Educational Vampires — You May Have Already Been Bitten!

The Single Skill You Can Use to Protect Yourself and Loved Ones

Atypical Education Vampire

An Ancient Threat

It happens every day in every school: every second, somewhere in the world, a student is bitten by an Educational Vampire (EV). The bite can be devastating, changing the course of learners’ lives. Their love of learning, their faith in schools, and worst of all, their belief in themselves is drained away. Stricken learners either develop into fear-driven perfectionists, cynical, reward-driven minimizers, or lethargic zombies. The last category of victims is abbreviated LZ, which is often mistaken as a label of lazy and the victims are blamed by educators for their condition.

One Type of EV Victim: Lethargic Zombie.

EVs are not new. The species evolved from Energy Vampires but with more serious effects. There is credible evidence to suggest that EVs invented the concept of schools to concentrate children in a powerless environment, to provide EVs easy access to learners’ souls.

EVs are lurking among us with even more systematized approaches to draining the life from our students, such as frequent testing, lack of helpful feedback, and uninspiring curriculum driven by standards. The worst behavior of EVs is so common that it has its own name, EVAL — Education Vampires Afflicting Learners, though the act is often camouflaged as the more academic-sounding word, evaluation.

The problem is growing since it’s easy for anyone to become an EV. Each of us has been bitten by an EV sometime in our life, at least once, but likely multiple times over many years. The “virus” lies dormant until the right opportunity comes along. All one has to do to trigger the condition is to utter words that drain all the positive emotion and hope from a student by, just once in the name of improvement, finding fault with the learning performance. “That’s a good effort, but it’s not up to standards, Billy. You have to try even harder. Your grade is aC.” Billy may be thinking, “no matter how hard I try, the teacher always trashes me. I must be stupid.”

Are you vulnerable? Have you ever been bitten by an EV? Then you’re a carrier. Have you ever bitten a student, drained their learning soul? Then you’re a practicing EV, even if you said, “but I did to help. Billy needed the truth.”

What can we do to stop the spread of this terrible affliction?

There is a Solution

Fortunately, there’s a cure for active and dormant EVs. What’s more, we have a zero-cost vaccine for our children. The cure is to move away from evaluation as the dominant feedback mechanism and only use it when students are fully prepared for the “bite.”

Evaluation, short for summative evaluation, is done to make a judgement such as assigning a final grade. Let’s be clear: evaluation’s purpose is not to help the student. Evaluation is done to serve the institution’s need to pass judgment.

The cure is formative assessment. Formative assessment is done during learning to help the student. That’s the big difference. Evaluation serves the institution. Assessment helps the student.

Whether done intentionally or not, educators often hide evaluation by calling it assessment. Don’t let that fool you. They are not the same.

Formative assessment includes three four components: Strengths, Opportunities for Improvement, Insights by the Assessor, and a plan to improve. The next section details the cure.

Vaccination against EVAL builds on the cure. To be effective our educators, parents, and must practice formative assessment. When done by a learner on him or herself, it is called self-assessment. You may also hear the vaccination called Self-SII — Self-assessment for Strengths, Improvements, and Insights. Please don’t confuse it with a separate, unrelated affliction, Selfies.

The EV Cure

As a potential or practicing EV, whether you’re a teacher, parent, boss or other person-of-power, you can self-administer the cure by practicing SII wherever you might have normally practiced EVAL. You must do it until it is ingrained. A 90–10 balance between assessment and evaluation is recommended. The steps in the list, when practiced regularly with a learner, have been shown to dramatically help (see references). In the procedure below, the assessor does the assessment, and the learner does the performance, which could be a paper, a physical act, problem solving, or anything else requiring the application of knowledge and skills to produce a result.

1. Establish Trust Between Assessor and Learner

Learners benefit from friendly, kind, and trusted analysis of their performances.

2. Agree on the Approach

Include the purpose of both the performance and the assessment, the parts to be assessed, and how feedback is given. The assessor should do it in collaboration with the learner, if possible, but if not, as in a school setting, be clear about the intent and approach.

3. Design the Methods of Assessment to be Used

Decide how the evidence is captured, such as through observation, writing a paper, or creating a video. Then, develop and share a rubric to measure the quality of the performance.

4. Collect & Analyze Evidence From the Performance

The assessor measures and analyzes the likely causes of the observed performance.

In the analysis, the assessor identifies two to three strengths to reinforce, two to three opportunities to improve, and any insights gained by the assessor.

Each of the statements is justified with evidence. The suggested improvements include explicit suggestions to the learner. It’s harmful to merely say, “Good Job” because the learner needs to know why or it doesn’t help reinforce the strengths of the performance. It likewise harmful to say, “bad job” because it leaves the learner feeling bad with no way to correct. Both comments may be received as being about the learner as a person, and not a performance that may be improved.

5. Give Feedback to the Learner

The Assessor conveys the feedback to the Learner and answers any questions; strengths are presented first and then followed by opportunities for improvement, and concludes with the insights the assessors has gained.

