My first encounter with the Alberta Assessment Consortium was in 1999, when Robert Hogg, new to his role as AAC Executive Director, invited me to join the AAC summer development workshop. Through many conversations about this thing called ‘assessment for learning’, I gained insights about teaching and learning that I hadn’t even considered prior to that time.

The Black and Wiliam meta-analysis was only a year old, and what I didn’t know at the time, was that the work we were about was truly ground breaking. What I did know, was that it resonated with me. It made sense, and gave me a whole new outlook on my teaching career.

I was still in the classroom at that time, and had the opportunity to try out these new ideas – performance tasks, rubrics, criteria, feedback, exemplars – with real students. I also had the opportunity to explain these concepts to parents, and to celebrate student growth and learning during family/teacher conferences.

I’m the first to admit that my early assessment work was not very refined. Those non-examples that we use in the AAC workshops – some of them came from my files! One of the most important things that I learned during my personal assessment journey was the value of feedback. I was mentored by three truly great educators who helped me embrace feedback as the essence of learning for every learner – students and adults.

It was also the time of the AISI projects in Alberta, and the nature of the three-year funding cycle had the unintended consequence of assessment for learning taking on ‘initiative’ status. You would hear statements such as, “We did assessment last cycle. We’re doing differentiation now.” As if you could ever be done assessment..

Have you ever felt like you were in a relationship that just wasn’t working as well as you wanted it to? That wasn’t helping you live your best life? 

I have, and that relationship is with assessment.

I’m closing in on the end of my 9-year secondment with AAC. Those 9 years provided me with a priceless opportunity to reflect on classroom assessment and how it impacts our role as educators. As well, I’ve had plenty of time to consider how assessment is perceived by leaders, teachers, students, and parents.

My experience with AAC, working with amazing teachers and leaders across the province, leads me to believe that, in general, we don’t have the healthiest relationship with assessment. Our current predicament has shone a light on that. Right now, the only assessment question we should be asking ourselves is, “What do I need to know about my students so I can keep their learning moving forward?” Instead, it feels like we’re spending too much energy asking, “How will I get enough evidence to assign grades?”

Another massive concern right now is about cheating and how to prevent it. It’s interesting to me, and a bit sad. Why are some students “cheating” on tasks and assessments? Why are parents helping them, or in some cases doing the work themselves? We’ve already established that, for once in our lives, the grade on the work doesn’t really matter. Instead of bemoaning the fact that this little secret has been shared with students and their families (“Now how am I going to make them do any work?”) maybe we should be celebrating! We have been given the perfect moment in time to rethink our relationship with assessment.

So what happens when we suddenly find ourselves in a world where marks and grades have lost their currency? We need to help students and their families realize that the true value in assessment, whatever its form, is the feedback it provides, to teachers and students alike, about where students are in their learning and what the next steps might be. Assessment helps us help our students. It’s about nurturing and supporting learners, not weighing and measuring them. And students need to be partners in the process.

At the same time, we need to critically reflect on the work we ask of our students. Is it meaningful? Authentic? Intriguing? Purposeful? If students don’t see or understand the value of the work, how can we expect them to care about doing it, let alone doing it well?

After my extended absence, I’m heading back to the classroom next year. I’m excited and apprehensive in almost equal measure. You may have noticed that this post is long on questions and short on answers. It’s because this work is so challenging, and I know for sure that I don’t have all the answers. I wonder what my own students would have said if I had ever thought to ask them what assessment was for. Or why it was important. Or even what it looked like. I’m afraid they would have answered that assessment is about me passing judgment on them. And while it may be true that sometimes assessment serves that purpose, it’s not what should ever matter most.

We’ve been given an opportunity to set aside grades for this moment in time. Let’s use this opportunity to build a different, and better, relationship with assessment!

It can be hard enough to keep students interested in their school work when spring arrives and the weather warms up. This spring poses special challenges. Students are parents are growing increasingly weary with the schooling situation they find themselves in, and many teachers are noticing a steep drop-off in the engagement of their students.

