Assessing assessment

This afternoon I attended the annual meeting of the Independent Curriculum Group, and for a pretty mellow group of educators we got ourselves kind of stirred up, in a good way.

As an organization we aim to get schools talking about curriculum, and about why it’s a good thing for schools to develop their capacities to create their own. This year we’ve been focused on assessment, with groups of teachers, administrators, and occasionally students (Yay!) gathering in groups around the country to talk about the challenges of assessing “21st-century learning.” These conversations seem to have ranged from smallish and speculative to big and substantive—in every case, as I take it, exemplary of the kind of teacher talk of which we get to do far too little in our day-to-day lives in schools. A few groups have used the Looking At Student Work protocol approach that I wrote about a few weeks back—the Tuning Protocol, popular in Critical Friends work, proved especially useful.

A question on everyone’s mind seemed to be, So where do we go next with these conversations? Do we compile a giant “assessment bank,” or do we gather more groups and create “master assessments” that could be used in multiple schools to measure the efficacy of our collective work teaching certain kinds of skills? Some folks suggested generating documents on the essential characteristics of effective assessments, while others suggested creating a typology of assessments. Appropriate links were made to models like Understanding by Design and the work of Project Zero. Would master assessments become a new kind of “standardized test,” the very habit the ICG was founded to help schools kick?

Some interesting things emerged: schools that don’t give tests, schools that do exhibitions very seriously, and schools whose students (having learned this from teachers, I presume) now use the “assessment” as a euphemism for all the work they’re expected to do, but especially for tests, as in, “You have a full period math assessment on Chapter 5 on Tuesday.” At one point the talk grew lofty, with reference to mission and values, with a very astute observation made by Emily Jones of The Putney School that “We’re all assessing different things for different purposes with different children”—a nice reminder that each school provides its own context for even the most standardized of tests. Josie Holford of Poughkeepsie Day School knocked our socks off by suggesting that any enumeration of “essential 21st-century learning capacities” (yes, I’m talking about YOU, NAIS Guide to Becoming a School of the Future) ought to include “resiliency in the face of failure as one of those capacities.

In the end we kind of left ourselves up to the knees, at least, in the gelatinous goo that is the assessment of learning. I think we even agreed, more or less, that the work of the small groups should continue, perhaps focusing on how to tease out or define the qualities and characteristics of these oft-cited essential capacities. (Think about it: “Global Perspective”—What does this look like? How do you construct the scaffold by which it can be taught? How do you measure it? The capacities may be easy to list, but they’re damn hard to assess.)

Nothing earth-shattering took place in our meeting, but I think we all went away kind of jazzed by the conversation; unfortunately, late afternoons at a big convention (we are all at the National Association of Independent Schools Annual Conference, whose theme, “Innovation,” we seem determined to make into the new “excellence” (see my earlier grumpy post on this trend) when instead what it should mean is, “It’s time for all you schools to catch up with what’s been going on in education for the last 40 years or so!” It’s nice to be among people from a variety of schools from all over the place who care about all this.

It’s nice to work in this profession, in fact.

Looking At Student Work--A Fine Idea for Our Time

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had occasion to participate in a couple of Looking At Student Work exercises, and it’s been a treat.

Based on protocols developed at Project Zero and elsewhere in the 1990s, these exercises today—amid all the cries (including those heard here) for more tech-mediated, more project-based, more collaborative, more student-driven learning experiences—seem almost quaint in their focus on simple questions: What does learning look like? How do we know when our students are learning what we intend them to learn?

Although the rigor of the protocols used in the LASW process was novel in its time, there’s nothing particularly newfangled about teachers discussing learning. Such discussions, though, are rare amid the bustle and endless brushfires of school life, and they tend to be haphazard. Looking At Student Work brings discipline to the process, but best of all the protocols, which require a certain amount of quiet contemplation and reward close observation and measured (and in many cases explicitly non-judgmental or evaluative) discourse, create oases of tranquility and focus in our lives—opportunities to actually do the reflection that we so often urge on our students and our colleagues.

How pleasant, how almost redemptive it is to sit in a circle of peers looking at a piece of student work—and it can be an essay, a math test, or the video of a student presentation—and drill down into the complexities of understanding student learning. We can explore the behavioral and emotional layers that inform whatever students (and their teachers) do and expect, look for the fit between the work and the assignment or between the work and the rubric. We can talk about the ways in which tech-mediated or project-based or collaborative or student-driven work meets the goals of a course, achieves the short-term aims of a teacher, or ignites passion or engagement in a student. We can observe the struggle of a student to reach understanding or the struggle of a teacher to find a way to elicit understanding.

Somehow, as we have our own conversations about professional culture and new ways of learning, the kind of “teacher talk” that Looking At Student Work inspires seems more important, more foundational than it did back when Critical Friends groups were like other work from Project Zero founders like Howard Gardner and David Perkins, brand-new ideas. Here are researchers and theorists whose toil in the agony and sweat of the human spirit—how we all learn and act—predates but is still wholly relevant to all today’s talk of apps, PLNs, and “Schools of the Future.” Their work also, it seems to me, cuts through most of today’s increasingly tiresome interplay of cheap shots at education as we know it and overhyped “innovation” that will “change everything” for the better, and devil take the hindmost. Looking At Student Work is about the basic building blocks of teaching and learning.

I’ve made it clear here that the generality schools have light years of progress to make up and that new ideas and practices will help accomplish this, but I also think we need to take time every now and then to take the kinds of professional deep breaths that Looking At Student Work requires. It’s a fine way to remind ourselves of our own humanity and that of our students, and nearly twenty years on it continues to offers an avenue into reflective practice that is every bit as valuable and as promising as it was back in the day when multiple intelligence theory, like the Macintosh computer, was new.

