Assessment through the Student’s Eyes

I read an article in the Educational Leadership magazine called “Assessment Through the Student’s Eyes”. This article discussed how students should have a part in the assessment process and that assessment should not be used to “sort the winners and the losers” but learn from and pin point the areas of difficulty to determine the how to make all students winners. I thought the article was very enlightening. I thought the idea of students taking part in the evaluation process is so important. I would think it would allow for greater understanding of what is required of them which will also give students a sense of comfort. I was recently asked the question for my end of year evaluation, “what is one area you would like to improve in?” I mentioned that I would like to improve in implementing quality assessments that cover the broad range of content standards to be used in the limited time given as an elementary specialty teacher. I now would like to add to that by creating and implementing assessments that include the students in the evaluation process. I just wonder if this is practical in my situation as an elementary physical education teacher.

I once took a course in advanced motor learning for physical education and the professor asked how many of you actually assess learning. I was surprised to see that not one person raised their hand. These teachers were teaching all year long without evaluating the performance of students or their ability to impact learning. Their response was that time was an issue. I document students learning in everything that I teach, but I find it very difficult to accomplish what I would like to by the end of each unit. This is usually due to the fact that evaluation (especially more advanced and effective assessments including student evaluation) takes time away from teaching, practice, and demonstrations which are essential to learning physical skills. In addition, the time and environment that is expected to be given per week is not regularly given to the teacher and students especially when student are being pulled in many different directions.

I think I do a pretty good job of accomplishing what I need to and still go above and beyond by teaching and assessing learning content in preparation for the next year, but it is still a great challenge due to the actual time given. At times I feel like learning is rushed and I want to give students more practice, but there isn’t enough time to adequately learn the acquisition of skills throughout the year. Lately it seems like more and more is expected of teachers and students, yet time and financial assistance is not given. Just recently our district re-wrote our contract increasing the amount of class sections for specials which will limit our preparation time, as well as, our ability to prepare environment and equipment for different grade levels in between classes or rearrange class periods due to special events that occur each month. I know that time will not change and I have to make the best of what is given. I am however, thinking of ways to evaluate learning more efficiently by creating more user friendly assessment strategies which will hopefully allow time for implementing the articles recommendation by including the students in this evaluation process.

Yes, but…

I found this chapter to be an interesting reminder of my own misconceptions. The idea of covering the content is something that I am challenged with throughout the year. I feel I cover content pretty well especially when considering the challenges elementary PE teachers face. For instance, instead of just focusing on the content for each grade level, I tend to overlap the grades so that students can review what they learned the previous year and continue from that point. I also do that because we have two other teachers at my school that may not have covered that area which makes a review very necessary before progressing to the next level. Because of over lapping lessons, I feel like I’m teaching twice the amount. I do notice that it is necessary though because when I discuss basic topics that they should have learned years ago, they just don’t remember, never understood it, or they were never even taught it. If I was the only teacher I would know what was accomplished and know where to continue.

In addition to this obstacle, time is always an issue. This year we had a problem with students being pulled out of PE for music. This is an issue because in the state of New Jersey, students must receive 150 minutes of health and PE instruction per week. They are currently only receiving 80 minutes per week of PE on a good week. At the same time, I learned this year how strict NJASK testing was for the examiners. Our faculty had to be certified to be examiners and was given a booklet of rules to follow that seemed very strict and caused a lot of stress for many teachers, especially since there was a teacher in the district who was sued for something very technical. The state actually came in to observe the test administration. It amazes me that this is taken so seriously but state mandates are not.

Other obstacles come into play that take away from the state mandate such as band and instrumental lessons, special services, GT, assemblies etc. This is without mentioning the days that students are not feeling well enough to participate in physical activity, they are just not prepared, or the gym is not clean in time after lunch. This makes our challenge worse because time is even less than expected. It just seems that these inconveniences are not taken into consideration. This causes frustration when you feel like you have to cover everything and only if you do cover everything you are doing your job. I definitely related to this because sometimes I feel like the more I cover the better. I notice, at times, I sometimes don’t take in the consideration of students understanding as much as focusing on the teaching, lack of time, and the need to move on to the next unit. I feel we are trained to believe more is better. This year we had a specialist come in and teach one lesson in a discipline with no additional lessons. Not much can be gained from one lesson. That is like spending one day learning addition in math. It looks good on paper that we are covering new and different areas throughout the year yet we are failing to “emphasize depth versus superficial coverage” and focus on “conceptual understanding” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The conclusion I came to was to focus on big ideas which will overlap content and core standards creating transfer to other areas. In the end this will provide deeper understanding of the big ideas and cover a broad area within the limited time that is given.

Reflecting on the Process

I realize the difficulty of designing such a program for new teachers and the challenges a team faces when trying to change the way they write curriculum, plan lessons, and teach those lessons. In addition to this, time becomes a very important issue. I had a discussion with my principal about my new teacher project and she was surprised with the accomplishments made on this project considering that there is currently a team working on a similar project for the district that will take them all year to complete if they are lucky.

There must be a clear understanding of the UBD framework in order to productively and efficiently progress through the stages of backward design. I found that challenges were added when deciding on assessments, their sequence, and how these assessments relate back to the big ideas and essential questions that were developed months ago. I realized that we had to focus on fewer questions and come up with the most crucial essential questions necessary to make this program a success and a valuable professional development experience for new teachers. The other challenge was choosing the most essential assessments that could be completed in 10 meetings. We had compiled many different assessments and are faced with the challenge of deciding what are most important to our goals for the program. During the process of developing this new teacher curriculum program I realized the importance of determining the most critical big ideas to support the foundation of the UBD processes by focusing on the desired results. If the big ideas are not reflective to what must be accomplished, it is difficult to continue to design the assessments and learning experiences that will satisfy the crucial desired results.