Keeping all of your work in a folder...BRILLIANT!!!

In my senior English class in high school we kept a portfolio with a lot of work from the year. Like most things in that class though we did a mediocre job of pursuing it. We didn't keep all of our work and it was very unorganized. I don't think the portfolio was assessed all that thoroughly either. In my class I would like to use portfolios and really stress their importance. I want students to be proud of what is in there. What I like about portfolios is that the student as well as the teacher can map their progression. As said in the chapter, portfolios show the process as well as a product, they create a collection of work, are useful to review instruction, and show student growth. It's really great how something so simple could be so helpful to both the student and the teacher. When assessing the student, portfolios are a great way to answer the question of how to grade students of different ability levels. It will be easy to see how hard a student has been working and be able to grade on their individual progress instead of comparing them to others. Another great thing about portfolios is it gives the teacher a great resource when parents want to know what is going on.

Reflection and Self-Awareness

I can remember creating portfolios from first grade to senior year of high school. Portfolios always made me excited not only to track my progress, but also to have a finished product, a personal artifact, from that year in my life. The reflection at the end, however, always was a drag. I just wanted to be done with it already! I guess I was just struggling with the idea of critiquing my own work, especially the poorer-quality work from the beginning of the year. Now being students in the College of Ed, we get bombarded with reflection assignments. I realize the importance of self-awareness and progress today, but perhaps I can use my previous frustrations to connect with my future students. I can explain to them how difficult it can be to grade our own work or point out the flaws. At the same time, I can help them understand the PURPOSE of reflection, and that I want them to decide their grade based on effort and growth.

Portfolios

After the discussion from Katie's lesson and then reading the section on portfolios in chapter 6, I can see myself using that type of assessment in my classroom. I think the students would benefit A LOT more if they could do an English, Math, etc portfolio (a portfolio for each subject or even just a few subjects) through their entire hs career! It probably would be hard for the entire English department at a school to go for that, but hopefully once I start doing portfolios for my students then other teachers would want to follow along!

When I first heard about the portfolio idea from Rebecca in class I just thought it would be a good idea for students and parents to keep student's hs work-almost like a good memorable token or something. Then, as I read chapter 6 I realized that it could be used as an actual assessment of the students learning AS WELL AS how the teacher is teaching-the effectiveness of their methods. I believe the best way to asses a students learning is by using authentic assessment and a portfolio does that-students have to reflect on their own work (share what they have done, how they have done it, how they think they did on it). Don't get me wrong, some traditional assessment is totally fine, but then again, are you assessing a student's knowledge or did the student just guess the correct multiple choice?!

Assessing Individuals

I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately, even before we started talking about it in class, and I think one of the best things for me has been to see how my field teacher grades and assesses the students in his class. It's a career communications class, so it's geared towards students who probably aren't going to go to college. Currently, the students are working on position papers on a controversial issue--one that they care about and hopefully will want to write about (that is the goal, at least). Every time I get to work one-on-one with the students, I'm amazed at how many different levels they are at. Some of the students are writing pretty decent papers, while some of them still don't know how to come up with a topic sentence. Their teacher is grading them mostly on an individual basis--he told me which students he wanted to be at certain places in their essay and which students he just wanted to have an outline of their points by the end of class. As teachers, we are going to have to have different standards for different students, because all of the them are going to be at different places as writers. But I know that there still has to be a balance in the grading between what is expected of everyone corporately instead of individually, and I don't feel like I know what that balance is. How do we recognize the needs of individual students and their abilities while still basing grades on some sort of rubric or spectrum??

What is the real world?

Ok, after reading these 2 chapters and after our couple discussions in class, I am left with one burning question, WHAT IS THE REAL WORLD?

