I had reached a ‘now what?’ stage. Having been part of the community of learners on the Islands of Jokaydia was great, but personally I felt I had plateaued in what I could offer or do. More than that I think I started to find it difficult to see the other uses of Second Life other than that main one of being connected to a network of great teachers.

[...] what I began to obsess over was this: if anyone came to my plot .. why would they? Why would they come into Second Life merely to click on a few urls that would take them to the internet? To me, that wasn;t a good use of the platform.

To me, the problem Annabel describes here has always been a major weakness of how Second Life is used in education. It is often a place where artifacts are built for visitors and where mere reproductions of real-life lecture halls are quite common. Annabel wants to use Second Life as a place where students can build their own understanding while (virtually) building a homestead and clearing the land. She wants to engage visitors by providing them with primary and secondary sources that will then enable them to make well-informed decisions as virtual settlers. Her virtual classroom will never really be finished – it will be more of an empty canvas where visitors can construct their vision of early settler life.

Annabel envisions this project as an opportunity to show other educators how students can be encouraged to use virtual environments such as Second Life to build their own understanding of history so that it becomes visible to anyone who visits the virtual space. This is not going to be just about building a virtual space where students can click on some URLs and read secondary sources. Annabel wants to develop a virtual resource to engage students in Historical Thinking by providing them with resources they can consult and artifacts they can use to build their own understanding of history. It’s almost like creating a virtual world wiki where instead of being confronted with a carefully designed space, a student is given access to a variety of resources and tools to build that space and, in the process, demonstrate his or her understanding of the material. The wonderful part about this is that this process will make learning visible in 3D. A student who builds with the resources provided in this virtual space and by using her own understanding of the time period will create an artifact that other learners can explore, interact with, and also rebuild or redesign.

I hope that you will follow Annabel’s work by reading her blog, checking out the Virtual Classroom Project Flickr group, and exploring her work inworld.

Heard while driving home from Tess’s basketball game earlier.

“But Dad, I’m the only one in my class who doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“I know Sweetie, but that’s not a great reason for getting one.”

“But Dad, it’s like embarassing.”

“I’m sorry Tess, really. Mom and I will talk about it again, but for now…”

“Ugh.”

Silence for a few minutes.

“So, anything happen at school today?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Ugh. We got a writing assignment.”

“A writing assignment? What kind?”

“We’re learning persuasive essays.”

“Persuasive essays? Well that’s kind of appropriate.”

“Like, what do you mean?”

“Well, don’t you have something you want to persuade me to do?”

She looks at me and smiles. “Cell phone!” Pause. “Ugh.”

“What?”

“I can’t do it on cell phones.”

“Why not?”

“Because our teacher said we should focus on things we’re really interested in.”

“Aren’t you interested in getting a cell phone?”

“No. Well, yes … but this is … different. I wanna write about sharks.”

“Makes sense. You know a lot about them. But how would you make your essay persuasive?”

“People are prejudiced against sharks. Everyone thinks sharks are bloodthirsty, violent creatures. It’s not true. Not all of them are … and they can work together, too. I wanna write about that.”

“And your teacher said yes?”

“She did, and … get this, she said I could interview this expert on sharks from the University of …  uhm, I forget. But she is a researcher and an expert on sharks.”

“Is … she coming to do a talk at school?”

“No, dad. I will be meeting with her online, and with some other researchers that work with her.”

“Online? Just you? What about other kids?”

“They have other topics, so they’re working with other people.”

“Online?”

“Yes, online.”

“So, you’re going to find out more about sharks from this researcher in … where is she again?”

“Somewhere in California, I think … yes, she has a blog and some of her research is also online. She posted movies from her previous research trips on YouTube … we’re chatting tomorrow during class.”

“That’s soon!”

“We have to meet this week. She’s leaving for a research expedition, for two months …”

“… so you won’t be able to get in touch with her after she leaves.”

“Well, she’ll be sending updates to her lab from her cell phone … I guess her assistant could email them to me.”

“… or you could get your own cell phone.”

“Exactly!”

Paulo Freire always claimed that we should use our imagination to reframe our reality – to see beyond that which we find oppressing. This re-working of Will’s conversation is my attempt to imagine a better classroom and to emphasize that what teachers need today – and more today than at any time in the past – is imagination.

As I read and re-read this document I kept returning to its final section, “Conclusions and Implications.” The final heading in this section struck a chord because it closely aligns with my doctoral research study and my current interest in assessment. The authors of the study state:

We see peer-based learning in networked publics … in these settings, the focus of learning and engagement is not defined by institutional accountabilities but rather emerges from kids’ interests and everyday social communication (Ito, Horst, Bittani, et al., 2008, p.38).

The study then goes on to state that “peers are an important driver of learning” (p.39) – not a revolutionary statement by any means, but important here in the light of what follows:

When these peer negotiations occur in a context of public scrutiny, youth are motivated to develop their identities and reputations through these peer-based networks, exchanging comments and links and jockeying for visibility. These efforts at gaining recognition are directed at a network of respected peers rather than formal evaluations of teachers or tests (p.39).

