Читать книгу Softening the Edges - Katie White - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
Shortly after I began working as an educational consultant, I was driving to the airport with a colleague after we had spent three days facilitating a session on assessment with a large group of teachers. It had been challenging work, and I was trying to make sense of the experience by talking it through with my colleague. I was mostly concerned with how challenged the participants seemed to feel about the assessment design processes we were working through. They seemed burdened by so many stresses—multiple sets of standards; state testing as well as district assessments; and learners who were coming to school hungry, tired, and disengaged. Discussing assessment as an essential component of the learning process seemed to really challenge their beliefs about the work they were doing and their roles as educators.
As a Canadian, I was also trying to make sense of the education paradigm in the United States and the implications of this paradigm on my message and my facilitation. My colleague patiently explained the history of U.S. education reform and the resulting assessment reform. It was a long drive to the airport, and we talked through many important aspects of our work. My own experiences in coming to understand assessment had been personally and professionally challenging, and I already had a sense of the difficult nature of this topic, but I began to see that assessment was truly loaded with misunderstanding and harsh realities for teachers and students.
As we drove, we passed through rock formations alongside the highway. The light shifted over the red igneous cliff faces as approaching rain clouds began to alter the shadows along the edges of the stone. It made me think of the lines and edges that our education system has created in relation to assessment; the rules and processes that, to many teachers, seem static and non-negotiable. I started to think about the shifting effects of light on the edges of the rock, depending on the time of day, the weather, or the perspective of the viewer, and I began to wonder if it were possible to shift our view of assessment in the same way—by changing the conditions under which it is viewed and by changing the perspectives of the viewers. Would these kinds of shifts soften the edges of our relationship with assessment? Would they change how we see assessment and how our students experience it?
On that drive with my colleague, I began to recognize that assessment had taken on a solid form in the minds of the teachers with whom we had worked. It was a thing, an entity. It seemed vast and unmanageable all at the same time. It seemed like when teachers interacted with it, they felt a small pain, as if cut by the edge of the practice itself. I began to think that the work we were doing with these teachers was to take this hard edge of assessment and round it or smooth it out, so when teachers began to work with it, it would no longer hurt. I knew we needed to shift the perception of assessment as a thing into assessment as a process. We had to take that hard line or edge and turn it into something that was approachable, flexible, and manageable. Like a carpenter sands the edge of a table before inviting people to eat at it, like an artist skillfully blends a hard line into a soft transition between land and sky, or like a chef adds a spoonful of sugar to the vinegar to make the sauce less acidic, we were trying to invite changes or additions to assessment practices that softened the edges by addressing the needs of both teachers and students in the service of learning. By doing so, we were supporting the development of an assessment paradigm that is approachable, gentle, and not at all overwhelming.
The Metaphor
This book is about eliminating hard edges from our assessment practices and inviting soft edges through considered choices. It is about shifting the idea of assessment as an entity separate from learning to assessment as a process, integral to growth and development, and flowing in and out of the learning experience. Just as carpenters, artists, and chefs make the choice to soften the edges between two things in order to neutralize extremes, refine sensations, or create impressions of seamless transition, so too do educators. However, instead of sanding off edges of wood, blending land with sky, or mixing vinegar with sugar, teachers have the opportunity to blend their assessment decisions with the commitment to nurture and support both their own and their learners’ needs. When assessment practices align with the intellectual, emotional, physical, and social needs of the people involved in the assessment relationship, soft edges exist. In contrast, hard edges form when some or all of these critical needs go unaddressed throughout the assessment process, and without careful adjustment, those hard edges will derail even the strongest assessment practices.
During assessment processes, when we consider the needs of our students beyond the intellectual realm, we are attending to the whole student. Addressing the multiple needs of our learners is not new to teachers—we often provide food and school supplies to students who need it; we ensure consistency and safety within the walls of our classrooms; we provide exercise and rest in balanced proportions. Despite this, considering emotional, physical, and social needs is often not part of a discourse on assessment. However, if we do not attend to all parts of a learner while assessing, we can engage in practices that may be designed to support intellectual development, but instead infringe on a student’s emotional or social safety and undermine any gains in intellectual development we may have made.
