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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Assessing Assessment



 
I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the Alberta Assessment Consortium Fall Conference this weekend.  It was a pretty timely conference for me as our school division has moved to an outcomes based reporting system for our k-6 learners this year.  I am excited about this shuffle, and have been looking forward to it for a long time.  Back when I was a full time classroom teacher (not that long ago), I had these crazy tracking systems created to help guide me as a teacher through assessment conversations with my students, toward the reporting system I was stuck with; percentages. I was thankful to spend my weekend with some wonderful people who focus on assessment all the time to help me, and the other members of my district attending think through this shift.  I'm excited.


The Keynote this year was Ruth Sutton, who very clearly discussed the issues with percentage reporting, and ranking style assessment practices.  I was impressed with how she tackled underlying local issues head on.  Standardized testing: "Weighing the pig will not make it grow." The now infamous "no zero policy"  that has taken on a life of it's own in the media she said "don't make the zero a hero." (well actually she sang this but you get the idea)  and that " the public assumption that all students are motivated by failure."  As anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows this simply isn't true.  What a different world we would live in if the human race was simply motivated to "follow rules" and deadlines, or simply do the work required of them because of the possibility of a 0. 

I was excited to hear Ruth talk about how many people nod, and can speak in a limited fashion of their understanding of things like assessment, and differentiation, but really these are big concepts that we are all grappling with the constructs of.  "Assessment, Differentiation, they are one word, but really big stuff."  Our school division has been toying with differentiation for a while, I was lucky enough to have two opportunities to spend time at the University of Virginia with Carol Ann Tomlinson herself to learn about differentiation.  Since then I've had a couple of years to apply this knowledge to my own classroom, and work with my teachers to apply it in all their classrooms as well.  I was happy to hear (what I already knew, but it's still nice to hear an"expert" agree) that you're never done learning about these ideas, you just deepen your knowledge as you go along.

This of course led to great dinner conversations.  "Understanding is like an onion."  was the phrase of the night on Friday as the attendees from my district and I had supper.  Understanding has layers, with each one you get deeper to the core of the onion. 

Overall I'm coming back to school on Monday with my head full, some great ideas to move forward in our reporting to parents, some super helpful templates, and feeling pretty proud that I actually had the chance to present here myself (and didn't faint/puke/shake to death in front of an audience).