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Mukwa Ogitchida Professor Ken Simon EDU 300 21 October 2013 Assessment Philosophy: Can we build community though learner engagement using assessments? Schools have always been transforming centers. Places where people, mostly under the age of 25, go to be changed into something the society needs or can use. For years, since the start of free public education, what society needed were workers. These workers needed to fill three basic positions, leadership, and management, and skill workers. So we used assessments to differentiate these workers out from amongst the crowd. The result was that we got a few leaders who could see beyond the fence, and create new things. We got a large hand full of managers who learned to navigate the system and could perpetuate the status quo. Finally, those who could not test well, where encouraged to join the skilled workers labor force. But we also got people who dropped out of the system, and became the poor. This model is now outdated for two reasons. What the society needs is critical thinkers and problem solvers in much greater numbers than the current system provides. The second reason is that we are now realizing that it is the system, and not the individuals ability that has been creating these separations, and that this splitting of the work force has been done inequitably along racial lines. We now know that if you change the way you assess, you get different results. It is now time to build a system that assesses in such a way as to encourage investigation, and minimize differences. With this system

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in place we will have a chance to fill the needs of our changing society with people from many different backgrounds and ethnic-o-cultural backgrounds. If assessment is going to encourage investigation, it will have to be formative in nature. We will have to move away from large tests that put a stamp on a class or unit. Instead, we must move toward assessments that clearly communicate progress understanding a learning objective. However, the change must be in the entire classroom as Lorrie A. Shepard states in her article The roll of assessment in a learning culture, To accomplish the kind of transformation envisioned, we have not only to make assessments more informative, more insightfully tied to the learning steps, but at the same time we must change the social meaning of evaluation (10). We must make the classroom a place where assessment caries no stigma of separation, where everyone is expected to get to the finish line even if they use a different path. You can see that a classroom that encourages investigation also minimizes differences. The minimized differences are in learners abilities. This type of classroom says all students can learn. Interestingly, while there is a minimized sense of students ability, there is a maximizing of the pathways needed to get to the learning target. Learners will need to be assessed using many different modems, giving different types of learners an equal chance to show their newly acquired knowledge. So as the learning target stays stationary, each student will need different ways to reach the target. This also leads to instruction being multi-model. The classroom with this philosophy will have many different types of access points to the new information, and just as many ways to assess the learners understanding of the information. The challenge here is to get learners to look at assessments as part of the feedback loop. This is not the mountainous task it may seem, go into a classroom on testing day, and you will

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see students asking questions that the teacher does not want to answer. The root of this phenomenon is simple. Learners that feel the topic is too immense, give up until testing day when they see what they are required to learn. If we remove the veil, and tell the learners exactly what they are required to learn. Then we increase the frequency of the assessments, and at the same time remove the stigma of last chance. Suddenly, learners would look forward to assessments in order to see if they got it, or not yet. A Classroom of dedicated learners, each using an information system that best promotes their learning, all of the class expecting to reach the learning target, and using assessment to check their progress sounds great. So why is it that this is not the reality for most of our classrooms? Currently the shadow of high stakes test overwhelms the system. The picture is much like that of a desert in the rain shadow of a mountain. Much like the Great Basin that covers almost all of Nevada and parts of Utah. The moist air of change sweep in off the Pacific Ocean. Creating a bountiful landscape filled with hope, just as the scattering of successful schools do. Then the Sierra Nevada Mountains, our standardized test, suck all of the moisture out of the air. Then only dry depleted air, the traditional way we teach, is left to fly over the land or our students. There are places in the Great Basin where you can see the promise of water on the snowcapped mountains and at the same time you are standing in the driest place in the hemisphere. No need to be depressed, eventually all mountains erode away. Fortunately, societal change does not operate in Geologic time. If critical masses of educators work hard to overcome and create learning classrooms, then the domineering specter of standardized test will crumble. We can see the foundations eroding now if we look closely. Let us get back to one classroom. Learning is one student at a time, teaching happens one class period at a time. I have purposed a classroom that uses multi variable assessments that

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gives learners a chance to check their progress toward a target. I have suggested that in this environment learners would have fewer reasons to differentiate themselves from their peers. The subtitle of this paper asks if we can build community though this kind of engagement with our assessments. The first part of community building is present in this philosophy, the removal of our perceived differences. The next and more difficult step is to remove the societal norms that keep people apart, for this to happen it would take more than just a change in assessment procedures. It would take a pedagogy dedicated to social change. The greatest agents of change in our history have been educated individuals from oppressed populations. Then our roll as educators is to make education accessible to those it has not been open to. In this way we are loading the world with possible agents of change, and if these agents see all people as worthy of opportunity, then the change they will initiate will be community building in nature.