#edcampottawa Session One: Alternatives to Paper and Pencil Testing &Session Two:Turning Points in Assessment

Bit of a ramble in this post as I wrote it live. Everything in this post is not thought out, everything in this post is not my thoughts, everything in this post is what I heard or said at #edcampottawa, everything is not linear (ideas are as they were heard), everything in this post is the collective of #edcampottawa. Have fun reading this. My apologies to everyone that was there as I was doing this (typing slowly) instead of truly engaging. I did this so I could share my experience so more people would see the value in #edcamp.

My dear friend @BDMcLaurin picked me up at home and we immediately started talking about a lesson study we just did about a Ball Rolling Race. The premise is that the students will investigate ball rolls to create a model and then predict which ball will win and predict how long it will take each ball to go down an 11m ramp at an angle of inclination of 3 degrees. Anyhow.....there are some problems with the design of the lesson which I have to perform this Thursday. We were discussing this. On the way we also pick up @lkpacarynuk who immediately joined the conversation. This turned into how we as teachers ask kids to "investigate" but we value the solutions from students who get the connection or result that we want out of the investigation and not the process of "investigate". And then we assess/evaluate the connection or result that we wanted. We don't assess/evaluate the process of "investigate". In fact we don't even know the criteria for "investigate". Ok so I need to co-create the criteria for the verb "investigate" with my classes.

Went to the lobby and saw a bunch of people I know: @MaryBourassa, @hfxmark (from Virginia), @mmehmatte, @LiseGaluga, @Wheeler_Laura, @rswandel, @robintg all whom I have a great deal of respect for. I am sure I have missed some people.

Here is the edcamp board.

Bruce and I are heading to lead a session about getting away from paper and pencil testing. (or at least less of it)

Session #1

Introduction of what is happening in my class (collaboration and inquiry VNPS and VRG) and what is happening in my evaluations (traditional paper and pencil test).

Bruce described a whiteboard lesson and his experience with a reflection piece that the students filled out where he prompted them with:
Reasoning and proving - What was your conjecture of the most useful function for your model? What evidence did you use?
Selecting - What tools and computational strategies did you select?
Representing - What representation(s) did you use for your model?
Reflecting - Comment on the reasonableness of your results.
Collaboration - Did your group's solution include contributions from all members? Explain.
(Other ideas for prompts would be welcome as would revisions.)
 

People inquired to him about what it looked like, how it went, how did you coach them to get ready for this type of assessment. A thought that came out was that after a few times of doing this you would have some student exemplars (student work) to show and prepare students for what you would expect. Eventually will have student samples of these type of reflections. 

Laura brought up the app show me. The thought was that this app might help with this type of assessment.

I talked about a learning journal. The thought was that students would do an activity / whiteboard lesson / solve a problem and then reflect on it in a journal on a regular basis based on the prompts above. This would happen in class. I would circulate and provide feedback on how the student might improve the journal entry. This would be practise for when they had to do it for the assessment as Bruce described above.

Lynn talked about a journal being like a paper and pencil test. That there seems to be an anti-test sentiment. I said I would still test but I was looking for something to evaluate the collaboration and inquiry that is happening with VNPS and VRG. Robin in her beautiful way prompted the elementary people to maybe give us some ideas of how they journal and prompt. Someone mentioned Marilyn Burns and her work. 

How to do all this? (this was a concern brought up by many through-out the day)

Voice recordings and a QR code might be a possibility. The students record their learning/reflection and are responsible for their learning <could be live>.

Helene offered a grade 7 example. Film one student answering a prompt to a question/problem in the hall. Then that student becomes the filmer. Then the next student becomes the filmer etc.

They found that students did not help the next student when they filmed. They also observed that the students filming were very patient waiting for responses as opposed to how we as teacher might be (read less patient). Would need to be carefully planned task/question/prompt to film.

Robin told a story of a student who failed a test. The student came in a lunch and did the question on board. She asked the student to "Tell me what you are thinking". Prompts from Robin made it very clear that the student did not know what they were doing. Turned out the mark she gave the student on the written part was actually very generous. 

It all counts. These recordings could be marked in evidence record as R1, R2 etc.

Student's marks are my professional judgement. That means it all counts. We threaten with this but does it all count?

Subtle ways where we convince students that everything counts. Spiralling allows all students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning.

Voice and choice.

Assessment turns to judgement. Judgement sometimes . Feedback has increased in a vertical class. Exit ticket. I want to hear your thinking so I can judge it. That is the trick? How to do this without influencing them. They have this idea about right answer. As opposed to process? This takes me back to my opening conversation this morning about the "process of investigating"? 

Evidence record problem-have to put a level on it. Want to just check it-instead of recording it on evidence record with a level. 

How do we do all this? Composition book or scribbler. It would matche what we see in the evidence record. (Their journal matches their evidence record)

Evidence of pictures / recordings for each student. How do you mark this. What is the mark?

VNPS pictures of student work. How does this translate to a mark.

When we say, "That is interesting." or "That is good." we stop the learning and the process. Students want to please us. Need to give non judgemental feedback-not influence or shut down their thinking. 

Maybe we ask the question and provide the answer and students justify the process to get at the answer.

Or we change the question so it has multiple solutions. i.e. we opened up the question??? (whatever that means)

Everything they do has multiple ways and it all counts and they need to explain their thinking.

Time limit -efficiency.

I spoke about this.

Ok here was my big take away. (Remember I want what is happening in my class (collaboration and inquiry VNPS and VRG) and what is happening in my evaluations (traditional paper and pencil test) to be more inline with each other.)

I want the students to journal regularly. It will be their personal space to reflect/comment/document on their learning and then they will do collaborative whiteboard tests with reflection piece (like their journal). It would be just like what the students do regularly in their journal.

I would have to build confidence in students to journal their thinking and reflections. Journal is feedback to teacher . No judging the journal.

session #2

This is definitely married to session #1. I came in late. This is where the group was at when I walked in.

Things have changed because we think someone has the right answer so we follow what they did. Then it does not work for us. This is because no one has the right answer. Conversations help a great deal. (Read Collaboration)
 

Most Teachers are working on levels. People like this. I can group students into a level on the quality of their work.

Pegging marks to a level. Some teachers are using this to convert because they are uncomfortable to give a 3 which means 70-79. So 3- is 72, 3 is 75, 3+ is 78. Things are changing.

We test with level marking. Then we give a numerical grade. In high school we stream students. Class to class evaluations are different let alone school to school. Consistency not probable. Mark should not drive our practise. Easy to get overwhelmed with assessment so teachers give up. Assessment and evaluation should be different. Assessment is to inform their learning and my teaching. Evaluation should not be important to me as a teacher for 90% of the time. 

Students are used to collaborating-then in high school we beat the collaboration out of them.

This is changing. The same could be said of teaching.

We have to believe that the teacher next door is teaching the way they teach because they believe what they are doing is the best for their students. We need to be very careful if we don't believe this.

Collaborate-share, respect the sharing!

Zone of proximal development- we need to meet students where they are at. Right - and this translates to teachers - we need to meet teachers where they are at.

Maybe it is not about the techniques of teaching/pedagogy. Maybe something else is going on. Is it personality? Is it all about the relationships?

 



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