Faculty teaming and Student assessment Dr. Boyd Chitwood, Headmaster Would you like to know some areas of special improvement the faculty is working on for this year? As a faculty, we’re always striving to improve at Cambridge Christian. Our love for our students and commitment to evidence the Lord’s excellence, inspire passionate pursuit of getting better. Better instructional techniques, cultivation of a Christ-‐centered worldview through Truth Strands teaching, more effective communication, curricular development, technology integration, and a host of other areas are regularly ‘on our radar screen’ for improvement. In the current school year, we are addressing special attention to the topics of teaming and assessment. Teaming is simply a grateful admission of what God gives us in the Body of Christ. Each member matters, but strength comes as the members of His Body share their gifts with each other. Teachers in all schools have a tendency to get isolated. They close their door and teach their students with all the ability and energy they have. When we’re not alone, when we meet as teachers, planning together, sharing creativity and perspective and experience, supporting each other in the daily challenges of the hard job of teaching, we benefit as a faculty and our students benefit as well. We’re structuring time to meet as multiple grades or departments. Teams of 6 to 10 teachers will grow from each other’s strengths. We’re even working to learn how to better navigate team efforts. Done well, teaming can be a true ‘supercharger’ to the power and impact of our work with students. One of the key topics we’re working on in these teams is assessment – making it more than just the test at the end of the chapter. Assessment has three major purposes: 1) measure what students are learning, 2) motivate student learning, and 3) modify teacher instruction based on student learning. © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved
The first – measure what students are learning – seems obvious and basic. The test or the paper checks whether the student has learned the material. There is much more to it, though, and the most important factor is whether we as teachers are doing the big picture assessments over an extended time to see that our students are truly learning and growing. The second purpose can be as simple as encouraging students to work so as to obtain good grades. The motivation of assessment done well can be much deeper and richer than this, though. Finally, it might be unusual to think of student assessment as modifying teacher instruction, but it’s really quite fundamental. Student learning has its individual components, but it also is greatly affected by the teacher’s actions. Teachers have to learn from assessing their students how to better teach them the next time. All of these teacher commitments to improve come from obedience to the Lord and love for each of their students.
Assessment: Measure what students are learning The first purpose of assessment is both its most obvious and perhaps its least understood. We want to measure what students are learning. Of course, this includes whether they have learned the lessons for the week or the unit which will often be tested with pencil and paper through a quiz, test or paper. We will also check back on that learning to see how much of it ‘stuck’ with review assessment later on and cumulative assessment where the later work will presuppose that students are able to do the earlier work. Consider two vital extensions of this assessment. First is when we try to assess not only what students know, but also what they can do with that knowledge. Identifying how deeply students have learned can be described through tools like Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels. Does a student recall information? That is often a beginning for learning, but then it moves forward and deeper from there. Can the student apply that knowledge, draw conclusions, analyze, synthesize and evaluate? We work to grow our students as thinkers and communicators. Assessing how they are growing in these ways requires more than the standard knowledge-‐based quiz. Along with knowing something, we look to see that our students can do something with it. Further, we want to know how they are integrating that knowledge with the comprehensive foundation of a Christ-‐centered worldview. © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved
Secondly, our assessment is looking for what ‘value-‐added’ growth the student has experienced. This can be as specific as seeing what students learn about a subject over the course of a year. Rather than just ‘taking a snapshot’, we want to ‘shoot a video’ which shows cumulative learning over time. Value-‐added assessment can also be as general as measuring how our students are growing as thinkers and communicators, how they are growing in biblical discernment and ethical decision-‐making, how they are growing in knowing how to learn in new areas on their own. These are the sorts of assessment challenges for which teachers are teaming together to apply the varied gifts, experiences and perspectives of 6 to 10 committed and called professionals. Assessment: Motivate students to learn The second purpose of assessment is paired with the first – just as we measure what students are learning, we want to be motivating students to learn. Assessment can be a vital part of this motivation. Of course, we can encourage our children to “get good grades.” Many are motivated to do so anyway. They know it pleases us as parents and teachers; it can meet their own competitive desires; and it helps anyone to know that the work they’re doing is valuable and worthy of praise. All of these dimensions are important, but there’s another that is sometimes left out and takes a little more effective strategy on the teacher’s part. We want our assessments, our tests or quizzes or papers or assignments or activities, to help students know that they are learning which in turn motivates them to learn more and better. Think about that. As a teacher, if I present material as merely a hurdle to be overcome for my praise and competitive advantage over other students, some students may be somewhat motivated by that. It’s a whole different picture, though, If, as a teacher, I show students that the things we’re exploring and learning as a class help them to know and do things which they didn’t know and couldn’t do before we learned them. Who among us, as children and adults, does not want to feel knowledgeable, capable, skilled, prepared, and effective? © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved
