Assessment Reflections
Initial questions about assessment
As I embark upon a two year journey of reflection upon assessment at GMWP, I want to reflect upon two memorable essays I have assessed in the last two years, which were written in very different contexts under very different conditions for very different purposes. And I assessed each of them differently.
Assessment One
The first essay was written in November 2016 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory. The student, a GSA leader at my school, wrote in harrowing detail about the day after the election: their sudden alienation reflected in the dingy and drab surroundings of the basement room the GSA group gathered.
As a person, I felt moved and immediately volunteered my classroom (which has double windows overlooking a prairie) for the group’s lunchtime meetings.
As a writing teacher, I was impressed with the student’s use of syntactical structures, imagery, and figures of speech. Analyzing this piece as writing, I thought the one major revision could be in terms of organization: not only was the piece not yet consistently organized (here focused on people, there focused on ideas; here focused on feelings, there focused on ideas; here focused on the past, here focused on the future), I did not think the student had properly conceptualized this piece of writing.
I felt torn: as a human, I wanted to sympathize with this bruised chid; as a teacher, I wanted to instruct this promising writer. And so I did both: with tears in my eyes, I expressed my sympathy and support to the child, with thoughts in my head, I articulated a few different ways to organize the essay for the child to consider.
At some point in the revision process, I mentioned to the student that the essay was already recorded as an A, that my feedback was intended to help them improve this piece of writing: it was already powerful, and I encouraged the student that a little conceptual clarity might guide a reader towards a specific response.
Assessment Two
The second essay was written, per International Baccalaureate instructions, on May 1, 2018 sometime between 8am-noon local time. This student was given two hours to respond to IB English Literature Paper 2 prompt #3 (“explore the use of staging techniques by two playwrights”) and wrote the only one of two hundred essays I graded as an IB examiner over 3.5 weeks that I found genuinely engaging.
What made this IB candidate’s essay engaging was their use of the first person. Rather than the third-person, formal, academic approach to declaring an objective result of a staging technique, “the crashing sound is designed to gather the attention of the audience,” the candidate described their own response: “the crashing sound alerted me to this scene and this character, prompting me to pay close attention to a character I had not yet found compelling.” The essay was a compelling reading, giving me an understanding of what it was like for this person to attend the play, what their experience of the art was like, or, to quote Joan Didion, “how it felt to be me.”
I will never know who this candidate was and the candidate will never know me, nor the score I gave: the essay I assessed was one of five pieces, whose scores are combined to create a score out of 7, and the candidate only receives the overall score.
The student accomplished all the criteria required to satisfy the rubric, and I easily justified a very high mark. And that was the extent of my assessment: I gave it 22 out of 25 marks, which translates to a 7 out of 7, or the highest grade possible.
Assessment Reflection
This is not one of those stories where I describe my anguish at reading what I think is a “good” essay that the rubric determines is a “bad” essay. So, this is not an anti-rubric argument (though are some very good ones out there). I assessed each essay in a very different way, but gave them equally high scores. But when I think about what I do, I wonder if assessment has any role at all in teaching children to write.
The contrast between the two situations raises some questions that I want to explore:
- What is the relationship between feedback and evaluation: what is the effect of providing advice, what is the effect of scoring or ranking a piece of writing?
- Is all assessment transactional: when writers present their work to me, do they always want something in return, whether that is advice or a grade?
- What role do emotions and subjectivity play in assessment: how much of my advice is determined by time, setting, context, and other factors, how does this affect the quality of assessment I provide?
At this point, I only have questions but over the next two years, I plan to look at my assessment practices, the effects upon my students, and how this affects my teaching: I want to examine, with a nod to Paulo Freire, my pedagogy of the assessed.