It’s not surprising that interactions with peers and even adults in an interest-driven community are more engaging and more fulfilling than traditional classrooms where teachers and their textbooks and tests are often presented as more important than independent thinking and personal growth. Motivation emerges from interactions that take place online where anyone can see and participate in them. This “context of public scrutiny” is of great importance here. The safety of the self-contained classroom, one separated (by walls and firewalls) from the rest of the world – the world we are supposed to prepare our students for – goes against everything that surrounds young people today and prevents them from learning how to navigate the complex online world. Instead of separating our students from the world they’re getting ready for, instead of cocooning them in protected classrooms, we need to give them opportunities to learn from and with people who share their passions. We need to give them access to communities “where they can find role models, recognition, friends, and collaborators who are co-participants in the journey of growing up in a digital age” (p.39).

What this means to me is that we need to seriously re-think not only our classrooms (we’ve known that for a while), but also, more importantly, our assessment and evaluation practices.

According to the report, we need to give our students access to “passionate hobbyists and creators” who share their work and passion in interest-driven communities, and who are valuable educationally because “youth see them as experienced peers, not people with authority over them”(p.39). Clearly, reducing access to these communities and the interactions they afford to letter or percentage grades is going to make our practices not only irrelevant but also, frankly, irresponsible. Opening up our classrooms to allow interest-driven interactions with people who “are not authority figures responsible for assessing kids’ competence, but are rather what Dilan Mahendran has called ‘co-conspirators’” (p.39) means that we have to start thinking very seriously about preparing our students for these interactions and helping them reflect on and learn from them.

How do we do it?

Some suggest that the tools teens embrace outside of school need to play a more prominent role in the classroom. Yes, these tools can help promote meaningful interactions, self-expression, and reflection. But let’s not forget that merely bringing Web 2.0 tools into the classroom misses the point. Yes, they do promote peer-based interactions and self-expression. But adding blogging or wikis or even global collaborative projects to our curricula is not going to magically transform our static classrooms into interest-driven communities, and it certainly is not going to prepare the students to safely and effectively navigate “networked publics” (Ito, Horst, Bittani, et al., 2008, p.8). These tools are not going to magically create interest-driven communities. I have visited eight classrooms over the past four months, and in all but one I was shown both a class blogging community (or an online collaborative project) and also a list of teacher-generated prompts or assignments to be completed by each student for that very project. Will Richardson once referred to this as “assigned blogging” and, let me assure you, the phenomenon is alive and well.

I don’t mean to say that there is no point in bringing technology into our classrooms. No, we have the responsibility to help our students learn how to effectively and safely use these new tools to extend and share their knowledge, make competent decisions, navigate “networked publics”, and connect with those whose experiences can enrich their lives and their understanding of things they are passionate about. Our students need places where they can learn how to safely construct their online identities. They need to practice and acquire new media literacies. But the mere presence of technology in our classrooms is not going to help our students acquire these new literacies. Neither will using them to complete teacher-generated assignments. We have the responsibility to open up our walls and show our students that we want their passions and interests to grow beyond our physical classrooms, our class blogs, our textbooks, and our lesson plans. We also need to show them how to do it safely. It’s time to reach beyond what we traditionally mean when we use the word “school.”

But when our students reach beyond our classroom walls – even if it is with our permission or encouragement – we’re not quite sure what to do. We stand there a bit sheepish, and we start thinking how to fit what they’re doing into the course curriculum. How do we justify that brave act of opening our classroom walls? More importantly, how do we grade what the students have done? As Michael Wesch recently argued,

All of this vexes traditional criteria for assessment and grades. This is the next frontier as we try to transform our learning environments. When I speak frankly with professors all over the world, I find that, like me, they often find themselves jury-rigging old assessment tools to serve the new needs brought into focus by a world of infinite information. Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have been habitually used to measure content recall. For example, I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions (Wesch, 2009).

In other words, “the pursuit of real and relevant questions” is too complex for our rubrics, checklists, and multiple choice quizzes. I believe that it demands that we get involved as co-investigators who assist students with their independent research and who also, through personal engagement as online learners and collaborators, model what it means to be successful as a learner. We have to become “co-conspirators” or, to use Vygotsky’s famous term, “more capable peers,” whose job is not to measure and evaluate but, primarily, to promote and support reflection and analysis in our students. As educators, we need to work on our role in the classroom as “passionate hobbyists and creators,” we need to engage in learning in our classrooms, and in doing so we need to move towards a different model of assessment and evaluation.

“Become Students Again”

And that is precisely what I’m interested in – how do we redesign our outdated assessment and evaluation mechanisms to support our students as they venture outside of our classrooms and into interest-driven online communities?

