EDU – 606 | Reflection: Assessment Strategies | 1
Reflection: Assessment Strategies
“Do we realize how we reinforce silent compliance and conformity, and squelch individuality, creativity, and critical thinking?”
-- from the Rethinking Our Classrooms article,
Rethinking Discipline by Jehanne Helena Beaton
Learning to Get Good Grades
In the perfect world, students would not be assigned letter grades by teachers. The assignment of grades is perhaps the most insidious component of the covert curriculum. Grading communicates the message that The Teacher is in charge – The Teacher holds the power – and regardless of what or how much a student may have learned during a term in school, The Teacher will be the final judge of who is said to be smart and who is fit to be down-graded.
The goal of education is not to tell children what to think – or to let them know what others think of them. The aim is precisely opposite: to get young people to think for themselves. All children love to learn. It is an innately human endeavor. Students are natural-born learners and do not require coaxing, nor do they need a reward system. Learning is its own reward.
Learning to get good grades from teachers is not at all the same thing as learning to gain understanding. Yet, in order to be successful in the education system, getting grades is the one and only thing a person needs to be good at.
“Maybe it's time we begin to imagine. Otherwise, we will continue to communicate powerful messages to our students, especially those who are poor and students of color. We will reinforce their lack of voice, their lack of efficacy in the world. We will reinforce their belief that there exists no democratic, legitimate avenue for them to question authority, to intellectually and personally challenge the status quo.”
-- Rethinking Discipline by Jehanne Helena Beaton
Children who learn how to “do school” – implicitly absorb the shock of the institutional golden rule: Know Thy Teacher. In the pocketing of that single key to success, one must also accept the role – not of learner and leader of tomorrow – but of slave, consigned to mimic the thinking of yesterday’s followers. Considering the goal of education, it is the student who should be doing the reporting. After all, the children are the ones charting the new world!
Progress reports would ideally be self-evident, self-declared demonstrations of self-achievement – that is, explicit reports of self-identified progress. At its core, an institution of education must be a process – not of instruction and induction -- but of eduction and self-discovery. In the perfect world, reports of progress would themselves be standardized tests created by students. Each individual’s test would stand as the basis for proof of understanding the right new questions – not of knowing the old answers.
We do not live in a perfect world. Urban educators are well aware of their contribution to the permanent record of a child’s achievement -- that the institution, not the child, is creating. The label of school grade has implications that reach far beyond the schoolroom. Grades are U.S. curricular currency. They are so intricately tied to socio-economic status through the education system, it is safe to say we’re not likely to see schools without grades for decades.
In the meantime, along with teaching content, urban educators have the responsibility to un-teach the covert curriculum’s lesson on how to “do school.” Standards-based strategic instruction and an assessment for learning system is what it required. Those are the tools students need in order to think for themselves -- within and beyond institutions. Urban educators must teach students how to learn from learning, how to demonstrate learning, and how to effectively assess their learning. As the students chart their growth and report their individual progress, the teacher will learn how to get good grades from each student in the class.