Giving Students a Say

Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage

Myron Dueck

• Editorial: ASCD
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416629825
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Assessment is an essential part of teaching and learning, but too often it leads to misleading conclusions—sometimes with dire consequences for students. How can educators improve assessment practices so that the results are accurate, meaningful, informative, and fair?

Educator and best-selling author Myron Dueck draws from his firsthand experience and his work with districts around the world to provide a simple but profound answer: put student voice and choice at the center of the process.

In this engaging and well-researched book, Dueck reveals troubling issues related to traditional approaches and offers numerous examples of educators at all levels who are transforming assessment by using tools and methods that engage and empower students. He also shares surprising revelations about the nature of memory and learning that speak to the need for rethinking how we measure student understanding and achievement.

Readers will find sound advice and detailed guidance on how to* Share and cocreate precise learning targets,
* Develop student-friendly rubrics linked to standards,
* Involve students in ongoing assessment procedures,
* Replace flawed grading systems with ones that better reflect what students know and can do, and
* Design structures for students' self-reporting on their progress in learning.

Inspired by the origins of the word assessment —derived from the Latin for "to sit beside"—Dueck urges educators to discard old habits and instead work with students as partners in assessment. For those who do, the effort is rewarding and the benefits are significant

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Chapter 1

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The Elevator Pitch

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How can we make the case for student-centered assessment—and why is it important to do so?

Terry O'Reilly's book This I Know (2017) is a must-read for anyone with the slightest interest in marketing. And if you couldn't care less about marketing, you might just enjoy the background stories to the multitude of ads and products that've shaped our lives. O'Reilly bases much of the book on stories and lessons from his popular podcast Under the Influence. One of my favorite tales is that of Steve Jobs attempting to entice John Sculley to leave Pepsi and join Apple. In 1982, Sculley was at the top of his game and firmly entrenched as president of PepsiCo. Starting as a truck driver for the soft drink giant, Sculley had been climbing the Pepsi ladder for 16 years (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017), though none of his work involved tech (Pollack, 1983). As president of PepsiCo, Sculley was the marketing genius behind the "Pepsi Challenge," which pitted Pepsi against Coca-Cola in a series of blind tastings, and he was considered a strong candidate to become CEO of the entire Pepsi brand. Seeing the effectiveness with which Sculley carved away market share from Coca-Cola—and the inescapable comparison to Apple taking on Microsoft—Jobs was obsessed with poaching Sculley. Unfortunately for Jobs, Sculley wasn't interested in the Apple scene. Although Jobs offered Sculley a huge salary and lucrative stock options, he couldn't be swayed. After months of campaigning by Jobs, Sculley attempted to put the matter to rest in a face-to-face meeting with Jobs:

I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm not coming to Apple. I'm going to stay here in the East Coast doing what I'm doing. I'll be an adviser for free. Let's just be friends, but I'm not coming to Apple. (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017, para. 41)

Most people would probably have left it at that, but Steve Jobs wasn't like "most people." Upon hearing that seemingly final rejection, Jobs walked up to Sculley and, 20 inches from his face, uttered his now famous line: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017).

A week later, Sculley was employed at Apple. Ten years later, Apple was the most profitable computer company in the world.

O'Reilly cited this story to highlight the power and importance of the "elevator pitch"—the succinct encapsulation of an idea that takes no more than 20 seconds to convey. In his campaign against the formidable Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan had a simple, successful elevator pitch he posed to voters: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" (O'Reilly, 2017, p. 29). Any product you've purchased, movie you've watched, or book you've read likely came to fruition because it had an elevator pitch that convinced someone that it was worth producing.

According to O'Reilly, a good elevator pitch has a few fundamental qualities. It needs to be concise and captivating and reflect the essence of the organization or brand. "Pitches are an exercise in clarity," writes O'Reilly (p. 20), and they reflect the adage "Less is more." O'Reilly encourages organizations to distill their mission into an immediately digestible and compelling hook. Warning against our desire to elaborate, O'Reilly states, "If [your elevator pitch] takes a paragraph, it's not ready yet" (p. 24).

Steve Jobs may have understood the power of a good elevator pitch more than anyone. He described Apple as follows: "Apple has always had the ability to take really complex technology and make it easy to understand and use by the end user" (Arthur, 2014).

