Читать книгу Assessing with Respect - Starr Sackstein - Страница 8

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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

When I signed on to write this book, times were different. Although I believed strongly that assessment and the social and emotional needs of our students needed to be tied together, I couldn't possibly have predicted the way the world would turn in the months that followed.

Living in social-distancing isolation because of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an eye-opening experience. Emotionally, I've been all over the place, sometimes inside of an hour, feeling anxiety about the unknown, fear about loved ones, concern for my son and coworkers—not to mention the sometimes debilitating lack of motivation because of circumstances beyond my control.

And yet I'm among the privileged—and always have been, despite what may have felt like momentous impediments that life has thrown my way and the silent, not-so-obvious home situations that my teachers probably didn't know about, as I worked so hard to conceal them. School was my sanctuary from the challenges I experienced at home, and despite the zip code I grew up in and the support of a two-parent household, challenges did exist.

Now I have access to the internet, several electronic devices, a car, a home, enough food, and not least of all, my health and a supportive, available family. My job is essential and can be done safely from home. Perhaps I haven't been eating or sleeping as well as I could be, and that has an impact on my ability to work effectively. In fact, this situation has made it hard for me to write. Writing, one of those things that has always been a stabilizer and has come easily to me, has become something I will never take for granted again. And, in the way we don't appreciate those things that do come easily, I've often wondered during this experience if this is how my students felt when they were asked to write but simply couldn't.

Our students, colleagues, and their families may not have the benefits that are more common among the privileged, and therefore, how we relate to one another has to be from a place of empathy and care, not judgment. Beyond empathy, however, there needs to be a profound acknowledgment that, although we try to truly understand the experiences of others, the depth of the challenges that many individuals, including people of color, have faced is beyond intellectual comprehension. We must continue to question, remain curious, and try to be better supporters and allies of our fellow human beings.

As an educator, a mom, and a human being, I've watched school systems struggle to meet the needs of all learners while often not having the resources, including training, to do an adequate job on any level. This is not the fault of families or individual educators, but a systemic cancer that has been plaguing schools in the United States for a long time; the COVID-19 pandemic simply illuminated the elephant in the room that not enough people had acknowledged.

Although we are all invested in helping students learn, we haven't always done a good job of considering all of the aspects of how and why that happens. What are the optimal conditions for learning to occur in an authentic and meaningful way for all students? How do we ensure, as educators at every level, as well as systemically, that we are doing everything we can to equitably attend to the needs of all children, as they deserve to be nurtured? Have we considered our own privilege and how that colors our ability to help those who need our help most? Whose voices are we listening to, and why?

The means by which we assess our students says a great deal about what we value and also shines a light on who stands to gain the most from those values. As educators, we must be cognizant of who is making decisions and what the implications of those decisions are for the way we assess and then label our students, in turn creating a path of potential paralysis. In other words, when we label our students, we pigeonhole them, sometimes making it impossible for them to transcend the labels. They hear what we tell them, internalize it, and then believe that this who they are, for better or for worse.

This book is intended to help leaders and other educators consider their assessment practices within a context of teaching social and emotional skills so that students develop positive learning dispositions and systems honor the dignity of the learning of all students. Our goal should not be to test and grade children to put them in a hierarchy for potential future roles of dominance or subordination—or even for the sake of sheer efficiency. It is our responsibility as educators to see children in a holistic sense and find ways that best allow them to be successful.

I have learned through researching this book that some people are critically examining social and emotional learning (SEL), and that critique has merit. Keeping in mind the Common Core, trying to develop standards around social and emotional skills becomes problematic when we all have different definitions for things like "self-management" and "regulation." The National Equity Project has resources that are helpful in working through this language and coming to understanding. And as educators, we also have to be cognizant of critically questioning the things we read and do and consider what the impact is on the marginalized folks we work with, trying as hard as possible to not cause further harm.

My background in alternative assessment and assessment reform coupled with my research on social and emotional learning has made it clear to me that we have to take a deeper look into this important overlap. During my research, I came across the following five core SEL competencies developed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2020):

 Self-awareness concerns our ability to recognize our feelings, name them, and then identify the impact they have on our ability to learn, connect, react, and so on. In terms of assessment, self-awareness comes in the form of reflection and students' ability to articulate what they know and can do using evidence from their learning. Helping students understand where they are in their learning helps them better inform us about what they need.

