K12 online review 3

The third presentation that I am reviewing is the one that I found most valuable. It is called Asking bigger questions about assessment by Gardner Campbell. He starts off by explaining how Shakespear is very concerned with assessment. He looks at A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and shows how in each case, the character is concerned with proof. For example, King Lear is concerned with proving family love. Proving, is a term that is important for education and is often seen as something the teacher does for the students. The teacher is a bringer of information and as such has the proof. This should not necessarily be the way that we operate though. Before the presentation get deeper into this point, Gardner discusses a little bit about the history of assessment. Historically, proof happened orally in a large communal setting. It was very public and social. Compare this to today’s notion of assessing where it is written and private. How do we explain this shift? Well according to Gardner, scale and time are the causes. The amount of students and the amount of time required to go through the assessing process orally is simply not “doable”, so these problems lead to written assessment, such as exams. So then assessment becomes not meaningful in a social manner. So what does this tell us? It tells us that we need to rethink our method of assessing. It is impossible to go back to an oral way of assessing. To do so is a Romantic way of thinking (Romantic in the way that it longs for the past, not romantic in the way that it deals with cupid and hearts etc.), not that Romanticism is undesirable, but we as educators cannot limit ourselves to a specific model of assessment. Therefore we need to develop our own forms of assessment fitting into today’s model of education. Gardner mentions that “god teacher” are those teachers who do think about assessment in different ways than the standard testing that is in place today. He goes on to discussthe problems of what he calls scientific educational assessment. The main thing here is that this form of assessing limits ourselves to what we have and know, and does not allow the things that we don’t know to play a role in learning. He then proceeds to explain assessment and what it should look like. A great idea here is that students work should be shared and showcased with the entire class, the entire school, the entire community, and possibly on a larger scale (though he sees the larger scale a little problematic). What is more is that teachers should NOT be the ones to “prove it”. Nor should the students be the ones to “prove it”. So where does the proof come from? The proof should come from a collaboration between both teacher and students. He discusses the notions of play and metaphor. Metaphor is how we as humans think. We take what we don’t know and classify it as something we do know. Play is where we practice creativity and develop our minds, using metaphor to classify the things we are learing. Play leads to self assessment. Witness as understood today is meaningless. We should understand the term witness as, having a testimony. Having a testimony means that we have the ability to prove. Therefore witness, in this new light, should be used in the classroom. He concludes by talking about Shakespear again, more specifically the Tempest, and shows that we have short lives, or a very little amount of time to make a difference. What is important is, the time we spend together. This is how we can prove the worth of our lives.

So what do I think? This was a brilliant presentation where assessment is discussed as something that can change, and therefore is not static. I can see myself having a oral presentation week in my class where we act as the learners from history and practice an oral assessment, that is different than the mold that we have now. I especially liked the how he ended the presentation. “It is the time we spend togehter that is most important”. Keeping this in mind, our classroom assessment can become something that is more meaningful than numbers on a page. Assessment can be about learning as a community, and it can be something that is no longer private. I understand that I am sounding a little idealistic here and that this takes a lot of work to accomplish, but if I am willing to put the time and effort into it, my classroom assessment can become something that is meaningful to the students. I also like the idea of proof. Prooving that we know something is a lot different that being able to write words on a page. This is something that I will keep in mind in the classroom setting.