Taken another way, how many of us want to feel ignorant, inept, untrained, unprepared, and generally unable to do things well? As teachers and parents, we have the privilege of teaching children to read when they couldn’t read, to know about the world when they didn’t know about the world, to write and communicate when they couldn’t write and communicate, to solve problems they couldn’t solve, to know God’s perspective on life and success and truth and value when they didn’t know those things before. What, though, if instead I make my assessments of students completely about me as their teacher? Did they pass my test? Did they do the assignment I gave them? Did they solve the problem that I came up with? Did they please me? Learning includes me as the teacher, but it constantly relates back to help the student know what he or she now knows and can do. Assessment motivates because it shows the boy or girl, young man or young woman, ways that they are growing and succeeding. They are becoming more capable. They are becoming better prepared. They are growing in capability and perspective, in skill and training. This goal of assessment certainly does not mean the student can never falter or fail. That, too, is information and motivation. Maybe they know they didn’t study their best. Maybe they know they don’t understand it, but they also know the teacher is there to help them understand as they continue to work at it. I can’t motivate them with the encouragement that they’re learning if I never inform them when they’re not learning. The type of assessment does matter. I have to help the student see ways he is learning. But more than the assessment is the importance of the relationship between teacher and student. Does he know I want him to learn and grow and succeed? Does he know that, too, is my success? Does my student know that their nurture into the fullness of God’s created intent is my goal and motivation? If so, then assessment will motivate student learning. Assessment -‐ Modify teacher instruction based on student learning This is the third dimension of our work on improving assessment at Cambridge Christian. It might seem unusual to think of student assessment as modifying teacher instruction, but it’s really quite fundamental. © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved
Student learning has its individual components, but it also is greatly affected by the teacher’s actions. Teachers have to learn from assessing their students how to better teach them the next time. That does make some basic sense, but it’s also harder than you might think. What might a teacher learn from assessing her students’ learning? The great majority might have grasped the material excellently and shown that mastery on the test. Mission accomplished; on to the next challenge (while still watching for ways to bring the few stragglers along). Almost all the students might show they haven’t grasped the concept, and the teacher responds with some re-‐teaching and looped review of the material in future lessons. But what if 70% did well and 30% did poorly? (or some other mixed result which reality always seems to give us). Students do differ in ability, and they will differ in mastery on different material, but we are committed to pursuing the fullness of God’s created design for each child as our standard of success. We have various ways to individualize, including other teachers and other programs in our ‘tool box’ for helping students. We use many of them, and continue to develop more. I won’t belabor that point for now. Not infrequently, also, we find the student hasn’t worked to the best of his ability, and we team with parents to motivate him with consequences, positive and negative, extrinsic and intrinsic. My focus here, though, is not the variety of student effort, but the variety of student learning styles. One will learn best with visuals, another with oral instruction, and still another with some movement (You might be surprised how both random and related movement can help learning for some students.). Sometimes it’s not the learning style that brings the differing test results. It may be basic competencies in different kinds of reasoning. Some of us think strongest with words while others do it best with symbols (and some with pictures and some in still other ways). Math is symbolic reasoning, so our students who are better with words may score poorly on a particular math test when the unit was taught almost entirely with symbols. The test may show 40% of the students doing poorly, and the teacher knows from other observations that most of those kids think best in words. Some additional instruction in words with more teacher explanation that then calls for more student translation and repetition might be just the way to success. © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved
It’s really a very complex endeavor, and one that our teachers are always working to get better at. They find new ways to teach the same things to different kids in different contexts to pursue better understanding and higher achievement. Our teams of teachers are giving special attention this year to learning from each other ways that have proven successful in modifying instruction based on student assessment. It’s a work we will persevere in as we pursue the Lord’s best for each child in our care. © 2011. Boyd Chitwood. All Rights Reserved