That's compelling—and likely the main reason why I am typing this on a Mac, own an iPhone and an Apple Watch, subscribe to Apple TV, and stop to admire a vintage Apple IIc whenever I pass one.

I've often wondered what responses you might get from a room of teachers if you asked them to produce an elevator pitch for their subject, class, or school. What about an elevator pitch for teaching in the 21st century? How might educators summarize their entire reason for being into a single sentence or two? While I was attending a conference in Australia, John Hattie shared with me his simple quest: Know thy impact (personal communication, May 2018). I liked it. It was simple, powerful, and inextricably tied to feedback—for the teacher!

Based on the experiences of businesses such as Apple and authors such as Hattie, we will want to start with why we are in education, not what we do in education. In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek (2009) encourages us to imagine we sell Apple computers, and he predicts that our sales pitch might start with this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly" (p. 40). Although this may seem logical and describe the essence of our product, this pitch is related to what the computer is, not why we produce it.

O'Reilly (2017) argues that in crafting really compelling elevator pitches, the most successful companies have a clear understanding of the business they are in, and some examples might surprise us. Nike isn't in the shoe business; it's in the motivation business. Michelin doesn't sell tires, it sells safety. The marketing geniuses at Heineken no longer flog beer as much as they sell inclusion, tolerance, and moderation.

Following the lead of these top brands, perhaps educators need to clarify the business they're in, and I'm not sure it's education. I think we would transform our schools if we rebranded ourselves as being in the empowerment and engagement business. As U.S. representative and civil rights leader Barbara Jordan declared, "Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment" (quoted in Newman, 1998, p. 124). If you think about it, throughout history, education is inextricably tied to empowerment.

We explored elevator pitches with our faculty at Summerland Secondary School (SSS) in British Columbia, Canada. Principal Alan Stel and I devoted a significant portion of our staff meetings to crafting individual elevator pitches to answer the question "Why attend Summerland Secondary?" It was an interesting and challenging activity, and the results were as fascinating as they were varied. Here are a few examples:

SSS helps to build students' skills and confidence so that they can be successful in whatever path they choose.

We are small enough and big enough to create amazing opportunities for our students and staff. Our opportunities reflect modern realities and valued traditions to balance all areas of learning and to prepare our students for challenges known and unknown.

Small, Supportive, Innovative, Creative, Flexible … Like Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

I've been working on my own education elevator pitch, and a while back I arrived at this:

I empower my students through authentic learning experiences and engaging assessment practices. In all that I do, I develop meaningful relationships with students so that they become confident learners—better prepared for whatever they might encounter.

I've edited versions of this more than a dozen times, and I'm sure it'll live in continuous development. With each iteration, however, the word assessment seems to remain a constant. As much as I've tried, I can't separate my educational elevator pitch from the topic of assessment and why it must be student-centered.

Assessment is the language of learning. From establishing our purpose and defining the learning objectives, to evaluating student progress and reporting on it, assessment is, in the words of Dylan Wiliam, "the bridge between teaching and learning" (2018, p. 56). I recall teaching my own kids to ice skate, ride a bike, back up an ATV with a trailer in tow, and countless other things. Each experience dripped with assessment components: objectives, success criteria, evaluation, and feedback. In the case of skating, my back never really recovered, and the ATV trailer sessions had me periodically walking away out of sheer frustration. However, eventually both of my kids learned how to skate and back up a vehicle with a trailer—thanks largely to assessment and their part in it.

The word assessment originates from the Latin assidere, meaning "to sit beside" ("Assess," n.d.). Let that reverberate through your mind. To sit beside. When looking at assessment practices in schools around the world, I'm not sure we're reflecting the true meaning of assessment. For far too long, assessment is what we have done to students rather than with them. Students need to stop being the people to whom we apply assessment processes, as if they were inanimate objects. Similar to how a lawyer might become a "partner" in the firm, students need to transform from being the employee to being the co-owner in the learning process.