6. Learner creates an action plan

The learner discusses the plan and schedules and requests a follow-up assessment. Even better would be if assessments are requested “early and often.”

When done repeatedly, SII-assessment encourages a culture of learning, where each student trusts the educator and looks forward to feedback. Before the necessary end-of-term evaluation (“the bite”) educators need to explain to the learner that a grade is required, but since the learner has repeatedly practiced and improved, its not a cause for anxiety.

The most important outcome is that learners is that educator responsibility for teaching shifts to learner self-agency for learning.

Though educators may not be ready for more grading, a classroom of strong assessors/learners who support each other does lighten the load.

A mastery learning environment, as proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968 (yes, the creator of Bloom’s Taxonomy), further strengthens the impact of assessment by building the learning around the procedure and supporting with group learning and individualized progress to mastery.

Vaccinating Learners

Vaccination may eradicate a disease when all potential carriers are protected from infection. Like vaccination against viruses, regular assessment, prevents EVs from draining or infecting their intended victims. The evaluation feedback either glances off or is turned into assessment. Enlisting learners in self-assessment is what elevates their cognitive immune system from resistance to immune.

Self-assessment is nothing more than learners assessing their own performance. The benefit of self-assessment is the added capability of introspection: not only are self-assessors aware of their own performance, they are also able to recall the contribution of their thoughts and feelings to the observed quality. A potential downside is the learner often does not have the full experience of an educator, but that is balanced over time, the learner’s self-assessment skill strengthens through practice and feedback.

Recovered EVs may assess their learners’ self-assessments to further enhance this vital self-growth skill.

Example Assessment

Carlos is going to write a research paper and is developing the outline first. He asks Martha if she would assess his outline. Carlos trusts Martha, she’s familiar with SII assessment, and an experienced writer. She agrees, and they talk about the properties of an effective outline, and decide that the thesis statement and logical structure are the components she will assess. Focusing on the thesis statement, Martha describes the qualities needed, including clarity, importance, attractiveness, and arguability. She explains that an outline may be assessed on the standard parts of introduction, criteria, consideration of various approaches, argument in favor of the thesis statement, the support for the position, and the conclusion.

After analyzing his thesis statement and outline, she prepares the following feedback:

Strengths

• The thesis is interesting, important, and clear. The idea to best reduce greenhouse emissions by prioritizing the combination of ease of reduction and greatest impact is compelling and effective.
• The evidence you have for methane as the greatest contributor is backed up by several reputable references.

Opportunities for Improvement

• The only evidence for the ease of reducing methane involves enclosing feedlots to capture methane emissions from cows, sourced from a website; more reputable sources with more realistically large reductions is required; if more evidence is not available, then looking at another contributing gas is needed
• The criteria do not support differentiating the various gases; the criteria do measure the volume of annual releases, and the impact of the gases, but they do not measure the ease of reduction methods by source; specify what ease of reduction is, and also what sources it reduces, and by how much

Insight

• This approach to analysis is an effective analytical framework for attacking this or other similar types of problems, such as water or particulate pollution, particularly when more than one source.

Martha discussed the feedback with Carlos and clarified his questions, and then encouraged him to bring it back for another assessment. She avoided judgmental language such as “good” or “bad.” She also avoided saying “you did” or “you didn’t” which would be more personal, and instead looked at the outline itself and commented strictly on the evidence.

Call to Action

The consistent use of SII-Assessment by educators creates an environment where learners look forward to feedback, seek it out on their own, continually strengthen their performances, and improve their self-assessment. By knowing assessment from evaluation, learners are better able to receive an evaluation and resist internalizing the judgments as personal failings or punishment. Instead, the good that they find within the evaluations is used as assessment feedback. In this way, learners become immune to the damage education vampires do, and avoid becoming one themselves.

Please spread the word. The impact of EVAL robs students of the joy of learning, the initiative to improve, and destroys their belief in themselves. The solution is not difficult but needs to be aggressively pursued. Do your part and share this article widely and we can put an end to educational vampires!

Next Steps

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Footnotes

1. Adapted from p. 55 of Apple, D., Ellis, W., & Hintze, D. (2016a). 25 Years of Process Education: Assessment vs. Evaluation (1991). International Journal of Process Education, 8(1), 53–58. Retrieved September 24, 2017 from http://www.processeducation.org/ijpe/2016/color033116sm.pdf.
2. Apple, D., Ellis, W., & Hintze, D. (2016b). 25 Years of Process Education: Self-Assessment (1992). International Journal of Process Education, 8(1), 59–66. Retrieved September 24, 2017 from http://www.processeducation.org/ijpe/2016/color033116sm.pdf.
3. Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for Mastery. Instruction and Curriculum. Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia, Topical Papers and Reprints, Number 1. Evaluation Comment, 1(2). Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED053419

Image Credits

• Vampire credits: Free Art License 1.3, Original Image modified by author.
• Zombie credits: Photo by Mobilus In Mobili, modified by the author, (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mobili/15451390697/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.