Thinking like an assessor

We teachers normally struggle to really determine what our students truly know or what they are able to do. According to chapter 7 teachers will assess effectively the work of students if they take the position of an assessor more than a teacher. But what’s the main difference between these two concepts? Basically, the difference is that teachers are more interested in generating grades, through the use of appropriate exercises which include right or wrong answers. On the other hand, an assessor is more interested in analyzing evidence of transferability, which is based on the ideas of how to use knowledge and skills effectively in different situations.

I think we have to clearly understand what assessing students means, since in general the most common, easy and natural way of assessing our students is through giving them tests, and we don’t really consider the information gathered during the process, which is of great value and importance. Although, gathering relevant evidence during the process is not that easy since we must recognize that it’s quite complicated for us to keep an eye on every student in the classroom, especially when we have 40 or 42 students working together. I know this is our eternal problem, our unsolved problem, but the more I read the more I realize this is one of the key points to achieve quality and equality in our educational system. But anyway, as we know things won’t change, we have to do and give our best considering all the failures the system may have, and according to this chapter, this time it’s related to the way we assess our students. We should keep always in mind the objectives we’ve set for every single class, which might vary considerably depending on the group. Besides, we need to consider the different kinds of assessment in order to pick up the most appropriate regarding our students characteristics and needs, which is not easy, not at all, but again it sets us a great challenge to develop and improve our teaching skills.

Gaining clarity in our goals

According to Wiggins, the design process to plan a unit of study has to be coherent and focused on clear and worthy intellectual priorities – on what we call “big ideas” and “core tasks”. All this means that teachers are in charge of setting explicit or clear priorities; we have to make choices according to the objectives we have set for the course and therefore, according to these objectives, we juggle with multiple responsibilities such as deciding what we are going to include in our units or what we are going to leave aside, or the time we are going to spend in the tasks designed. But, is it that easy for us to make decisions on what to teach? Maybe yes, maybe no, probably some of us have got the freedom to choose a textbook; but anyway, textbooks contain lots of units which should be covered in a year, and developing big ideas - which is our main topic today- demands time, time to reflect, to analyze and compare different ideas or concepts that might appear in the lesson. Then, probably the question is: do we have enough time to do our job as it should be done? Remember that big ideas are at the core of subjects and they need to be uncovered through collaborative and reflective work that results from the use of essential questions; therefore, students need time to make connections between the new information given, the information they’ve already got and their own life –in other words, transferability-.

To round off, it is of great importance to have clarity on what we decide to teach and why, but please consider that it is a huge task, since we don’t have enough time to do it properly. But anyway, ‘ideally’ there should be a clear and straightforward answer for these questions, considering our big goal which is helping our students to truly understand new concepts as well as use their skills wisely, in order to become autonomous and efficient learners.