Furthermore, this is not a student issue but a human one. People want to know the standards by which they are being assessed, how they will be evaluated, and whether they will have some input into the reporting of the result. I mean, seriously, how intrigued would you be as a student if this were the sales pitch:

Welcome, class. I'm going to teach for a while, and then sometime next week I'm going to assess you. After enough of those experiences, I will rank and sort you compared with others based on how well you've recalled the things I've told you. Your scores may affect your future in some dramatic way. Good luck.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, there may be some effects on your grades that have nothing to do with your understanding, but rather how you behave, treat others, display effort—those kinds of things.

I probably lost you at "I'm going to teach for a while … ."

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but that "sales pitch" would largely sum up my assessment model over the first 10 years of my career. Clearly, it needed to change.

Support for a Student-Centered Approach to Assessment

A more learner-centered model of assessment has ample support. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international governmental forum whose purpose is to "promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world" (www.OECD.org). This Paris-based forum, to which Australia, Canada, Italy, the United States, and more than 30 other countries contribute, has taken a decade-long approach to helping governments respond to new developments and concerns around education in an information economy. In The OECD Handbook for Innovative Learning Environments (OECD, 2017), this multinational think tank presents seven principles for designing learning environments. Thankfully, the OECD states that it's "unrealistic for a school or district to start working on all seven principles with equal priority" (p. 22). Although all seven are worthy of further study, for our purposes we will summarize three that support the student being the primary agent in assessment:

• The learning environment recognizes the learners as its core participants.
• The learning environment is acutely sensitive to the individual differences among learners.
• The learning environment operates with clarity of expectations and deploys assessment strategies consistent with these expectations. (OECD, 2017)

In his groundbreaking synthesis of research on factors affecting student achievement, Visible Learning for Teachers, John Hattie (2012) presents a ranked list of 150 items. The highest-ranked factor is "student self-reported grades." To be clear, by Hattie's own admission, he would rather have phrased this as "student expectations," meaning that students are incredibly accurate in predicting their own level of understanding and achievement. Hattie states it bluntly: "Students are the best people to report on themselves" (personal interview, 2018).

Let's pause for a moment to consider the ramifications. How is it possible that many of our traditional assessment models largely ignore the voice of the student when reporting learning, while research suggests that the student is the most important agent in the conversation?

In Embedded Formative Assessment, Wiliam (2018) makes a strong case for teaching to be adaptive to the needs of the student, an approach that is impossible if we're not involving the student in assessment. In establishing five key elements upon which we would base our assessment system, Wiliam includes three that directly and overtly involve the student:

• Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and success criteria.
• Activating learners as instructional resources for one another.
• Activating learners as owners of their own thinking. (p. 52)

Involving students in assessment has powerful side effects. In his book Rigorous PBL by Design, Michael McDowell (2017) underscores how a student growth mindset is supported by students having the ability to monitor their own progress and take actions to improve their achievement. In a vein similar to the OECD principles and Wiliam's elements, McDowell goes on to encourage the supporting of "assessment-capable learners" who can monitor their own progress by being able to answer these questions:

• Where am I going in my learning?
• Where am I now in my learning?
• What's the next thing I need to improve in my learning?
• How do I improve my learning and that of others?

Inviting students into the realm of assessment is linked to increased motivation, confidence, self-regulation, and performance. Moss and Brookhart (2012) make a compelling argument as to why students must be at the center of the assessment conversation:

Students who take ownership of their learning attribute what they do well to decisions they make and control. These factors not only increase students' ability to assess and regulate their own learning, but also boost their motivation to learn as they progressively see themselves as more confident and competent learners. (p. 11)

As we dig even deeper into the research, involving the student goes beyond boosting motivation and confidence. Not only should students understand the elements of assessment as McDowell, Wiliam, and Moss and Brookhart propose, but also their understanding of its very purpose relates directly to their performance (Brown & Hattie, 2012). There is a positive relationship between assessment and performance when students believe that assessment (1) legitimately helps determine their grades, (2) helps regulate their own learning, and (3) is used by teachers to modify or improve instruction (Brown, Peterson, & Irving, 2009). Conversely, if students perceive that assessment is irrelevant, is given for fun, reflects external factors beyond their control, or is related to overall school quality, they perform worse (Brown, 2011).

Voice and Choice: Key Factors in Student-Centered Assessment

If assessment means "to sit beside," we need to stop figuratively placing the learning outcomes on the table between us and our students, informing them of what's right and what's wrong, an...