The terms hard edges and soft edges are metaphors for the degree of alignment that exists among the beliefs, values, and needs of educators and learners, and the ways assessment is experienced in classroom spaces. The metaphor speaks directly to the relationship between the whole person and assessment. When the edges are softened, assessment practices blend one learning experience into the next and allow students to feel smooth transitions, growing confidence, and recursive content and skill development. Softened edges allow both learners and educators to relax into the learning, adjusting and reflecting as needed and responding within a context of trust and support. Learning to recognize the hard and soft edges of classroom assessment experiences will invite both teachers and students to examine their roles, beliefs, and actions and redesign everyday assessment practices to meet the intellectual, physical, social, and emotional needs of all of those in a classroom.
When we engage in processes we don’t fully understand or we implement practices we don’t fully accept, we can feel frustrated, resentful, confused, and unheard. These emotions indicate a hard edge, and both teachers and students can feel these hard edges in classroom experiences. When the edges are hard, we have likely infringed on some aspect of the whole self and, without intention, may have caused emotional harm, social challenge, or intellectual difficulty to ourselves or our learners. For example, when we preassess and see students’ confidence suffer, we know that in our attempt to support their intellectual growth, we have inadvertently challenged their emotional safety and formed a hard edge. The pain students may feel when encountering a practice they don’t understand may be sharp and unexpected.
As a result of encountering many small hard edges over time, students may feel marginalized or voiceless in assessment and instructional practices. They may not have been given time to make sense of what was happening to them in their learning environments. They have become part of a story but have no agency in designing the plot, and this, in turn, impacts their emotional and intellectual well-being. At times, students may feel there is a difference between what they understand about themselves and how their classroom experiences reflect their skills and knowledge. This can result in a lack of growth and engagement and indicate a hard edge.
This lack of student growth and engagement, in turn, creates a hard edge for teachers because learners are not invested in the processes we have designed and our need for efficacy is challenged. When trying to determine whether an assessment has developed a hard edge, we can ask ourselves if some aspects of our design choices are impacting our own emotional, intellectual, physical, or social safety. Are students invested in the learning we have so carefully crafted? Are we spending more time grading papers than our learners spend reading our feedback? Are we discouraged by the lack of progress students are showing?
When we are caught in a cycle of hard edges, something will have to shift to soften things for everyone and ensure our assessment architecture supports all aspects of the whole person. Assessment architecture refers to “a layout of the plan teachers will use to monitor learning throughout a unit of study” (All Things Assessment, 2016a). By attending to the diverse needs of our learners and ourselves, we can ensure that our blueprint for assessment is flexible enough to address needs as they arise but thoughtful enough to accomplish the intellectual growth we are intending to develop.
Whether modifying existing assessment tools and approaches or creating them anew, the practices explored in this book are intended to either remove a hard edge or create a soft edge of learning and offer empathic approaches to classroom assessment and reporting that honor the intellectual, physical, emotional, and social needs of both teachers and students. To further clarify these concepts, see table I.1 for select indicators of soft and hard edges.
Table I.1: Indicators of Hard and Soft Edges
| Hard Edges | Soft Edges |
| • Teachers, students, or both feel boxed in by a practice. • Teachers, students, or both suffer emotional pain as a result of a practice. • A teacher’s or student’s sense of self and intellectual, physical, emotional, or social capacity are diminished by a practice. • Teachers, students, or both feel helpless as a result of a practice. • Teachers, students, or both feel a separation between who they are and what they do. | • Assessment processes invite flexibility, responsiveness, and creativity for teachers and students. • Assessment practices support investment, compassion, and optimism for teachers and students. • Teachers and students experience efficacy and agency in decisions about their own actions. • Teachers’ and students’ voices are heard, and physical, emotional, intellectual, and social needs are met. |
All students have a learning story. These stories are powerful because they represent an accumulation of all the learning experiences a student has had over time. Each day is a page in this story, each year a chapter. The main character in the learning story is the child, and teachers are the supporting characters who ensure the plot is filled with achievement, efficacy, and empowerment. Ultimately, we want to support a story of learning that contains the right balance of success and challenge, wonder and consistency, creativity and competence.
