Assessments.  Assessments and UDL. Oh boy.  This is the area that I find I am most struggling.  I am pretty old school when it comes to assessment.  Or at least I have been.  Ok, I’m evolving. At a very slow pace.  Like maybe a snail’s pace. 

Is this a snail or a bunny?  A bunny snail? A pet!?!

 When I first started teaching, it was all quizzes and tests for assessments.  Now that I’ve been teaching for 14 years, it’s all quizzes and tests.  Kidding!  I do pretty well in the category of formative assessments.  I am constantly checking in with homework, vocabulary quizzes, show of hands, sticky-note on the board, reflections and the like. Where I struggle is with summative assessments.  I’ve been writing killer tests for so long, I’ve got it down to a science.  There are good reasons for how my tests are written – they show higher-order thinking skills, they make kids show their understanding of the language and also of whatever cultural concept or story we are working on, plus they focus on grammar and syntax.  They’re beasts!  So many of my students struggle with the first test or two, but once they get the hang of it, they wreck them, and I am so proud. 

 

However, there are some kids who, no matter what, never do well on tests.  And THAT’S where I falter.  I know they don’t test well.  I know they understand more than they are showing me.  But I am at a loss as to how to fix it. Cuz I wrote a great test. And it’s all about me.  AmIright?

 

No.  I am not right.  Rats!

SIDE RANT: So I’m here to teach a language, and a culture, and some literature, to students.  And they are learning it. But their grades aren’t always an accurate reflection of what they can do.  I know the grading system is broken, but I also know that it has helped to keep my course rigorous, and that is something I worry about losing.  However, with the way I currently grade, I see how kids will frantically try to cram everything in for a test, but not to actually learn.  Because, after all, the GRADE is all colleges worry about (at least, in their limited world-view, it is).  That’s what it has come down to.  Students only care about learning in a secondary way – they are more worried about the final grade.  Strangely enough, I care about learning first, and their grade second.  This is the point where I would love, absolutely LOVE, to throw grades out the window.  I want to report on the skills students have or haven’t acquired.  I want to show progress.  I want the actual learning to become central to my class, not just to me, but to my students.  END RANT

I’m pretty sure that our school will not be changing the grading policy any time soon, so I will have to start looking a lot closer at my own grading practices.  In the meantime, I need to explore providing more options for students who aren’t good at taking tests. I still think that there is value in tests, and I also think that there are many tests in the “real world” (MTEL, GREs etc) to make them an important skill to continue pursuing.  However, they cannot be the only summative assessment available to students.

I really started diving deeper into this last year, after a school in-service that talked about UDL.  I liked the idea of providing options for students.  One of my colleagues worked on a capstone type of project, and offered to share it with anyone interested in seeing how they could modify it for their own purposes.  I jumped on that and decided that students could choose to either take the final exam, or do the capstone project that was driven primarily by the students’ own interests. I had a good mix of projects and tests and I also had happier students. 

I would like to say that since then I have been offering up the options of tests or projects all over the place and my room is now lit by happy rainbows and has sparkling unicorns prancing around in a joyful melee with my students…but apparently changing almost everything I’ve done with assessments over the last 14 years will be a slow process.  I am almost done reading Don Quijote with my Spanish 4 students.  I have a book test all set and waiting in the wings…but I’ve also been developing an alternative.  It’s a project.  I’m just going to bask in that for a moment.  Aaaaahhhhh. 

So far I have a rubric for creating a storybook and also for creating a video (use tabs on bottom for both rubrics), both with the goal of retelling the story.  There are multiple websites to make online books, or they can make one by hand.  Videos could be animations, or filming drawing on whiteboards, or reenacting the book with themselves as actors.  I also will leave it open to them to come to me with ideas I didn’t think of and see if it could work.  Maybe they will want to turn the story into a comic instead? A graphic novel?  I will modify the rubrics as needed to cover their choices.  Students will be working in groups to complete their projects, but if they have a real problem with group work, they are welcome to work alone. 

Sigh.  That wasn’t so bad.  My next challenge will be how to work on UDLing chapter tests.  Not quite as large as a book test, but not as small as a vocabulary quiz. I am open to suggestions!  Please feel free to share any ideas that you have with me! mshannon@cbrsd.org