Recently we spoke to our school’s Parent Advisory Committee
about the shift in assessment from traditional methods to Assessment for
Learning. We proposed that a vast majority of our teaching staff are “committed
to the transition”, we had a good discussion with the parents of our students
about the complexity and difficulty of making this transition, hinging much of
the concern on the hard reality of time. We argued that perhaps the greatest
challenge when attempting to implement Assessment for Learning (providing
descriptive feedback, employing more complex reporting systems like rubrics and
matrices, engaging the student in their own learning design) is finding the
time to do it. In the realm of curriculum delivery, teachers and administrators
are currently recognizing at face value a lesson they have known all along:
many course curricula are far too broad in scope of learning outcomes and too
shallow in the implementation of each outcome. Teachers constantly feel
pressure to “cover the content and move on” – often at the cost of
understanding each outcome. This boils down to a conflict of breadth versus
depth: learning experiences in high school are often too broad in their scope
and too shallow in the coverage of each underlying skill. The result is a
paradigm in which teachers feel it is far too difficult to make the time to
teach all of the objectives, provide meaningful feedback, and plan learning experiences
that are well-suited to these more complex, more meaningful assessments.
We have some excellent examples within our building of
teachers and departments breaking out of this paradigm by sacrificing some
content and emphasizing quality feedback in the form of written responses,
student interviews, and rich peer feedback over social networks. This is the
solution according to former deputy superintendent of the Surrey School
District, Peter Drescher. He argues that a “less is more, depth over coverage”
approach is needed, focusing on “Essential learning outcomes in greater depth”.
He argues that:
“Rethinking what we teach must come before we can rethink how we teach. Learning design should move further along the continuum from content knowledge acquisition to an essential understandings/skills development orientation.” (2008)
The teachers engaging
in this approach are visibly “set free” from the restraints of a long list of
curricular outcomes and are able to engage in their passion for teaching students,
not courses. They are able to justify
spending the time with students to review their progress, provide quality
targeted feedback, and foster personal ownership.
As Drescher states, the goal for administrators should be to
allow teachers to challenge any curriculum that presents as a long sequence of
shallow objectives. A long sequence of shallow objectives can lead to a long
sequence of shallow assessments. We should be encouraging teachers to review
this “inch deep and a mile wide” perspective and contemplate the shift to a
significantly smaller number of significantly more meaningful learning
experiences – an inch wide and a mile deep.
To be continued…
Identify the stakeholders… Trust the process… Trust the people…
Edu-Bring
No comments:
Post a Comment