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The caricature of the tough grader is familiar to most; the teacher who only doles out As or top marks to the truly elite performances. They often begin grading a stack of papers with the idea of holding back the As early on, in case someone deeper in the stack produced a truly exceptional paper.
Often, this caricature has a sense of pride about the competitive nature of grades, whether that competitive culture was inadvertently or intentionally created. Read more
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In Growing Tomorrow’s Citizens in Today’s Classrooms: Assessing 7 Critical Competencies (2019), Cassandra Erkens, Nicole Dimich, and I outline how critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, communication, self-regulation, digital citizenship, and social competence are the necessary skills for students to succeed as future citizens. In the book, we highlight two important, overarching aspects of teaching and learning in the 21st century.
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What exactly does a strong critique of someone else’s work look like? How is it the same and different from a critique of one’s own work?
When do readers identify the main idea of a text? Which processes lead to the identification of a main idea?
What does a good data analysis look and sound like? What are the critical components of a strong analysis?
These are just some of the questions I have witnessed teacher teams wrestle with in the last few weeks of collaborative assessment work. The answers to these questions and others like them serve as the bridge between teacher assessment design work and student ownership of learning goals. When we explore goals in explicit ways, we can begin to imagine how we might explain complex skills like critiquing, identifying main idea, and analyzing data to our learners. We have to make these concepts tangible and accessible if we are going to nurture student investment and hope.
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