Mr. Stickfigure is not a properly qualified statistician, which is perhaps why I do not fully understand the connection between assessment and instruction. Or rather, I understand that there is virtually no necessary connection between the two modes, which, I’m sure, seems like ignorance to some. Assessment, I gather, has to do with observing and evaluating where students stand in relation to given knowledge or abilities. Instruction, I assume, has to do with the stimuli and activities provided to the students in order to move them from where they stand to somewhere else. That, so far as I know, is the only necessary connection between instruction and assessment: in order to move students forward, we must first know where they stand.
Assessment is a difficult process, so difficult, I think, that we tend to think we have achieved more than we really have when we make an accurate assessment. The process of planning, administering and evaluating assessments can be so arduous as to make us believe that, the assessment being done, instruction will follow as a matter of course. “Teaching to the test” is a literal example of this tendency, but insofar as we all pretend to know that teaching to the test is a bad thing, it is a bad example for this discussion.
So let us imagine something else: Sometime in the late 20th century, a group of distinguished educators lock themselves in a room over the summer. The room itself is enormous, because in addition to the educators, it houses millions of texts, carefully typed on letter-sized paper. In fact, the room holds exactly one copy of every text ever published that is less than 20 pages in length. Methodically, painstakingly, the distinguished educators read each text. As they read, they sort the texts into piles based on their common attributes. Occasionally, they take a break to compare the piles, and sometimes they push small piles together to make bigger piles when they find that their attributes match. After much combing and sorting, all of texts have been grouped into one of five piles based upon criteria that are observable on the page. One of the piles, for instance, contains all of the narratives, everything with a unified plot, setting, characters and theme. Another pile contains all persuasive writing, everything ever written to justify an opinion or change a point of view. Surprisingly, with very few exceptions, almost all of the texts in the big room fit into one of the five piles. These piles are then named, their controlling criteria described, and the whole set is called Performance Standards in Writing. Through much hard work, the educators have arrived at both what students need to be assessed for and what they have to be instructed to do.
Criticism and science are often both misunderstood in the same way. Through their work, both critic and scientist offer an assessment. The critic offers a critique, the scientist offers data. Both are claims to the truth, like all assessments. People, however, are not as interested in truth as we often claim to be. Truth alone rarely satisfies us. Or rather, we demand more than just truth from what is true; we demand use-value. Truths without an accompanying utility do not register on the scale of common knowledge. This kind of truth is for the specialist, the fetishist, the junky. In fact, we are so accustomed to discounting inconsequential truths that we have developed a strange cultural habit: If something breaks the event horizon and is received by us as truth, then we automatically assume that a use-value accompanies that truth. If something is true, in other words, it must be useful.
This accounts for our simultaneous attraction to and distrust of both critics and scientists. Critics, after all, are only the most persuasive critics: These are the best at taking the world as we thought we knew it and superimposing new truths over its surface. These are the ones who can seduce us into doing what we do not often want to do, which is see things in a new way. Science, for its part, makes us see the world in a new way, and much more literally than criticism. Nevertheless, neither data nor critique is the same as a plan of action, which is what we expect of useful truths. The fact that critics and scientist make us see new truths without providing a plan of action lies at the heart of our discomfort with these characters.
Nevertheless, truth prevails, and a good assessment suggests its own applications. Or, so it would seem by the way we so willingly leap from evidence to implementation in the aftermath of a really juicy truth. In the case of the teaching of writing, we let the distinguished educators do most of the work for us in assessing the Performance Standards. Upon being provided with the five different writing genres—sorted as objectively as words can be sorted—we were asked the question: Now, how will you teach the writing genres?
Our answer is a tautology: By teaching the writing genres. That is, after all, the essence of explicit instruction, rubrics and the writing process. Mr. Stickfigure, for his part, is still stuck at square one. I agree that it’s true that students should be able to write confidently in each of the five genres, and I agree that the five genres aren’t the worst way to categorize a wide range of texts. I just don’t see what these facts prove about how we should teach students. As a teacher, however, I have often pretended I do. I’m addicted to use-value, too. At this point, I’m willing to keep all the standards and assessments as a sign of good faith. But I’d like to stop pretending and start a whole new discussion about writing instruction, this time, with a less presumptuous attachment to the truth.
2 comments:
Mr. Stickfigure says that "...the only necessary connection between instruction and assessment [is] in order to move students forward, we must first know where they stand."
That's certainly so, but it's also certainly incomplete; we need two other connections in order to move students forward.
First, once we have finished our instruction, we need to know whether the students learned what we thought-- and hoped-- we were teaching them. This means that at lease two assessments are necessary, one prior to and one following instruction. Moreover, by implication, some set of standards is necessary, too. Without them, there's no "ruler" against which to measure our students' progress.
Second, we need some pathway between the students' starting points and the desired ending point. Unless such a pathway is visible, there's no way for either the students or for us to know whether we are indeed moving at all, let alone moving forward. By implication, this requires a series of intermediate assessments; we have to, in effect, have an odometer to measure our progress.
So, assessment and instruction should be linked. Many teachers think they somehow just "know" whether their students are making progress. How do they know it? And how do they know the magnitude of the progress they think they're making?
Absent a sound assessment system, there are no meaningful answers to those questions.
The assessment cycle Mr. Lloyd is describing is, indeed, part of the make-up of a successful institution. It could not be more true that "we need to know whether students learned what we thought--and hoped--we were teaching them," as Mr. Lloyd puts it. Anything else, it would seem, is pure superstition.
And yet, having accepted this, I still have two questions, neither of which have to do with "the practical reality of our system" or any such unaccountable excuse. All I will ask of reality, then, is what a school that operates with such an assessment cycle actually looks like? Particularly, what does it look like during state-assessment season? It seems that if the state assessment is more than a three-hour blip on our radar, we are not operating a successful assessment cycle.
And even if we are, and the ELA comes and goes like a boring speech in the auditorium, what has assessment shown us about how we should teach? My argument, I guess, is that there is a sort of uncertainty principle at work between instruction and assessment. We can do something, which is instruction, and we can see if what we did was good or not, but we can't do both at the same time. We still need to invent a new hypothesis after each failure, and no less after each success.
In essence, perhaps all I am saying is that assessment is not, and cannot be, a creative force in education. Assessment is, on the other hand, precisely what proves that creativity is what we need. Until then, our assessment cycle will remain flat.
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