We’ve more or less lost the ability to use grades as “carrots and sticks” to motivate (or punish) our students, and this could be a good thing. Maybe we should embrace this moment in time, and use it to question why we ever allowed marks to matter so much in the first place. Are they really the only reason our students would ever feel compelled to do the work we assign? If so, let’s admit that we have a problem!

So, if grades won’t do the trick, we need to rethink the learning experiences we’re offering our students. Here at AAC we have some ideas that might help you hold onto your kids, and continue the learning this spring. And as a bonus, these are important ideas for us to think about anytime.

We’ve heard this a lot – but now more than ever, parents are essential partners in our students’ education.

Let’s be clear – we haven’t moved to wholesale home schooling, but rather to learning at home. There is a fundamental difference in that language. Teachers are still very much responsible for making decisions regarding instructional programming for students. And yet, we must make a fundamental shift in how we see our work. Now more than ever, we need to see parents as partners.

Alberta Education has provided direction as to the amount of work students could be expected to accomplish. For elementary students, that works out to about 20% of a ‘normal’ school day, week, month…

But what we are experiencing is not normal, and so whatever content and skills you usually ‘cover’ at this time of year in 100% of the time, for the sake of everyone involved, please put those expectations aside. Your students will not be able to manage. Neither will their parents and neither will you.

No student will be behind. Every student in Alberta is experiencing a lengthy disruption to their normal year of school. It sounds a bit trite to say that we are all in this together, but we actually are! No student is going to be able to accomplish all the learning tasks that are normally assigned during this period of time. And if they do, it’s because they have an exceptional base of support, and those tend to be our students who are most advantaged at the best of times. These are not the best of times.

Just as teachers always do, this is an important time to differentiate for students. Some parents are asking you for more work, and others are saying that it’s too much. The media is offering a glimpse into the reality of learning at home, and parents across the country are beginning to ‘opt out’ of the pressure.

Such a decision would no doubt be difficult for any teacher to experience, so what can we do to try to avoid receiving such a drastic response, while still being true to our professional responsibilities? Our AAC team offers four suggestions for helping to avert a crisis.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know that AAC has a collection of performance tasks on our website, designed for teachers to use with their students in class. Maybe you’ve even used some of them in the past. Some tasks are available only to AAC members, but there are others, particularly in middle grades social studies and high school mathematics that have been developed through Alberta Education grant funding that are available to the public.

In our ‘new normal’ of distance learning, performance tasks are a great way to provide your students with something a little different to do at home, that still keeps them focused on important learning. You’ll likely want to make some adjustments, but you can make performance tasks work for your students at home!

First of all, if you haven’t already, you might want to start by reading a recent Assessment Talking Point about performance assessment: What’s all the fuss about performance assessment? Many of the tips in that post will be important to remember now.

A good performance task is open-ended, providing entry points for students at all levels. It focuses on big ideas and important learning, but for now at least, step away from the rubric! There is no need to grade these tasks in any way. Instead, look for ways in which your students can share their learning with you, their classmates, and any other audiences you can envision. It’s not about the grade. In fact, it should never have been about the grade, but that’s a topic for another day!

So… here are the new Top Ten Things to Consider when using performance tasks through at-home learning.

Time to Make Lemonade!

It’s been said that when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Well, it appears that we’ve been gifted a very large shipment of lemons.

I’m not pretending that things are fine, because they’re not. If any have ever doubted our connection to a worldwide community, there is no question at all anymore.

And I’m not suggesting that we ignore the inconvenience and suffering that this pandemic is causing, because it is real.

At the same time, it can be empowering to find places where we can influence the lives of our students and their families for good. Take assessment for example. In the new normal of distance education and distance assessment, how can we make assessment live up to Rick Stiggins’ powerful vision?

        We need assessment that will… 

• Encourage, not discourage
• Build confidence, not anxiety
• Bring hope, not hopelessness
• Offer success, not frustration
• Trigger smiles, not tears

If we consider that assessment is essentially the process of gathering evidence of student learning, we have an opportunity right now to revisit this question:

         How much evidence do you really need to tell you that <insert the name of your student here>             understands/can demonstrate <insert the learning outcome here>?

