Authentic Assessment of the Byzantines
Teachers too often ask students to complete assessments that require nothing more than regurgitation of facts and simple data retrieval. Consequently, students end up working toward passing a test, not for real learning. For these reasons, designing assessments that hinge on activities such as multiple choice, true/false, and matching are not doing the job of determining if students have engaged in authentic learning. To authentically learn, students need to understand not just the “what”, but also the “why” and “how”. This demands that students be asked to analyze, take stands, and even create original work that communicates their stances. The nuanced and multiple facets of Byzantine history and its influence on the Renaissance provides ample opportunity for this.
Let us first begin with analysis. In Van Sledright’s work What Does It Mean to Think Historically…, he demands that students be taught how to think like historians through the consumption and analysis of both primary and secondary sources. A common anecdote that many former and current students have relates to the dreaded high school DBQ. The terror of the DBQ was not in its difficulty, but rather the mind-numbing task of reading the accompanying questions and then searching for the answers in the text. Whereas, when thinking like historians, students are asked to not only look at the document, but also its context (author, time period, location, etc). The context is crucial as it informs the reader why something may have been created as well as its reliability. It also helps students understand how a situation had many layers and that sources do not have to be a bipolar right or wrong. An example of a formative assessment that follows this format can be found here on pages 36–40.
While a DBQ assessment gives students the opportunity to build their analysis skills and even their own beliefs, it does not challenge them to further their stances. This is where an assessment format such as debating can come in. Building off of the previous DBQ, suppose the students were forced to defend the stance that Emperor Justinian did or did not revive the Roman Empire. The structure would look roughly like the diagram below.
The goal of this formative assessment would be to form a consensus on Justinian’s success in revitalizing the Roman Empire.
The final step in authentic assessment is creating a new and personalized product. For this approach, I am inspired to focus on an arts integrated approach. This will not only help build student understanding; it will also aid in differentiation and connecting history to the modern world. I have already designed an integrated arts lesson on the Hagia Sophia and its relevance to Wisconsin which can be found here. The lesson uses Greek Annunciation Church and Frank Lloyd Wright as inspiration for students to create a modernized version of the Hagia Sophia.
This is an example of authentic assessment as it asks students to demonstrate what they have learned while demanding they think critically about how to show it. Additionally, it links history to their personal lives as well as other subjects.
