Week 4 = Epiphany through Teaching Learning Assessment

June 23, 2011 – I came across this while reading the agenda for Week 4:

“Words like "tests" and "examinations" have well established connotations of evaluating a student's possession of knowledge. We need a different process, and a new language, to identify how to assess a student's capability for using and applying knowledge. Education of an individual, understood in terms of developing a capability for using and applying one's knowledge, cannot be adequately assessed by traditional testing. Grading on a curve, which sorts students into groups for administrative purposes, says nothing about how each student is using his or her project solving talents or growing toward their potential.” (Rice, 2009)

I would sum up that the above quote is saying assessments are a gateway to teaching students not a final judgment of their worth in a classroom.

I also had a colleague send me this link to a video about changing the education paradigm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

The combination of these two things lead me to the thought that: it is the instructor’s job, when writing assessments to first determine what is being assessed and how do we measure that success. It is also the instructor’s job to build an effective curriculum to solve the problems in which our students will face.

In other words, here are the three main focal points for a teacher when dealing with assessment:

1. Locate the problem you want the students to solve and build that into authentic situational learning.
2. Use or build an assessment to facilitate the need of the aforementioned problem.
3. Re-evaluate the need to re-teach or continue exercises in a particular area by determining whether or not you we measuring the correct success.

I’m very interested in looking through the RSA site (http://www.thersa.org/) which I discovered through the YouTube video above. Just a quick skim allowed me to see a philosophy I whole-heartedly agree with, the philosophy of innovative education. I believe education as a whole alienates kids when they don’t allow them to search for the answer. It is much more important the student makes the journey than they come up with the “grand 1 answer” to any question asked by the teacher.

Just through this study I feel much more comfortable trying new things in my classroom and doing more projects as well. During my first full year of teaching I found I had a lot of unique (my students would say weird) lessons and things they never expected to do in school. For example: we used Microsoft Word to format an original screenplay and award speech for our “(insert name of school here) Academy Awards.”

I guess I am now more accepting of being a “weird teacher” after today.