2 posts from April 2009

As I heard Savannah from Arizona tell about how one day at school brought on stomach ulcers, her reluctance to return to school for months, and the loss of her friends because they were embarrassed of her, I couldn’t help but think of my own soft-spoken, sweet, honor-role female students. Imagining any one of these female students of mine getting strip-searched because of an administrator’s alleged probable cause darkens my view of schools as pro-social institutions. No matter how strong a school official’s belief that a student had drugs on her and posed a threat to the student body as a distributor, there is no situation in which dehumanization and “traumatization” should be seen as appropriate protocol.

Institutions are adulterated when bureaucratic terms like “from a policy stand-point” permit such practices. A drug-free environment should not come at the cost of dehumanization. The injustice done to Savannah is two-fold: the stigma that is attached to a student in an incident like this is penultimate to the violation of a young person’s body. What I mean by that is, schools should never be in the business of turning a good, decent youth into a delinquent based on mere suspicion. Whether the student really does behave like a delinquent, or merely her self-concept is turned upside-down by such an event, has a profound impact on her identity and immediate future.

The impacts of such physical invasion and humiliation on a teen would alter his or her trajectory with curriculum and instruction because, as Savannah did, they would be inclined to become a truant. After all, the school sees them as a criminal already; why go to a place where the adults do not approve of you, and your peers have turned from you? Indeed, this one strip-search, one gloomy morning or afternoon, had a life-altering effect on Savannah.

A better practice would be to hold the student in the office and require her to be sent home. I suppose the school would rather have the incriminating evidence to brandish over the parents, instead of vehement parents defending their children’s innocence. If school administrators aren’t trained in the dangers of pharmaceuticals, as the district spokesperson defended, then they shouldn’t get so over-involved. Let me reiterate myself: it is not the job of a school to turn a youth, who needs all the protective factors she can get against adolescent risks, into a delinquent. Schools ought to administer corrective punishments, rather than punishments that cripple youth. Of course, chronic suspension is an instance of this that gets iffy for a teacher who cannot teach anytime that unruly child is in the room. But in this instance, we are speaking of those wallflower students, who may indeed pose some threat to the student body by being involved with drugs, but who need an education as bad as – or worse than – their peers.

I actually can think of a student in a situation like Savannah’s. J.R. was actually once my student of the month. His classwork was oh-so-meticulous. He was respectful and calm-spirited. Last term, the administrators nailed him with a 9-day suspension for having found large sums of cash on his person. J.R. returned to school with the wind totally knocked out of him. He was depressed and I could literally see the ruin and approaching disaster in his face. “They think I’m so bad,” he said. He stopped coming to school for two months. Then he either withdrew or dropped out. I never saw the boy again. This is a instance in which his culpability and involvement in drugs is more blatant than Savannah’s ever was, and I still believe the school did him wrong. My heart breaks that the “system” – this institution intended to equip, enable, educate – removed his last chances, his few remaining protective factors. He’s been left to the hands of risk, when a good punishment ought to eliminate risks of an offender to re-offend. That would be true restorative justice.

Assessment in my classroom now has evolved to a good balance of authentic and traditional assessment. In the last term of this schoolyear, I have made a point to have equal amounts of each in my gradebook. For authentic assessment, I have done creative vocabulary card projects, and have led my students through the entire writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing on computer), and have put these in as test grades. I definitely believe that these two long-term projects qualify as what the video called “fun tests” that tests students’ abilities, because students can ask questions while they do them, and the quality and depth of input into the final product is wholly in their hands. Thus, these authentic assessments evidence the students’ determination to get it right, which traditional, multiple choice tests cannot possibly capture.

            As for the traditional tests in my classroom this year, they have been (as mandated by my administration) multiple choice followed by an essay portion. I design the multiple choice off of the SATP question style, but make sure that the language used in the questions comes strictly from either the novel we are reading in class or terminology we have reviewed in those weeks preceding (i.e., diction, oxymoron, author’s purpose, etc.). I like the multiple choice questions I give, but agree that authentic, live, original products measure a students’ capacity and illustrate his/her understanding better. As I see it, authentic assessment proves that a student has internalized the information, whereas traditional assessment can, at best, show that that knowledge has touched the surface of the students’ mind, but not necessarily penetrated or become permanently incorporated in it.

            Next year, for assessing my students, I hope to develop: (1) more precise and fitting scoring guides for performance-based tests; (2) a way to incorporate more presentation into the assessment, so that peers can learn from each other; (3) one-on-one, 5-minute book discussions with each student, as the Urban Academy in NYC does, assigning student to chat extemporaneously with a ‘perfect stranger’ about a book they’ve read independently); and (4) some way to build-up to more independent, self-driven, self-monitored work from August through May.

If I am going to get really ambitious in thinking about next year, I think it’d be amazing to bring in local experts, so that, as Gary Wiggins said in the video, high-quality, local assessment would play out before my students’ eyes. If geometry students can be evaluated by local architects, English students can be evaluated by local authors or poets… imagine the possibilities! I heartedly agree with Doug Reeves, author of the 90-90-90 studies (esteemed by Ron Sellers), that assessment should be ‘for’ something, not merely ‘of’ something. In this case, being evaluated by an expert would be for the purpose of “assist[ing] educators to improve instruction and advance student learning,” rather than merely to quantify how well students caught on to a concept (from Reeves’ “Forum on Assessment”). Assessment should assist, buttress, support instruction, not be its hated pest.

My hopes for assessment this summer are to transpose the composing-process project I did with my classes this year. I find that evaluating students’ writing step-by-step, and affording students individual instruction throughout, is a good approach to performance-based, authentic assessment. Students can control their achievement if they are determined to produce the best product possible over a period of time and work. This might be a good time to experiment with presentations, since class sizes will be low and manageable.

The main roadblock in reaching my assessment dreams will be me entrusting students’ progress into their own hands. Letting students do long-term projects requires that the teacher give student time and space to create an original product. But my inclination, based on experience, is to expect students to get off task and never come prepared with what they needed to scout out on their own. Maybe if I do part of the leg-work, such as pluck out a group of books for students to work from in their research instead of setting them free in a vast library, for instance, the prospect of allowing them the freedom to create on their own will be less frightening to me.