Schools, Sports, and Character

Mens sana in corpore sano – muscular Christianity – “There is no ‘I’ in team”

These and other verbal pieties have a long history in independent schools, words and phrases that justify and exalt the ideal of sport as a crucible of character. That’s as may be, but in actual schools in our own time, there’s more to it than just platitudes, however aspirational they may be.

I coached, mostly quite happily and often delightedly, for going on 30 years, and I loved the feeling of a happy team, working hard and finding not just occasional success—and I can’t claim much of that—but the sheer communal joy of being a part of something that was bigger than any on individual, even the coach. Somewhere in my education in political philosophy I encountered the Arabic term asabiya, which my memory defines as “group feeling,” a kind of collective unity of identity and purpose that fits pretty well with our own notions of team spirit, and perhaps even school spirit. There is something gloriously transcendent in the feeling one gets from a great practice, a pre-game pep talk that truly reaches every player, and the spiritual refreshment of selfless play and (even occasional) well-earned victory.

Of course the distilled asabiya that infuses coaches and players in these private team moments is a rare thing, made rarer still these days by a distortion of the athletic ideal in schools that makes each player and every team merely elements of a “progr’m”: a carefully laid out system of feeder teams, parent support groups, and anxious coaches and administrators dedicated to creating, at the top of a food chain, varsity teams that win enough games to festoon gymnasium walls with championship banners and create conduits—perhaps narrow but emphatically public—between the school and the college sports teams for whom high schools serve as part of a minor league system. The most successful teams—or progr’ms (Why can't people in athletics say “programs,” if they have to use this term at all?)—acquire a further encrustation of college recruiters, videographers, and local hangers-on, and the very best players may even find themselves surrounded by posses of “advisers” hoping to skim something off the top of the student’s future success.

Spectators who are just interested in kids, play, and character must practically don blinders before doing something so simple as watching a game. Screen out the school politics playing out in the sideline, screen out the banners, screen out the college scouts in their somehow distinctive outfits sitting high in the bleachers just apart from the real fans, taking notes. Screen out the student supporters who have learned the mindless, reflexive rudeness of fans at professional games whose behavior makes old timers like me cringe. Screen out the intense parents, watching their children and the coaches like birds of prey and sometimes even clocking playing kids’ time in the fear that their dreams of a “full ride” at some college will go up in smoke through either one knuckleheaded play or the suspected partiality of a coach—who is subject to pressures of his or her own. Focus on the players, their faces, their movements, their body language—focus on the actual character this vast enterprise is actually supposed to be building.

Recently I watched one of the top athletes at our school melt down after a couple of unexpected losses in an individual sport. The physical explosion was stunning, the tears and shame almost unnerving. This is a kid I know well, a kid with whom I have discussed their intense dislike of what it means to be an athlete, especially a very successful one. Highly competitive, the student doesn’t like the effect that competing has on them—mistrusts the feeling of exultation from winning, likes most opponents and is uncomfortable with the fact of head-to-head, win/lose competition with them (shades of Jane McGonigal on gaming), hates the pressure of being good enough to justify being expected to win always, rejects the adulation that comes from a kind of success that is no different in the student’s mind from the academic success that earns only some respect and never adulation. Why is sport different from anything else I do?, the student wonders. “I am me, not Me, The Athlete.” The other day the student discovered another uncomfortable side effect of being at the top: the feeling—the sense of embarrassment—of “letting down” the team and even the school that comes with losing when they “should have won.”

I have no problems with the struggles of and lessons learned by this student, not just in the meltdown but through years of hard work and good competition. But I am sad that those struggles and lessons have not made that student feel better, and more proud, about who they are—that instead the context in which they have been experienced has made the student doubtful of the value of the whole business. I am sadder still that I am capable of sharing this doubt.

Of course to the teenage mind the spotlight illuminating a bad moment or two shines more brightly than it does for anyone watching, but seeing this episode and talking with the student afterward made me realize how much of a pressure cooker school sports truly can be—and how the forces acting on contemporary school athletes pollute what used to be hailed as the “purity of sport.”

Once upon a time school sports were ways of allowing children to work off “animal spirits” or of channeling excess energy away from misbehavior. I am a fan of strange indigenous activities that have sprung up spontaneously at schools to serve just this purpose—think of school-specific twists on playground games at your own school, perhaps, or more elaborate games like Eton Fives—and I love reading stories of school sports a century and more ago when teams were selected and coached by students alone.

Soon enough, of course, school teams became vehicles for extending the school’s identity and brand, and athletic success became not just a matter of satisfaction to the team and student body but something of a proxy for the overall “quality” of a school. Through most school hallways the top athletes now stride like kings and queens, receiving the deference of peers and teachers and secure in the knowledge that their grades and test scores need not quite reach the level of their unathletic peers in the quest for college admission; this is no secret, whether it is any less fair or unfair than whatever advantages are conferred by being a “legacy” or an applicant in some other privileged category. (And I should add here that the student mentioned above specifically avoided the athletic recruiting process when applying to college, not wanting to claim any privilege for an activity they hold in low esteem.) Schools enthusiastically spend millions of dollars on athletic facilities while scratching their heads over the expenditure of mere tens of thousands for instructional technology, professional development, or faculty salaries.

I don’t think there’s much resolution here, and I fear that the more insidious trends are likely to become more pronounced. But I will still go to games, and as a spectator I will work hard to screen out the cultural distractions and focus on what I can read in the eyes and actions of the students—what I may see there of the character, will, creativity, and joyous asabiya of each player and each team.