Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

I remember, when I was in school how we were always given some form of an objective test as the “standard’ form of assessment.  They were usually very boring, so long they took the entire period to complete, but very easy for the teacher to grade.  I’m one of those teachers/people that feel an English Language Arts classroom is where students should be allowed to write as much as possible in order for them to create a more meaningful connection with their text.  As teachers we need to break away from assessments that rely primarily on the recall of knowledge, because these are usually “right” and “wrong” answers and it does not allow for our students to express their own opinions and idea, which usually means student voice and that is a major part of the edTPA (From page 225 towards the middle).

I’d like to think that for the Unit Plan I’m completing for this class, uses examples given from this text.  I plan on having my students create and use a Double Entry Journal, there will be a Summative Assessment at the end of the Unit in the form of a Formal Literary Analysis, the use of classroom discussions, and providing multiple opportunities for providing feedback from both the teacher and their peers.  This information is found primarily between pages 226-230 of the text.  These forms of assessment seem to hold more value than just testing my students on their ability to recall what they have read.  Using discussion and journals allows for my students to communicate what they have learned and how they feel about it; making personal connections that will hopefully remain with them for the rest of their lives.

As much as I hated writing essays in school, I find them to be most beneficial now.  It’s funny because the Literary Analysis that my students will construct happens to be one of the evaluating criteria suggested by the authors of the text (Explaining Characters’ Actions page 227).  I love this idea because my students need to have an understanding on the plot of the story, but because all my students will be unique individuals they will each have their own way of exploring and providing different forms of evidence.  Essentially there really is no wrong answer here, granted they remain on task with the writing and don’t go completely off topic.

Overall, I really liked this article.  It’s more than just an article saying don’t teach this way, but actually it’s giving us ideas on how not to get stuck in a rut teaching through objective texts.  The fact that they provided examples of other forms of assessment along with what that might look like in a classroom is amazing.  I’m really glad we read this article, I plan on using it as a source for my lesson connections in my Unit Plan.