Tag: Assessment

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Assessment

To make learning-based assessment work, the best teachers try to
find out as much as possible about their students…

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Early this semester, I’ve done two things to help me gain crucial information about my students. The first is that I’ve offered extra credit for filling out an information sheet. The sheet contained the following questions:

  • What are three things you believe are true?
  • If you were given an unplanned Saturday to do with as you please, how would you spend your time?
  • What is the high school or college course you’ve benefited the most from? Explain.
  • Who are three people in your life whose advice you listen to? What advice have they given you that you cherish?
  • What are the two most important ways you’ve grown as a person in the last year?
  • What’s your favorite story? Why?
  • How are you currently contributing to the lives of your family members, friends, or neighbors?
  • What do you hope to learn in this class?

In the future, this will simply be a quiz grade, rather than extra credit. These are the kinds of questions that I want from every student, not just the overachievers.

The next thing I’ve done is give every student I’m teaching this first-week writing assignment:

Write yourself a letter dated May 10, 2019 and address it to me. Begin “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…’” then tell me what you will have done to earn your ‘A.’

I’ve only read a few of them, but it may be one of my favorite reading experiences ever. Students are telling me (with more or less detail) what they think they’ll need to do to succeed. With only two classes under our belts, they don’t really have a sense of me as a grader or the exact nature of the work they’ll be asked to perform. It’s cool to see what they’re thinking about their own emotional and intellectual abilities and how they can put them to work this semester.

I pray this will contribute to better assessment on my part. I certainly feel like I know these students better after just one week. Of course, assessment is just one part of the Christian teacher’s gig. I’m praying their souls as well and their growth as disciples. Through the information questions I ask as well as the “I got an ‘A'” assignment, I’m trying to suss out where they’re at in terms of their faith and how that faith interacts with their educational goals. I pray that I don’t forget this part of my task.

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Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

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Grades and Sanctification

“This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.”

From The Art of Possibility

In the quotation above, Rosamund and Ben Zander encourage us to give ourselves and those we teach As. The point is to remove the comparative measurements that too often stifle and paralyze us.

To make a theological analogy, the Zanders encourage us to use grades as an act of sanctification rather justification. Justification of course is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins,” according to the shorter Westminister Catechism. No amount work on our part will earn us that pardon, and it doesn’t matter what the quality of that work is or how long we do it for. Sanctification, on the other hand, is a process no less of grace “whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”

I will be meditating on how this distinction should work itself out in my assessments and the joy, love, and peace that accompany the work of the Spirit in our lives.

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Slow Down

I just finished assessing and sending back a group of student papers. I never feel like the assessment cycle is done, however, until the (unofficial) window where students might email me about the grade they received is closed.

Last week, I received just such an email from from a high-achieving student who had gotten a high B that wasn’t quite the A she had wanted. She wasn’t rude. She just wanted to meet and talk about the grade. Typically, conversations like this make me anxious because they invite me to get defensive.

But I knew what the problem was. Continue reading “Slow Down”