Assessment - What Do They Really Know?

"Teachers want their students to learn content knowledge and skills, and have a deep understanding of complex concepts... I have a wide variety of assessments to gauge what they know".  - Tovani pg. 117

In her work, Tovani talks about how although teachers don't expend much effort in grading multiple choice tests, and they are the 'easiest' to grade, they do no really dig deep to see what students know. Students can easily cheat off of other students, guess and get lucky, or use SparksNotes to get an A.

Tovani suggests that you give students a way to "best display what they know". Instead of grading knowledge that is "easy to grade" (pg. 118), educators should take more grading in favor of students better grasping the material.

What would this look like in your classroom? Leave a comment below!

Feedback that Sparks Student Discussion

Tovani believes (and I agree) that when students have an opportunity to discuss what they have read, they remember it and understand it on a deeper level than simply reading (pg. 110). One way to acquire this sort of discussion is by putting students in small groups to converse with one another. Tovani suggests groups of six students or less in order to ensure participation from all of them. The group discussion should take place during the "debriefing time" (found in my blog post The Workshop Model) and should only happen after students have a chance to write down their thinking first. They can write down their thinking on anything from a double-entry diary to sticky notes, as long as they have processed their own thoughts before entering into group discussion. 

During this time, Tovani is assessing by walking around with a "Group Observation Form" (found in one of Cris Tovani's other books, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?). On this sheet she records what she hears in order to plan for the next class period. She also sometimes adds directly to the conversations of the students as well. 

This is a great way to assess student learning and also allow the students to deepen their thinking by sharing their thoughts. In the art classroom, I would find a way to incorporate this into a critique situation. My students could write down how they feel about a piece and why, and then I could break them up into groups to discuss their feelings with their fellow classmates. This way, the students get to participate and share, and I get to assess quickly and efficiently.

Talking Back to Your Text

Another way that Tovani discusses the assessment of students understanding what they are learning is by doing a 'talk back' with the text (pg. 88-89). The teacher can model this behavior by doing a think-aloud. Tovani gives an example of how she had one of her colleagues do a think-aloud and talk back with a biology textbook:

Her Colleague's Pattern of Thought While Reading the Textbook

• Read text in small chunks
• Paraphrase each small chunk
• explain what the text meant to her
• Examine graphics and pinpoint confusion 
• helped her pay more attention to the text when searching for details
• Trusted that pages of written text would explain the graphics
• read with the intention of connecting text and graphic
• Categorized information in her head and then on paper so she could refer to it later
• Reread with a purpose in mind - usually to answer a question or clarify a process

Tovani then turned these concepts into annotation idea, which is basically a model typed onto a sheet that helps walk your students through what they are reading. These annotation sheets ask the students to do things such as "record a what" or "record an analogy". These sheets also encourage students to write down something that is a connection to information they already know, jot down questions, or record a way that the student thought differently while reading.

The Workshop Model

Cris Tovani organizes her time in the classroom based on the workshop model (pg 45, figure 3.2). By utilizing this as a backbone for classroom structure, she ensures that students are doing work in the classroom so she is there to scaffold, encourage correct thinking, and do 'think-alouds' with her students. I think this structure is quite effective, and I have included how she organizes her class below:

Taken from pages 44-46

1. Share the 'targets' for the day - what do you really want students to get after today?
2. Next up is a 'mini-lesson'.
• Provides direct instruction
• Includes the whole class
3. Work Time!
• Students 'dig-in' and practice the learning done in the mini-lesson
• This should be the bulk of the class period - applying what they have learned
• Tovani walks around and conferences with each group that is working
• these conferences normally range from 2-4 minutes
• she uses these conferences to assess student learning and build stamina
• Support and scaffold students for the rest of the class period
4. Debriefing
• Give students an opportunity for metacognition
• Help them synthesize and reflect on their learning

Tovani discusses that this is an approach called "listening to teach, not talking to teach", and can help students do more work on their own, thus teaching them how to think and teach themselves with some supervision. She also explains that when students get 2/3 of the class period to practice, that time adds up by the end of a semester.

I find myself utilizing this in the art classroom a lot. By doing demo for a few minutes and then setting students free to work, I can walk around and scaffold their thinking while they are getting their 'hands dirty' and digging into the techniques that I have taught them.

Conversation Calendars

Although formal assessment has become a mainstay in teaching and isn't going away any time soon, Tovani suggests in her book that teachers utilize more informal assessment to better understand each of their students. One main way that Tovani does this is through "Conversation Calendars as Formative Assessment" (pg. 29). Above I have included an example done by one of her students. How could this help you better understand your students? Is there value in conversing with your students about topics that are unrelated to 'school'?

Do Test Scores Really Indicate if Your Students "Get It"?

Often times as educators, we feel that we spend hours pouring into our students to help them 'pass a test'. We hold review sessions, give study guides, play classroom games, and even hint fervently at exactly which terms and information we want our students to know. Most of the time, teachers get frustrated at poor test results, and feel as if they are not communicating the information that their students need to know. Have you ever considered for a second though, if students are passing your tests, but don't know your content? Below is an example of this from Cris Tovani's classroom.

Faraz and the Vocabulary Test
An Actual Story From Cris Tovani's Classroom
Taken from pages 15-19, condensed by myself for ease of reading

     Tovani wanted to test how she could accurately assess the students understanding of their vocabulary words using only a Scantron. To test the hypothesis, she ruled out as much cheating as possible - put the desks in rows, stapled everyone's tests in different orders, and paced up and down the rows to ensure no student would cheat. She also searched for definitions written on desks and had the students store all of their notebooks and backpacks away from their desks. She had one student she kept an eye on specifically because he never showed up for vocabulary lessons, avoided the weekly vocabulary quizzes, and was failing the vocabulary section of the class. After the tests were over, she finished grading them and found that this student got a 100% on her test. The next day, she spoke to the student and asked him how he passed the test. After some finagling and dealing, the student promised to tell her how he cheated if she wouldn't go to the dean. He admitted that he was texting his friends who knew the answers to the vocabulary words the whole time, and they texted him back with definitions to the words he didn't know. Tovani, who watched him the whole class, had not seen him send a single text message. Even though she made him do multiple vocabulary activities to make up for the cheating, she still discovered that

"Just because a kid aces a test doesn't mean he knows and understands the material."

Assessment Is Not the Enemy

Cris Tovani begins her book by delving into the concept of assessment not being the enemy. In a world of education based on students performances on standardized tests, it's difficult not to get swept up by the pressure of assessments. According to Tovani, after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) hit its stride, it became a way to 'judge and rank' students and teachers (pg. 11). Tovani says that it took her some time, but she "realized that assessment wasn't the enemy; it was the way it was being used to judge and punish instead of inform and help educators get smarter about teaching and learning" (pg. 11).

How will you be able to change the structure of your classroom to improve the way that you assess?  According to Tovani, it won't be too drastic of a change -

    "My hope is that teachers will recognize that many of the tools they already use, when given a slight tweak, can serve as powerful assessments that will inform instruction and improve achievement." (pg. 11)

What ways do you assess your classroom? How could you tweak those to better inform your instruction and improve your achievement? Leave a comment below!