portfolio // principle 3 | reflection 1

“Candidates possess the necessary knowledge and skills to conduct and interpret appropriate assessments.”

// interpret
To me, the crux of this principle is the word “appropriate.”  Assessments of student work should be appropriate in two ways:

·         to the assignment.  The nature of the assessment should match the nature of the assignment.  Low-stakes assignments such as journal entries or vocabulary sentences should generally be graded with less rigor than high-stakes assignments such as essays or major projects.
·         to the student.  Regardless of the assignment, assessments should offer students constructive, informative feedback that focuses on helping students improve their work.  This feedback may be more or less extensive depending on the stakes of the given assignment, but should always be present in some form.

My focus for this reflection is on the different forms of high-stakes assessments I used in my classes on a variety of assignments.

// select
To demonstrate my ability to develop, administer, and interpret appropriate assessments, I have included materials from the two units (one on short fiction, the other on Animal Farm) that I taught to my Honors English I classes.  The artifacts referred to in this reflection are as follows:

·         The short story unit final project overview, which explains and outlines the culminating project for the short fiction unit.  [P3.R1.A1]
·         The short story checklist used in grading the short story.  [P3.R1.A2]
·          The “Propaganda mini-project” assignment and rubric, which outline a project wherein students design their own propaganda posters featuring slogans from Animal Farm. [P3.R1.A3]
·         The “Animal Farm: theessay” handout, which explains and outlines the final analytical writing assignment.  [P3.R1.A4]
·         The Animal Farm essay checklist used in grading the essay.  [P3.R1.A5]

// describe
All of the included artifacts were used with my Honors English I classes.  The short story assignment was used as a creative, non-traditional assessment at the end of our short story unit, which consisted of students reading, discussing, and modeling published stories to understand both their literary qualities and the broader process of creative writing.  I distributed the assignment and checklist together after we had finished reading all the short stories and before students began the first drafts of their own stories.  The students then could refer to the checklists as they wrote and revised, in order to be sure that their final products would meet my expectations.  In addition, I made more explicit use of the checklists during in-class peer editing and teacher conferencing sessions.

The propaganda mini-project was used as part of our Animal Farm unit.  One of my major focuses for the unit was on the use of language to control thought, and this assignment gave students an immediate, hands-on look at this practice.  As with the short story checklist, I distributed the assignment and rubric together before students began work on the project so that they clearly understood my expectations and could tailor their work accordingly.

The Animal Farm unit concluded with a traditional essay assignment.  Students could respond to any one of four different prompts, but all essays were graded using the same checklist.  This checklist, once again, was distributed before any writing began so that students might clearly understand my expectations as their work progressed.

// analyze
These artifacts evince my understanding of this principle because each one communicates a set of expectations that are detailed, unique, and thus appropriate to the given assignment.  Because each of these assignments requires a significant investment of students’ time and effort, each assessment provides a corresponding level of detail that helps students understand exactly how that time and effort should be applied.  It is my opinion that I can only grade an assignment as high-stakes when I have clearly made that level of expectation clear with students from the beginning.

In addition, the details of each individual assessment are specific to the given assignment.  Rather than defining my expectations in terms of vague generalities, I designed the rubric and checklists to pertain directly to each assignment.  The short story checklist, for example, discusses issues of character believability and plot development, while the essay checklist deals with aspects of more formal writing such as a strong thesis and logical organization. 

Moreover, each assessment device reflects the major concepts covered in each unit.  Literary devices, for example, were a main topic of discussion during the short story unit, and thus they appear on the checklist for students’ stories.  When studying propaganda in conjunction with Animal Farm, class discussion focused on the use of color and imagery to sway opinion; the propaganda project, then, includes a criterion that addresses understanding of this concept. 

In designing assessments that are specific to the given assignment, my goal is to not only provide students with clear, sufficiently detailed expectations, but also to trigger the recollection and retrieval of past knowledge required to complete the given assignment.  Ultimately, my assessment designs reflect my desire for each student to succeed as fully and completely as possible.

// appraise
I feel that the assessments I designed for these assignments were useful both to me and, more importantly, the students.  During my own grading process, the checklists and rubric gave me clear criteria by which I could examine student work on a somewhat more objective basis, rather than relying on some ethereal, highly subjective conception of what makes a given assignment “good” or “bad.”

Students also engaged in some degree of self-assessment by referring to the checklists and rubric as they completed each assignment.  For the propaganda project, I only gave students verbal encouragement to do so (e.g. announcing as students worked that they should not consider themselves finished until they checked the rubric against their own poster).  For the short story and essay, however, the checklists were used more explicitly during student peer-editing sessions, in which students were required to complete a checklist for each story or essay they read. 

The major problem with the formal use of checklists in class is that some students inevitably take them more seriously and complete them more honestly than others.  Some students, then, receive informative, useful feedback on their writing, while others are simply told “it’s all good.”

// transform
The major transformation in these assessments relates not to their content, but their implementation.  In the future, I want to introduce checklists and rubrics like these in such a way that as many students as possible obtain valuable, informative feedback through their use before a final product is submitted.  In a broader sense, this will translate into a more detailed, content-rich peer-editing process.  Perhaps the best way to achieve this goal is to simply be clearer with students about how I expect checklists and rubrics to be used.  Modeling their use before a peer-editing session (in conjunction either with a writing sample of my own or of a willing student volunteer) might ensure a higher level of meaningful student participation.  Checking in with peer-editing groups as they work and pushing them to go further with comments (e.g. “Brad, make sure you tell Jenny why her characters are interesting”) will also help meet this goal.

Another more general transformation involves revising these assessments.  By asking students which criteria seemed either especially clear and helpful or murky and confusing, I can better understand which parts of my assessment design are effective and which are not, allowing me to continually revise and rewrite assessments so that they best serve the students I currently work with.