Assessing Assessment

Continuing my reactions to Dawn Latta Kirby and Darren Crovitz’s book Inside Out: Strategies forTeaching Writing (for another example, check out my post on the fiveparagraph essay), I wanted to talk about the contentious topic of assessment.  Kirby and Crovitz discuss this at length, devoting an entire chapter to the issue.  They offer up many ideas on how to alter and adjust your assessment of student work, and I’d like to reflect on these ideas with particular emphasis on the strategies I would like to try in my class.

First, it is important to note that these assessment ideas pertain to the assessment of writing, but I think that many of their strategies would apply well to other areas of instruction.  In particular, I appreciate the emphasis on what is best practice for student learning.  I think that all too often, we as teachers design amazing and engaging units that provide students ample opportunity to learn only to grade the end product in a way that has no ultimate benefit to the student.  Inside Out works against this end result primarily by suggesting that we 1) deemphasize grades (p. 221) and 2) involve students in their own assessments (p. 241).  I want to focus on these two elements because I think that they encapsulate my own goals as a teacher.

First, by deemphasizing grades, the focus shifts to the process of learning.  As a student, I highly valued my grades and I got really good at “playing the game of school” where I would figure out what I needed to do to get an A rather than focusing on actually learning course materials.  This did not impact me much in the classes I was truly interested in, but those that I did not naturally gravitate toward ended up being courses I scored well in but learning nothing.  I think that it is safe to assume that not all of our students are going to naturally love writing.  Therefore, it seems especially important that we emphasize progress and process in their writing.  By taking the sole grade away from the final result, you reward students who work steadily to improve their work while simultaneously disincentivizing those last minute papers.

The idea of deemphasizing grades ties in nicely with involving students in their own assessments.  As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my biggest goals as an educator is for my students to be able to assess their own writing.  If they are able to do this, they have mastered the understanding of what makes a piece of writing good.  This deemphasizes grades because the students will not be looking to me (and the grade I give) to know if their paper has value.  Further, I think that students should be involved in determining what makes a good paper.  By soliciting input from students on what they think is most important in evaluating written work, not only will they know what you expect from them in their work, but they will also increase their understanding of what constitutes good writing.

Ultimately, I think that our grading process needs to be reflective of our teaching practice.  If we teach our students to be critical thinkers and value their thoughts and opinions in class discussions, but take off more points for surface errors than we reward for actual content, the message students receive from that grade serves to undo the good work we have done in class.  Instead, by working with students to develop their writing ability and the grading criteria, they will see the value of their work and the process of learning.

Teacher resource: Check out this great graphic on ways to engage/redirect students who are off task! I love the variety of ideas, giving you plenty of options to tailor for each student.

Talking (Online) to Learn

In my current courses, we have been discussing the importance of dialogue in the classroom.  Inspiring Dialogue emphasizes the importance of enabling students to engage in discussion and dialogue in the class as opposed to teacher lecture and recitation.  The key idea in this book is that students are talking to learn.  That is, they work out ideas as a class and as individuals by discussing them and giving voice to their thoughts.  The teacher’s role then becomes that of facilitator.  What becomes of this idea, however, when we begin to integrate media and digital literacies into our classroom?  When the idea of new literacies was introduced to me, I worried that students would lose a great amount of value that the interactions in class discussions provides.  However, Richard Beach and Candace Doerr-Stevens address this point and assuage my fears in their article, “Learning Argument Practices Through Online Role-Play: Toward a Rhetoric of Significance and Transformation.”

Beach and Doerr-Stevens depict the issues of the typical form of argument in a high school classroom as consisting of an artificial argumentative essay.  The artifice lies in the fact that true argument allows for rebuttal and changing views.  Even in a debate, the object is less to learn than it is to win.  Problematically, by placing students at opposite sides, community in the class is replaced with competition.  When this happens, neither side wins.  Instead, the authors argue in favor of online, collaborative argument.  This concept seems to mirror the ideas from Inspiring Dialogue, but in an online format.  Students work together to discuss issues, raise concerns, and address points of disagreement.  Through this, whether online or in person, students are able to come to a greater understanding of whatever issue they are discussing, and they are also able to see multiple perspectives, allowing them to reassess their own opinions and ideas.

The virtues of online discussion are manifold.  Not only does it create a collaborative community of learners, but students are able to interact with an immediacy that is not available in face to face interactions because of the potential multi-modalities and hyperlinks within a given post or comment.  Further, the potential reach of online postings gives students increased motivation to exceed expectations.  Finally, there is great opportunity for these posts to provide students with tangible, real world outcomes.  The online community makes affecting change more accessible for students, and focusing on a real world issue can also provide students with even greater motivation to learn and engage.

