Assessment. When you look the word up in a dictionary, invariably definition #1 deals with taxes. But -- one thing I learned over the last few days -- when you look to the etymology, the Latin assesus means "seated beside".
That's one of the many things I learned at the Assessment Ready Conference. Thanks goes to Anne Davies and Sandra Herbst, facilitators extraordinaire for the above gem and many more.
I love that picture. Sitting beside is such a rich picture when it comes to assessment in the teacher-student relationship for so many reasons. For one thing, it's a picture of teacher not only as coach, personally invested in the pupil's learning. It's also a picture of teacher as potential learner. I know when I've taken the risk of teaching on the fly -- sitting alongside my students -- with the content, as opposed to knowing exactly what I want them to learn and subsequently teaching it, I end up learning. Some of the greatest insights I've gained into the literature I've taught, for example, have come through sitting beside my students without an agenda.
The other definition they gave us of assessment was "finding the truth" of where a student is. I found that quite powerful too, because, when you strip away the many layers of the genuinely latest and greatest in education -- character ed., critical thinking, differentiation, and so on -- isn't so much of it really about finding the truth of where the students in front of you are in the context of the curriculum? And using that information to help move them forward?
Other Key Learning:
- co-create criteria
- clarify what the curriculum big ideas are
- show students what quality work looks like
- be careful with rubrics; they can show students how to get 51%
- teachers' professional judgement is more reliable and valid than external tests when they have been involved in examining student work, co-construction criteria, scoring the work, and checking for inter-rater reliability....
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