Walking the Assessment Talk

I wrote yesterday about working on fractions as a gatekeeper of mathematical knowledge, and it came back to hit me in the face in class mere hours later. I gave my students a check in task, asking them to share with me how they were doing with the content that we had been engaging with. My struggle is that it didn’t match at all with the kinds of collaborative tasks that we had been doing in class, and some kids really felt it. One kid in particular left this message on his page:

I am heartbroken. This speaks to everything that I have been trying to work against in my classroom, and here we are. This one has taken his struggles with the content and internalized it with his identity as a person. This cannot be. We cannot allow our students to equate their success on an ultimately trivial task become their identity.

It also brought back to me the why of this assessment. Why did I give this task at this time to these students? Did I feel that they were ready for it based on the work that they had shown me? Or did I just come up in the schedule for the day. In my heart, I know that I gave it because it was on the schedule, and not because we had the evidence that it was time. I didn’t have a good answer for the why of this learning task. I didn’t put into practice the principles of assessment that I so passionately write about and talk about it, and it came out in this message from this learner.

Assessment needs to match the learning — we need to be consistent. And when our instructional strategies and philosophy and assessment philosophy don’t match up, we’re in for explosions in our classroom. This is a prime example of assessment and instruction butting heads. And an example of me missing the mark. This learner wasn’t ready; and I’d wager that many of my other learners weren’t ready for this task either, but I didn’t stop and consider that. My walk didn’t match my talk.

We must reconcile these aspects of our classrooms. Our classrooms are built on the foundation of our assessment pedagogy, and layered with our instructional pedagogy. We will always have this mismatch until we address and are upfront about what we truly believe about assessment.

Now I have the opportunity to turn this around, and to help my learners answer the big three questions:

1. Where am I now? 2. Where am I going? 3. How will I get there.

This is walking the talk.