When we establish a strong understanding of what we are trying to accomplish in our school system, we are better able to meet the diverse needs of both teachers and learners and support the creation of a positive learning story. This means we design actions that reflect this understanding and create classrooms that offer students the voice and confidence they deserve. This, in turn, supports the teachers who will walk alongside learners as they develop their learning stories.
The stories of the teacher matter, too. When the edges are softened in our assessment practices, we no longer feel boxed in or helpless, scrambling to defend a grade or explain a reporting decision, because we can take control of our assessment and the instructional decisions that emerge from the information we gather. We feel capable of describing our philosophical beliefs, and we can make sure our everyday practices align with these beliefs. We experience flexibility, responsiveness, and creativity. Furthermore, our practices support investment, opportunity, and hope for learners. We assert ownership of classroom experiences and build the capacity of students to be true designers of their own learning stories. In a classroom where the assessment edges are soft, all voices are heard, and everyone’s needs are met.
Softening the edges is not about going easy on students, reducing the rigor of the learning experiences we construct, or offering bonus points or easy tasks. Instead, it is about having enough respect for our learners to ask as much of them as they can give. Make no mistake—our learners can give a great deal. The potential of our students is astounding when they are met with high expectations, engaging purposes, and clarity about the strategies and skills they are working to develop. Edges are softened when the primary focus of our classroom work is to develop the relationships necessary to support risk taking, deep reflection, and passion. These qualities are as important for teachers as they are for students. A truly strong assessment and reporting system supports the development of this vision for every person in a learning space.
We want all learners to leave our school system filled with background information, strong skill sets, resilience, confidence, and the determination to accomplish whatever they decide will occupy their days. We cannot facilitate these goals by going easy on students. We can’t develop these attributes by making school a series of meaningless tasks for inauthentic purposes (grades) and a single audience (the teacher). We also cannot hope to nurture confident, independent learners by shutting them out of decision making and rendering them voiceless. We have to believe in our students so deeply that we refuse to accept less than their best. We have to believe in ourselves to accomplish this very complex vision for each learner. To do less and be less is simply not an option.
The Audience
While Softening the Edges very specifically explores ways to address these issues, it is not intended as an introduction to assessment. There are many other sources that introduce the fundamentals of assessment thoroughly (for example, Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, & Arter, 2012; Davies, 2011; Guskey, 2015; O’Connor, 2007; and Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). For additional works, please refer to “References and Resources” beginning on page 205. Instead, Softening the Edges is for teachers who have been dabbling in unpacking or unwrapping learning goals but may not feel completely comfortable utilizing this work for real-life learning. It is for educators who have tried preassessments and formative assessments and experienced some discomfort or frustration at the way they affected students and the time they seemed to take away from learning. This book is for teachers who have tried many research-based practices but feel some challenge to align them with the reality in their classrooms. It is for teachers with experience in the world of assessment.
Educators know that teaching involves much more than simply spending time with students. To make classrooms run smoothly and productively, teachers must research, plan, instruct, assess, and respond to student needs. At times, even the most careful planning does not anticipate in-the-moment needs of learners or interruptions to the schedule of the day (assemblies, announcements). The skills required to meet the needs of diverse learners within a school environment are astoundingly complex. It is challenging to be a teacher.