Perhaps not as much as we might have previously thought. Our carefully thought out assessment plans that we submitted in September won’t work in this new reality. What if we could use this time as an opportunity to move away from a focus on grades to a focus on learning?  Perhaps this truly can be a ‘less is more’ moment for student assessment.

Over the next few days, our AAC team will provide a series of helpful suggestions for teachers to consider as they adapt their regular assessment routines for our new reality.  We encourage you to take the opportunity to try some of those new formative assessment techniques that sounded great in the workshop but might not have been tried in the classroom. Now that we all have a new ‘classroom’, how can we adapt these techniques for online learning and assessment?  

Please take good care of yourselves and your loved ones. Slow down, and look for signs of spring. We can all use a bit of light and hope right now.  

To Fret or Refocus: That is the Question!

Ruth Sutton, one of AAC’s long-time assessment friends posed the following question at the Fall 2015 AAC Leadership Day.

How do you hang onto your sanity and your confidence and your resilience and your health when things around you seem to be changing, and not always rationally?

Ruth continued:

In that environment of external change – about which we can do not much – you’ve got some choices. You can either fret about things you can’t control, or you can begin to refocus on the things that never go away.

To say that things are challenging right now, both in the world as a whole as well as in the world of education, would be an understatement. And we have a choice. We can either fret or refocus.

Whether we are teachers or leaders, there is power in refocusing our efforts on improving our understanding and our practice in the area of formative assessment. But with all of the possible areas where we could focus our attention, why choose formative assessment?

Rick Stiggins, another long-time assessment friend of AAC, provided some sobering advice. After recapping the research base in the field of formative assessment, Rick warned that these impressive results were not available if one or two teachers did it some of the time. He emphasized that there needs to be a commitment within a school and a district to these principles of formative assessment.

Formative assessment is not an initiative. It’s not a quiz without a grade, or a bin equal to zero in a digital marks program. When done well, formative assessment is the way we do our work so that we ensure all students are learning. Dylan Wiliam calls assessment the “bridge between teaching and learning.” He continues to remind us that effective formative assessment happens “minute-by-minute” and “day-by-day.” It’s something that never goes away.

In the 1998 publication Inside the Black Box, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam boldly asked four key questions in regard to formative assessment.

• Is there evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards?
• Is there evidence of room for improvement?
• Is there evidence of how to improve formative assessment?
• Are we serious about raising standards?

What might our responses be to those same questions today?

Regardless of what transpires in the education sector – new curriculum or not; more large-scale testing or not – no one can ever take away the power that comes to students and teachers when they engage in true formative assessment. No one.

We’ve come a long way on this journey, and while sincerely honouring all the amazing things that are happening in classrooms all across our province, we likely can agree that we’re not quite ‘there’ yet!

So while we continue in a time of uncertainty, let’s consider Ruth’s advice. Let’s refocus on things that matter. The principles of classroom formative assessment make a difference for students.

Stay tuned… AAC is with you on this journey!

Whenever we do a workshop , we always showcase something from our fabulous AAC website. Participants are often surprised, because they had no idea the wealth of resources that are part of their AAC membership.

We may be a bit biased, but were pretty confident there’s no better place to access resources to support quality classroom assessment practices for Alberta educators than your good old AAC website! Yeah, we’ve been around for over 25 years, but that doesn’t mean that we’re old school! We keep up with the greats in the world and make sure that our resources and workshops are developed with the Alberta context in mind. 

People who know the value of our work often say that AAC is the best kept secret. We’d like to change that! 

We want you to tell everyone about something you found on the AAC website or learned at one of our workshops that you can’t teach without! Like our 2009 publication Building Better Rubrics for example – a teacher once told us that they can’t build a proper rubric without that book! Or an idea from one of our workshops that changed your perspective on teaching, learning and assessment –  “You mean I don’t have to mark everything?”

What is your most valuable AAC resource or your greatest AAC ‘aha’ moment? Let’s start a conversation on Twitter #AACgold. 

Not sure what’s there? We can help with that too! We have a website tour that you can use by yourself, with colleagues, and in a staff meeting. 

Take the AAC_Website_Tour and then take to Twitter! #AACgold