It seems that all this talk about assessment, testing, (even teaching really!), is to "prepare students for the real world". But, it seems that in English classes particularly, the goal is to produce good writers, good readers, and add a little creativity to all of that, with not much mention for the "real world". If the real world is AFTER college, then we need to expand our territory. We need to incorporate a wide variety of things that familiarize students with many careers. And the after-college-real-world would require students to give presentations, speeches, oral reports, advertisements, etc. However, if the real world IS college, (or if the goal of teaching high school is to prepare students for college), then the assessment and testing would look much different. For the great majority of my college courses, assessment and testing has looked much like what we sort of "shunned" the other day in class. Things like multiple choice tests, long, drawn out papers, 10-questions quizzes to prove if we read a book or not, and true/false where you have a 50% chance of getting the answer right. I guess I'm confused as to what we are supposed to do. Or what "real world" we are supposed to prepare our students for.

If it were up to me, I think a combination of everything would be best. Preparing students for careers, preparing them with college-type work, and helping them produce in themselves the best and most creative readers and writers they can be...

-Lacy

Assessment in AP Lit

Reading these chapters on assessment made me think a lot about my field class. I am in Mr. Stover's Senior AP Literature class, and it is intense. He is preparing the students to take the AP Exam in May, and they have been working hard all year. Mr. Stover has graded the AP Exams before, so he has first hand experience on what the testers are looking for. He definitely teaches to the test as well. However, this is not a completely horrible thing. Every student has a AP scoring guide, which ranges from 1-9, one low, nine high. Every time they do an essay, it has to be written as if they are taking the AP Exam. On their homework, he even wants them to time themselves and make sure they don't go over 40 minutes! It's amazing. However, what I find most interesting is that he doesn't assign grades according to their essays. Instead, he has them rate their essays and write justifications for their ratings. He then rates their essays and looks over their justifications. Their grade on the assignment depends upon how close their ratings lined up with his. He is always using the same language found on the scoring guide and essay prompts to describe the pieces of work they analyze, a suggestion B&B make with regards to the six-trait model. It is very interesting...

Devil's Advocate

5 points: The topic is narrow (what is narrow?). 5 points: The writer seems to be writing from experience (at what point do we consider someone "experienced?"). 5 points: An inviting introduction draws the reader in (all introductions need to be warm, fuzzy and pleasant?). 5 points: Striking words and phrases (is there a list of striking and not-so-striking words somewhere?).

There is no doubt that we can identify quality writing, whether it's in the form of a Faulknerian novel or a critical essay, a New York Times headline story or an experimental short story. We take classes, we study, we write. And somewhere in between all that good writing emerges. Writing that we can look at and say "yeah." But I think it's dangerous for us to try to quantify the standards of good literature. In number-crunching American, where research is god, anything backed up with quantitative assessment must be true. Right? Maybe so when determining wind patterns, consumer habits, or any other scientific stuff, but we're treading on thin ice when we do it with an art form. You wouldn't go to an art museum and give Whistler's Mother a D- because it doesn't adhere to some research-based rubric. You have to judge something on it's own standards. You wouldn't say the Beatles are bad because their songs are too short. Or that Beethoven is bad because his pieces are too long. You judge them on different standards. Though they are both music they both are trying to achieve different things. A rubric like the one in chapter 7 may be appropriate for argumentative essays (big emphasis on may be) but I would be wary of using these standards anything less formal. Take into consideration who the research is based on, "Paul Diederich, John French and Sydell Carlton asked (in 1974) 60 professionals, including 30 college professors, 10 writers and editors, 10 lawyers, and 10 businessmen to read 300 papers . . . "(pg. 122) i.e. old fat white guys. I'm willing to bet that that group would've scored a book like Mango Street poorly. Don't get me wrong. I think it's necessary to distinguish good literature from crap. The fact that Kite Runner sits on the same shelf as Paris Hilton's "autobiography" makes me want to puke. But I still think we need to rely on ourselves to determine what is good literature rather than some arbitrary list of numbers.

This doesn't solve any problems when considering how to establish consistent grading standards when addressing student papers. I'm just playing devil's advocate. The devil of a non-numbered world. I just don't want my assessment of students to be as white-upper-class biased as standardized testing.