A common experience for many educators involves spending most of their time out of the classroom planning units, preparing upcoming lessons, and assessing completed student work. Understandably, it is difficult to also find time to engage in a growing body of literature that attempts to capture and define good teaching. Staying on top of research is challenging, and sorting through a myriad of suggestions, tips, techniques, and studies can be a daunting task for time-pressed teachers. Teachers may explore this research under hurried circumstances, with little time for thinking deeply about the implications of the information or experimenting with the most effective ways to apply the ideas in a classroom setting.
As a result, teachers work through processes that administrative directives require and approaches they have been introduced to in conferences, workshops, or other professional learning sessions, perhaps without fully understanding the reasons for doing so. Classrooms can become a patchwork of techniques and strategies, with little opportunity to reflect, refine, and redo. Understandably, teachers may feel disengaged with initiatives and disenfranchised by mandates. Everything can feel isolated and separate, conveying a sense of things piling up as opposed to fitting together.
Even for experienced educators, the challenge remains that our classrooms are filled with an infinite number of variables. This is the nature of human work. Labeling an approach as the approach just doesn’t suffice. Each approach may be helpful, depending on the circumstances and needs of the people involved. Perhaps the most important thing to do, for both ourselves and our students, is to sort out what we believe about learning and the purpose of school. This book takes the position that any decision we make inside our classrooms has to emerge from our values, beliefs, and needs. It has to honor who our learners are as whole people, and who we are as their teachers.
The Teacher Voice
It is important to acknowledge that throughout this process of exploring our craft within the classroom context, our identities as teachers will shift when we step outside comfortable practices and try new things. This changing perception of who we are within our work impacts the choices we make every day. Like our students, we bring our own previous experiences, prior knowledge, and life circumstances to our role. We have the same need for empathy and compassion. We need opportunity and time for reflection. Our whole person must be nurtured and our voices must be heard. Ken Robinson (2015) explains, “There is no system of education in the world that is reliably better than its teachers” (p. 264). When the education system ignores teacher voice, it becomes increasingly challenging to feel like we have a voice at all. We may begin to question the need for risk taking and research, for reflection and discussion. However, when we minimize our own thoughts and ideas, we minimize our voice, which ultimately deprofessionalizes the work of educators as a whole.
D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly (2000) describe a classroom as a shared space. It is a place where stories are lived in a shared, but private environment. Alongside that notion is the idea that teachers and students are continually building a classroom culture that is very personal to those within that room. Relationships serve as the foundation, and practices become comfortable and predictable; everyone learns the rules of engagement, including the teachers.
The primary challenge with this model of education is that as teachers, we are not often afforded the chance to reflect on our practices with others. Clandinin and Connelly (1995) explain, “What is missing in the classroom is a place for teachers to tell and retell their stories of teaching” (p. 13). Without this opportunity to reflect and collaborate with others, we are left to manage the effect our work has on our sense of who we are as educators. Making time each day to meet with colleagues and share struggles and celebrations can often be enough to move us into our next round of risk taking and reflection. Documenting, together, the results of new practices and approaches can invite an increasingly sophisticated understanding of our assessment practices.
Teaching is incredibly complex, and educators are relentlessly asked to change practices, to shift beliefs, and often to do it alone. Our voices are not always heard and certainly not considered when many decisions are being made by district, state, or national leaders. Regardless of the intention of their decisions (to improve learning, to increase accountability, to enhance available resources, to reduce spending), these decisions impact us and our students. Carol Ann Tomlinson, Kay Brimijoin, and Lane Narvaez (2008) identify the unexpected degree of emotional response to change:
We are unaware of or unprepared to deal with the implications of change in classroom practice. We tend to deal with the change on a superficial level, tend to neglect fidelity to the change, and are often unprepared to deal with the fear, tension, loss, and conflict that inevitably accompany change. (p.11)
The absence of opportunity to reflect on our experiences and tell our stories means our ability to change and still retain a strong teaching identity is challenged. If we are left to manage on our own in the shared spaces we create with our students, we do not have the opportunity to hear the voices of others. In circumstances where isolation is the norm, we could then ask which voices have the most volume. Do we most strongly hear the voices of administrators and the initiatives they deliver? Is it the voice of the students and their needs we attend to most, or is it the voice of our own experiences and identity heard most clearly? In the midst of change and shifting practices, being given the opportunity to listen to multiple voices gives us much-needed support for exploring who we are.
