Making Awesome the Standard
Sharing my thoughts on assessment puts me in an odd quandary. On the one hand, I have long admired the perspective-opening approach to going gradeless. On the other hand, I seriously wonder what useful things I could say about assessment that wouldn’t expose me as a fraud. A fraud in the sense that I’m not even sure I understand assessment and the ways we talk about it in education circles. Also a fraud in terms of my own conviction about how I practice in my classroom, on my students.
I use “on” deliberately here. Assessment feels like something I practice on my students; something I do to, more so than with them which probably explains why writing about assessment makes me a bit squeamish. It’s hard for me to remember a time when the struggle to get my thoughts about an education related topic onto the page felt this fraught.
Of course, I have written about assessment before. It comes up in a number of blog posts in my archive. I’ve shared my methods of data gathering, in-class conversations and intermittent reflections on the process. Those are helpful documents; truthful without any attempt to be definitive. Reading through them, I notice the things I’ve changed, the adaptations I’ve made, the compromises I’ve entered. Precisely here is where I get turned around. Judging from my current practice and my ongoing professional development in this area, it appears to me that I am either assessing all the time, or almost never, or both.
Let me try to express it another way: My view of what assessment is and can be has shifted. I’ve come to appreciate it as a good deal more than a one-way, top-down teacher-student formality.
I used to think of assessment as the stuff we do to find out what and how well students have learned in order to be able to assign them a grade. Now I understand assessment as a much broader, more encompassing concept which can address both the process of learning as well as the performance or outcome. I prefer to use “performance'' because I teach physical education. My students show me a lot of their learning in motion; in complex combinations of behaviors that are remarkably ephemeral. For every morsel of learning outcomes I can identify, categorize and reliably assess, there are thousands of pieces that I miss, that happen elsewhere, that are in packages I cannot quite decipher.
As an illustration, I offer you an excerpt from one of those assessment related blog posts I found, Catching Standards:
I tell my kids I am focusing on catching. That’s what I am planning on assessing. But there’s so much else going on: long haul throws that overshoot the mark, extremely creative attempts to change things up–by twirling, bending over, tossing under a leg; there are a couple of students who need half the time to locate a new partner and then to get restarted; equipment gets lost in the rafters and student lose a couple more pieces trying to knock the first piece down. They are catching and tossing and throwing and missing, dropping and pitching. My students are showing me a host of behaviors, affinities, capabilities, weak points. And I’m trying to focus on catching.
I repeat this exercise over several lessons. I’ve taught the major skill points. We know that catching involves more than just trapping an object between our hands. The point is, that students, as young humans, inevitably are going to show me more than the skill itself. They will demonstrate the art of the catch. Their art of the catch. And over the years, this is the part that I seem to be able to see better and often more clearly than the catching itself.
See what I mean?
Let’s also be real: assessment is an adult conundrum. My students do not arrive in the gym thinking about how their performance will be evaluated. Their priorities in PE are fun, fairness, and challenge. And if they were assessing me (which they also are in their own way), I’m pretty sure niceness would also be in the mix. My students are looking for experiences that make them feel alive; that offer opportunities to be with their friends, to find an activity that thrills them, to show off their respective strengths. All of these explain why their favorite PE classes are Awesome Gym Days where they have access to the climbing ropes, swinging ladders, trapezes, handlebar scooters, wave boards, pogo sticks, stilts, soccer and basketballs. These used to be part of a reward system but since Covid moved in, I just schedule them every 5-7 weeks.
On Awesome Gym Days every student is active, engaged, working on something. It’s a lesson full of information. I can observe the intricate social arrangements, equipment preferences, challenge seeking, risk-taking, and a whole lot of joy. These sessions also provide a great example of how I see myself “assessing all the time and/or not at all.”
While I attend to multiple requests—Can we get another soccer ball? Yes. Can you lower the rings? Yes. Can you show us how to do this? (jumping on a pogo stick) Yes.—I am making mental notes on who is working on what with whom. I see who is looking for a next level challenge on the trapeze. I notice who chooses to play goalie in soccer. At the same time, I am gauging overall safety, constantly scanning the room for accidents waiting to happen. I task one group with clean-up, including folding and stacking the mats. That’s when I have to assess the clarity of my instructions (“How does that help your group if you’re lying on the mats now?”). I am assessing student capabilities and comprehension through my observations and interactions. It is time I spend actively studying my students and what they bring to the shared space.
At the end of Awesome Gym Day, however, I have no specific record of who accomplished what. Several of our standards were certainly addressed but that was left for students to decide without ever needing to declare it. I know that learning took place. Some of it accelerated, in fact. I know that students deeply value this time. They use every available minute to maximize their experience. They leave the gym sweaty and satisfied. They also remember these days long after they have left elementary school. What’s an assessment for that?
There are also many reasons why Awesome Gym Days are periodic rather than daily. All the lessons in between which are dedicated to exploring skills and games form a basis of competencies that students need to make Awesome Gym Day even possible. At every grade level, students need to know how to move safely in dynamic situations. They need to have familiarity with the properties of various types of equipment and how these can be used effectively. They need to understand space and how to judge where different movements will fit. They need practice working with all of their classmates in order to appreciate the tradeoffs of sticking with a best friend. They require a sense of community which will enable them to enjoy Awesome Gym Day on their own terms.
I never thought of it this way before, but could it be that my assessments, of both student readiness and of my own preparedness, are geared to make Awesome Gym Days the standard, rather than just possible? That the whole thrust of our PE program, which tries to touch on a host of movement topics, aims to equip students to choose their own adventures with joy and confidence? Could that be what all the assessing is for?
I really hope this is true. Because at the end of the day, what students take away from their physical education experiences should have less to do with the grades they received and much more with a sense of promise that movement can continue to hold in their lives. We adopt standards and formulate relevant assessments as a sort of quality control for instruction. I get that. But these Covid school years have forced me to get clearer about my responsibility to students. What do I owe them?
I owe them responsiveness. In my planning and adjustments, if I’m not responding to their needs—social, emotional and physical—what am I doing? To their credit, my students are pretty up front in word and deed about what they require of our time together: They need to be social, they need to be able to test and experiment, they need a break (in almost every sense), they need just enough structure, they need encouragement, and lots and lots of practice at all of this. Of course, it’s a balancing act. There are also institutional requirements, parent expectations and other constraints that figure in. We’re managing. We’re doing our best.
Given the circumstances, that’s actually a lot.
Sherri Spelic teaches elementary physical education at American International School Vienna. She has written extensively on topics related to education, identity, and power and, among other things, publishes a monthly social justice newsletter for educators: Bending The Arc. Check out her book of essays, Care At The Core or find her on Twitter @edifiedlistener.