 Self-management involves the regulation of our feelings and our ability to organize and motivate. This is where we think about goal setting and accountability. Building on reflection, students are able to take feedback from formative learning experiences and apply it to their own goal setting. This is how we teach students to track their learning, set goals, and develop an understanding of self-assessment.

 Social awareness is about perspective and our ability to empathize. Additionally, it is about cultural awareness and diversity, and in the case of education, matters of equity. In the assessment realm, social awareness is about feedback and assessment from peers. As we teach students to work with one another and build better learning environments, we create an intentional space where challenging conversations can be had and we can all grow as learners. The way we respond to people and provide feedback should align with what we understand of them as whole individuals.

 Relationship skills involve building sustainable and healthy relationships that connect us to one another. Collaboration and communication are key to this competency. In our classrooms and in assessment conversations in particular, this competency is all about how we facilitate students working together, giving them the tools to problem-solve and listen to one another's voices with empathy and commitment to understanding. By creating an atmosphere in which students have multiple opportunities to dive deeply into these relationship skills, we prepare them for a life of easier communication with the people they will work with in the future.

 Responsible decision making is all about making good choices by being able to take stock of situations and consider possible outcomes. It is about identifying issues, problem solving, reflecting, and taking action. For assessment, this competency involves helping students identify what must be done and providing opportunities to help them make better choices. Rather than stepping in when students don't agree, we can allow them to work through disagreements and then reflect on how those conversations helped to improve or hinder their learning. Additionally, this competency will be a part of project-based learning, as students will need to not only manage their time, but also help their teams be successful.

SEL has come under scrutiny from people of color, as several of the practices can continue to marginalize students. Because of this concern, people have begun to explore CASEL's framework through a lens of equity. A November 2018 Frameworks Brief from the Assessment Work Group (managed and staffed by CASEL) states:

Consistent with the pursuit of educational equity, we recently offered the concept of transformational SEL to reflect our interest in making explicit issues such as power, privilege, prejudice, discrimination, social justice, empowerment, and self-determination in the field of SEL. Transformative SEL connotes a process whereby students and teachers build strong, respectful relationships founded on an appreciation of similarities and differences, learn to critically examine root causes of inequity, and develop collaborative solutions to community and societal problems. (Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Borowski, 2018, p. 3) (emphasis in original)

CASEL's core competencies for social and emotional learning align with Costa and Kallick's (2014) dispositions for learning, which define a number of mental habits that help us with competencies and life in general. All these things can and should be taught and need to be an integral part of how we work with students of all ages to ensure a culture of belonging, as suggested by Cobb and Krownapple's (2019) "dignity framework" in their book Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity. Once we determine the needs of our students, build a culture of belonging, and honor the dignity of those we teach as well as those of us doing the teaching, we can begin to build better learning environments where students can flourish and assessment can be more comprehensive.

In this book, Chapters 1 through 4 address the CASEL competencies and their overlap with what schools need to be doing to better assess learning while promoting the social and emotional well-being of students. The chapters also provide classroom strategies for building these whole-child learning and assessing experiences, keeping in mind that assessment consists not only of end-of-unit exams or summative writing assignments, but also everyday formative experiences. Chapters 5 and 6 address the topics of grades and personalized assessment, respectively.

It's important to remember that assessment is not a static thing, but an action—an ongoing formative process that we engage in continually to ensure all students are getting what they need. It is an educator's responsibility to assess students for learning on a daily basis. Doing so is as important for teachers as it is for students. Students need to be able to discuss what they know and can do and how they know it, and we need to be able to see how well our instruction is working and what we need to adjust so that all students can learn effectively. Grades, like tests, are only one part of the story—a small part that ends up getting magnified for ease of discussion. These summative experiences often shed little light on what kids know and can do—and worse, they seldom contribute to future learning.

Feedback, reflection, and personalized approaches to learning that take into account the needs of each student are what truly develop effective learners. These strategies provide ongoing opportunities for students to apply new knowledge and feedback, to practice, to set goals, and to develop skill sets and content knowledge with the help of teachers and peers. This approach is what we need to be focusing on.