Softening the edges requires finding the time to reflect on our own processes within our school context and refine them in alignment with our personal philosophies about teaching and learning. Advocating for the need to do this may be difficult, but it is an essential aspect of change and growth. Richard DuFour (2015) says, “We have yet to establish a cultural norm in which working and learning are interwoven, ensuring educators are continuing to grow and learn as part of their routine work practice” (p. 79). Supporting ourselves and each other on our own learning journeys is vital for equipping us to do the same for the learners in our classrooms. We have to make time to slow things down and explore classroom moments a little—clean off the dirt of stories, egos, and daily stimuli, and see what is underneath. We need time to contemplate the significance of our classroom experiences to better understand ourselves as teachers.
Giving educators the opportunity to develop assessment practices that serve our need to learn who our students are and respond with confidence, accuracy, and integrity is another way of softening the edges. It honors the important relationship between teachers and students and respects the teachers’ responsibility to apply professional judgment to learning contexts—in essence, reprofessionalizing teaching. This requires trust in students’ learning potential and our own ability to capture that potential. If we are going to change the story of assessment in our schools, we are going to have to shift our processes. A new story cannot replace an old story without time to reflect and alter things bit by bit.
To work toward softening the edges, teachers must be invited to work together to come to collective understanding and shared purpose. Creating common collaborative assessments and working together to analyze student work and determine the next steps on the learning journey is a highly empowering practice that also has the benefit of greater student learning. Over time, collaborating and reflecting allows our practices to be more efficient and effective. Slowing down for a while means speeding up overall. Creating a collective clarity in our practice empowers us, as individuals, to invite change, creativity, and wonder in our shared classrooms. Teachers need the chance to experiment together and determine the effects on learning, learners, and their own well-being. Collaboration and reflection practices are essential to softening the edges for teachers while at the same time giving teachers a voice in the midst of change.
The Structure of the Book
Softening the Edges explores assessment, focusing on aspects of the whole person and leaving room for future discussion and questions. We will consider whole as being integrated, not complete or comprehensive. This invites us to take our assessment practices, dust them off, and reimagine how they could better serve the needs of those they are intended to serve. There are many ways we can adjust our practices to support student learning while at the same time supporting our need to ensure we are making a difference.
Chapter 1 explores critical understanding about assessment, and chapter 2 introduces the learning continuum that teachers must use to ensure effective assessments that honor the whole person. Without this foundational understanding, softened edges become very difficult to establish and maintain.
The remaining chapters each explore a different aspect of assessment: preassessment (chapter 3), formative assessment and feedback (chapter 4), self-assessment and goal setting (chapter 5), summative assessment (chapter 6), and reporting (chapter 7). These chapters establish a conceptual understanding of each assessment focus and answer the question, How do I put this into action? These chapters address both background information and steps for engaging in strong assessment practices. Each of these chapters includes extensive reflection questions to consider as we embark on softening the edges of our assessment practices. The prompts can be used to reflect on assessment architecture, student responses to assessment, and personal feelings about how assessment is working in the classroom. Each of these chapters also includes two reproducibles—one to help identify practices and circumstances that can create hard edges, and another providing specific and practical recommendations for ways to ensure soft edges. Both teachers’ and students’ voices are explored, and consideration is given to the best ways to support everyone’s needs while nurturing an empowering and engaging learning environment. Readers can use these tools as quick references, to refresh their memories, or to discuss the contents during collaborative work and professional development.
Softening the Edges is about bringing out the best in our students and in ourselves by assessing well and nurturing the whole person’s needs. Let’s get started!