I suggest that we follow and support our students. This isn’t just about granting them leave to learn from and with somebody else in some online community that we’ve approved. This is also about traveling with them, not to supervise or hold their hand, but to advise as more experienced peers – to explore, learn alongside them, and help them reflect on what they are learning. It’s about creating classrooms where, as Michael Wesch recently said, we can “become students again, pursuing questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along with the others” (Wesch, 2009). We need to be there for them to show them how to learn. We need to show them that we’re learning too, online and off. We need to show them that we reflect and set goals. We need to model those processes and learn to support our students in these new environments and interactions. It is our responsibility to help our students understand that learning how to learn means acquiring “a collection of good learning practices … that encourage learners to be reflective, strategic, intentional, and collaborative” (James et al., 2007, p.28). Teaching our students, not as whole grades, not as classes, but as individuals, how to learn in the world where knowledge resides in webs, nodes, and multifaceted connections and correspondences is now our greatest responsibility.

Of course, the biggest question for me right now is: what does all of this look like in practice?

__________

Bibliography:

But in the process of building this exhibit, I also realized that it could be so much more than just a virtual gallery – it could become a learning environment, a place that anyone interested in education in Kenya could visit and explore. So, the initial virtual gallery idea quickly morphed into “unfinished …” – a project to build a virtual Kenyan classroom, a typical classroom in a typical rural school in Kenya.

Of course, some will say that I didn’t have to use Second Life, that a blog entry, a Flickr set, or a PowerPoint presentation (or maybe all of them combined) would have been just as effective. That’s why, before I began, I asked myself: What can I do in Second Life that I cannot do on the world wide web? Why do I need a multiuser virtual environment?

I wanted the visitors to be able to experience, even if only virtually, what it is like to stand in a typical rural Kenyan classroom. I can’t do that on my blog, but in Second Life I can create that classroom. I can try to re-create that environment. Of course, as a visitor to my classroom exhibit in Second Life, you won’t feel the fine Kenyan dust on the floor – the kind of dust that penetrates into everything in Kenya. You won’t be able to interact with Kenyan students or look through their notebooks. I cannot create tactile experiences in Second Life. What I can do, however, is create a visual experience that is very close to what I saw in Kenya. I can create a replica of a typical classroom and then use it as the setting for tours, presentations, or conversations about education in Kenya. I can create a virtual environment that provides a meaningful context for discussions about education in developing nations.

That environment wouldn’t be complete without photographs of children and school life that I took while in Kenya. You will find them scattered around the exhibit. You will see photographs of children and classrooms leaning against a virtual fence or the classroom wall.

Again, an argument could be made that all those pictures could have been shared on Flickr. True. I did share them on flickr, but as soon as I uploaded them I realized that they didn’t fully represent my experiences, that individual photographs, when placed against the white backdrop of a flickr photo page, lose their richness and become just another snapshot. In Second Life, however, I can create an environment for them, a context that will help the visitor see them as part of a larger story.

When building this virtual space, I tried to make the environment as reminiscent of the actual schools in Kenya as possible. Many of the textures I used for walls or corrugated iron panels were extracted from my own photographs of Kenyan schools and imported into Second Life. Before I built the desks for the virtual classroom, I scrutinized the pictures I took of student desks in Kenyan classrooms. Before building the classroom itself, I carefully analyzed my pictures of rural schools in Kenya.

Why “unfinished …”?

I chose this title because when I first walked into a classroom in rural Kenya, everything around me seemed … unfinished – the bare walls and gaping holes instead of windows all contributed to that impression. It seemed that the classrooms were still under construction. Of course, the sad truth is that the classrooms I visited were all finished – there simply isn’t enough money at many of the schools in Kenya to put in windows or buy new desks. There simply isn’t enough money to put plaster on the walls, buy bulletin boards, or put up posters.

Not every classroom in Kenya looks like the one I created in Second Life. Some schools are better equipped than others. Some classrooms have windows and plaster on walls instead of bare bricks. Some have new desks. Many have electricity. The classroom I built in Second Life, however, is not atypical of rural classrooms in Kenya. It represents rural schools and the country itself quite well. In Kenya, many things, including roads, schools, buildings, and public services, seem … unfinished.

The work that Teachers Without Borders – Canada has begun in Kenya is also unfinished. We had initiated great projects, worked with many teachers, and established valuable contacts with ministry officials and other NGOs. We look at these accomplishments as work in progress and an opportunity to continue to move towards our goals. One of those goals – and my goal for this virtual exhibit – is to raise awareness of some of the challenges faced by teachers, students, and administrators in developing nations.

I hope that you will take the time to walk through the exhibit and experience school life in a rural Kenyan classroom. The following link will take you into Second Life, to the island of jokaydia where the project is hosted: (SLurl to the Virtual Kenya Exhibit).

Virtual Kenya Project Machinima
(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

Interested in a Tour?

If you like what you see and would like to bring your students or colleagues into this space, or learn more about education in Kenya or the work of Teachers Without Borders – Canada, please feel free to contact me. I’ve given a number of tours already and would be happy to chat about the space or help you build a lesson around this virtual exhibit.