Numerous thinkers and books have shaped our thinking about assessment, and we would like to share them with our readers because they both frame our ideas as well as contextualising them, and they will be the focus of our future blogs on this important topic:
If there is one common thread linking all these books, some of which we will discuss in much greater detail in later posts, because their arguments are crucial to the case we are making, it is this – assessment should support and guide learning, not supplant it: assessment should also communicate learning progress and achievement as well as attainment, but if it becomes the only thing that matters, if tests and examinations overtake learning, and if parents and students only care about final grades, then teachers are right to view their students through the prism of labels only and they are justified in letting the end cipher define all: students may be classified according to their attainment only and should be ranked accordingly. This logic makes the work of the pedagogue so much easier and permits of facile screening metrics and mechanisms of the kind that make for mindless decisions and foregone conclusions – for example, no female student measuring under 1.52 metres and no male student under 1.67 metres will be admitted into a Grade 8 class, say. In such a scenario, teachers are under no obligation to get to know their students or their learning needs; diagnostics, pre-assessments, formative assessments, and benchmarks are not required; growth and development are also moot, because teachers and students alike have little control over the predetermined measures and outcomes that have already ordained where students fit on the bell curve, and the whole business of teaching and learning can be reduced to a process of quickly ascertaining where that place is and putting the student there.
As we have already illustrated, this kind of thinking has permeated teaching and even the best-minded and most well-intentioned teachers have fallen for it. Students are driven by final exams and final grades only because that is what matters most, what will get them that most-coveted seat in the university of their choice, so they spend their entire learning lives trying to figure out what will be on the exam and then building their whole learning plan around it. Teachers succumb and tout good grades as evidence of their excellence as teachers. However, this paradigm is anathema and violates almost every precept we at Premiera hold dear and expound as educators. We believe in building professional communities of learning, where every child can learn, where every child’s social and emotional needs, in addition to their academic needs, are addressed and met, where all children learn in safe environments where they are protected and given space to grow and self-actualise, where their creativity is nurtured and celebrated, where their achievement is valued as much as their attainment, where they are not classified or labelled, where their interests, drives, aspirations, and hopes are known and valued, because these are doorways to opportunity and success, where teachers take the time and make the effort to get to know, hear, and motivate their students, where they design learning plans that target their students’ potential rather than their recorded capacity, where they are willing and prepared to work hard on behalf of every student, and where no child is considered as having failed to learn before such a holistic model is fully and comprehensively activated.
In the next post, we will discuss Grant Wiggins’ view of assessment and the place of the student in his model. His enlightened approach will frame future blogs and the arguments of those whose work builds on Wiggins’ theses, either explicitly or implicitly.
