Urgent vs Important – My Reflections

Question 1: During the first face to face we used the language of Urgent vs Important to help frame our thinking around our use of TIME. Reflect on why you joined Cohort 21 and your professional goals for this year. Now that the year has begun and you have met your students what IMPORTANT  goal might you like to address and leverage this community to get support with.

The longer I teach, the more pressing and mind boggling the issue of assessment gets for me. One of my professional goals this year is to take a critical look at our assessments in Grade 5 and start to compile alternatives to the traditional check-ins, quizzes and “Show What You Knows.” Meeting my Grade 5 students and getting to know them has been the best – they are confident, interesting, curious and capable students…until it is time for the test! They seem to be consumed by the level and much of the traits I mentioned above seem to disappear. They become worried, anxious, and hard on themselves. They no longer see learning as a continuum of understanding but rather view their worth based on their level. This has me questioning how we can separate measurement and assessment. This has me thinking about shifting our assessment practices to include more feedback, reflection of true understanding and more information for the student. I have been reading a collection of essays recently titled, “De-testing and De-grading Schools.” In it, Joe Bower states that, “Some things in life, however, are not made to be measured. While my height can be accurately described as 6’1” without debate, my personality, character, intelligence, athleticism and learning cannot be meaningfully reduced to a symbol. When we reduce something as magnificently messy as learning to a number, we always conceal far more than we ever reveal.”

This year, I would like to focus on assessment practices and how we can have them better align with the dispositions that we value in our classrooms. How our students can better view them as tools to push their learning, thinking and understanding forward.

I completed a Cultures of Thinking in Action course a few years ago and what struck me is that the dispositions that research has time and time again shown we should prioritize are curiosity and metacognition. How do our assessment practices allow for these to flourish? How do we continue placing a greater emphasis on aligning what we say with what we do – perhaps placing a greater emphasis on process, on mistakes and misconceptions.

I have been playing around with a few assessment changes in Science this year, in particular, and although they seem to be more aligned with what I value, getting to the understanding and growth in learning, they are incredibly difficult to assess and evaluate – they are messy! How do we construct or co-construct assessments that value the process of thinking and growth in understanding and do not seem so onerous.

I often use thinking routines in my classroom and am wondering if theses can be leveraged as assessment tools. What are the thinking dispositions that should be viewed as student entitlement? How can we shift the mindset of our students to value process, personal growth while at the end of the day we still evaluate their understanding? How am I going to ensure that our assessments speak to progress and acknowledge effort and actions versus just ability? How am I going to encourage them to do the thinking?

A final quote that resonated with me from Joe Bower, “This is precisely why it is so important to remember that the root word for assessment is assidere which literally means ‘to sit beside.’ Assessment is not a spreadsheet — it’s a conversation.”

Question 2: Which of the Season 11 Strands resonates with you and why? Share what you feel is both urgent and important about it for you and your school at the moment and some of the questions you have around moving forward.

How might we best engage, support and assess our JK-6 learners? Well, doesn’t this strand align perfectly with my problem of practice. I guess one other thing that I have been thinking about is, When does the assessment become the final level? Why do we as teachers need to stop supporting and teaching and uncovering understandings? I remember attending a Ruth Sutton workshop early on in my teaching career and she boldly stated that “Weighing the pig does not help it grow!” This has stuck with me for many years. In Math for example, if we can take a moment to teach into a concept that is confusing or was missed why wouldn’t we do so? When did everything become so final?

In thinking about this strand, it makes me wonder if it is enough to make small changes in the classroom and school. Perhaps an evolutionary change might work better in the type of environment we find ourselves in. Student agency comes to mind as a possible solution. I look forward to sharing, learning from my peers and exploring these concepts on Saturday!