What I like about the way Beach and Doerr-Stevens talk about implementing technology in the classroom is that it is truly integrated; it is not merely a tacked on assignment to say that you used technology for technology’s sake.  The blogs and forums used for class become an extension of the classroom discussions and dialogues in which students are engaged, allowing them to delve deeper into their thoughts and opinions.  This method likewise seems to be a perfect combination of the dialogic discourse that I want to utilize in my classroom and the instruction of writing.  Further, the students become involved in their own assessments.  By engaging with their classmates, raising issues and opposing points, and responding to these ideas, students work together to improve their writing and argumentative skills.  They begin to be the judges of what constitutes good writing.  Ultimately, that is my biggest goal for my students.  I want them to be able to leave my class and evaluate for themselves if their writing is good.  I won’t be there to grade their papers before they turn them in to a college professor; they need to be able to perform assessments themselves.  Blogging and online forums might just be one place to start.

Teacher Resource:

If you're looking into Smart board technology in your classroom, this is a great place to start!  You can search by subject area, standards, or even share your own ideas.  There are lots of templates and lesson ideas for you to use!  (I really like the koosh ball idea...)

The End of the Five Paragraph Essay?

The five paragraph essay: a dreaded but inevitable piece of writing for many high school students.  Despite ever-shifting state and national standards, the prevalence of the five paragraph essay (FPE) in high school English classes has endured.  However, it seems as though the FPE leaves many students unprepared for writing beyond high school.  As Patricia A Dunn writes in her blog, Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care, many college writing instructors indicate that students enter their classrooms solely prepared to write expository essays.  These students simply lack the skills to express themselves through narrative.  

This issue is briefly taken on by Dawn Latta Kirby in her book, Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing.  Here, Kirby indicates that there has been far too great an emphasis on the FPE.  To teachers who protest that testing standards require mastery of the FPE, Kirby indicates that test scores are not the sole judge of good writing, nor should they be the sole aim of our instruction (131).  Kirby encourages her readers to “engage in conversation with . . . colleagues to learn what you and they really think about FPEs” (131), and so that is exactly what I will do.

I agree with much of what Kirby writes (I was especially on board for the third chapter of Inside Out, which discusses building community within your classroom and developing a welcoming environment.  Not surprising, considering how obsessed I am with this website that lets you design your own classroom posters!), and I do think that writing in schools can often become too formulaic.  However, I think she comes down a little too hard on the FPE.  While Kirby acknowledges that FPEs are a building block for basic writing (131-132), she dismisses it as writing that stymies creative thought and even seems to attribute the prevalence of plagiarism to the constrictive, high stakes nature associated with the FPE (132).

In my opinion, the five paragraph essay is a critical writing form for students to know.  The FPE exam is not exclusive to English class alone, and knowing how to quickly formulate a thesis and supporting points is a crucial step for students who are limited to a 50 minute exam time in, for instance, their social studies class.  Would I love for all of my future colleagues to abandon high stakes testing and formulaic essay prompts?  Sure!  Making a portfolio or engaging in some other performance of knowledge is a much better demonstration of mastery than a pressure cooker exam.  However, the reality is that many high school teachers, college professors, and various exams (the GRE, LSAT, and MTLE to name a few) require quick writing that they expect to be at least organized and coherent if not in the FPE form exactly.  To not equip our students for this does them a disservice.

I agree with Kirby, however, that only teaching the FPE and teaching it rigidly also does our students a disservice.  Instead, I would advocate that students can use the FPE creatively.  Injecting humor, description, and narrative into a FPE can enhance and improve student writing.  The ideal FPE draws on both the formulaic and the creative: transition words help keep the reader on track while vivid imagery helps keep the reader engaged.  Organization and formula do not necessarily preclude creativity.  The two worlds can work together. 

It seems as though the FPE is here to stay, so I think that it would behoove us to focus at least some of our energy on learning not just how to teach the FPE, but how to teach it well so that student thinking doesn’t die along with their interest in writing.

What are your thoughts on the FPE?

Painting Poetry

A little while back, I had the opportunity to co-design and co-teach a week long course at a local charter school.  My co-teacher and I decided to teach a class about art and poetry, with the enduring understanding that you can interpret things in many, many ways. 

Students worked on a number of projects including a cut-out word poem, making art inspired by famous poems, and making a poem inspired by a famous piece of art.  The unit culminated in a "gallery opening" during which students presented an original poem and an interrelated original part piece.

I was amazed at the insights these students had!  The art and poems they created were terrific, and the whole unit was a blast. 

I felt like the lesson really came through one day when I was instructing the students to make a piece of art inspired by a poem.  One student said to me, "but how can you make a piece of art inspired by the poem when the poem is already a form of art?"  (A fifth grader, friends!)  Well said!  Art can be poetry and poetry can be art!

Welcome!

Hi everyone!  This is a brand new blog for me, and I'm so excited to start it!

The name, I know, looks a little weird.  So, let me tell you about it.  I am on track to become a licensed English teacher, 5-12, in Minnesota by summer, 2014.  So, the blog title is a combination of my last name (yes, it starts with K-v-i, and no, I'm not forgetting any letters) and my subject area, English: Kvinglish!  Pronounced: Kuh-VING-glish

Welcome!

I'll be posting sporadically here with various course design ideas, projects, assignments, etc. as they come up in my classes.  Please feel free to use these ideas as you instruct your own classes!  I just ask that you do not reproduce my work on your own blog or other publication without permission.

Stay tuned...