Assessment of Our Assessment: A Case for Student Participation

Carolyn Steinhoff

"We consider knowledge co be a process of construction by the individual in relation with others, a true act of co-construction," scares Carlina Rinaldi, a leading educator of internationally recognized preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in her book In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia (25). In 2003, as part of my work on my self-designed Masters in Education through Goddard College, I studied and toured some of the more than forty schools in Reggio Emilia. They are profoundly inspiring, and I draw on what I learned there every day. Among the many principles that guide them, a central one is participation.

Many studies show that the Italians’ principle of participation has a basis in

science- neuroscience, to be precise. In order to learn, neuroscientists are telling us, students need to participate, with teachers and with one another, in making choices about their learning. Eric Jensen is one of the growing number of educators who embraces what is often called "brain -based learning." One of the books Jensen has written for teachers, about how to facilitate "learning with the brain in mind," is Brain-Based learning. In a section titled "Tight Teacher Control,'' Jensen discusses ''Choice Theory" developed by William Glasser. The William Glasser-US website quotes Glasser as saying, "External control, the present psychology of almost all people in the world, is destructive to relationship. When used, it will destroy the ability of one or both to find satisfaction in that relationship and will result in a disconnection from each other. Being disconnected is the source of almost all hu­ man problems such as what is called mental illness, drug addiction, violence, crime, school failure, spousal abuse, to mention a few" (italics mi ne). Applying choice theory to reaching, Jensen cites Renate and Geoffrey Caine (1994): "…[E]xcessive control by teachers actually reduces learning" (112). Glasser articulates something we all know from our own experience, that the more people feel controlled, the more resentment they feel. No matter how students handle feelings of resentment, whether they express or repress them, when their brains are focused on managing these feelings, they cannot focus on the arduous and exhilarating work of learning.

In thinking deeply about a subject, I want to move between micro-and macro-focus. Jensen claims we need both in order to learn. Brain-based learning is a micro-focus on what happens inside our skulls when we learn. Of course, as educators, we should pay close attention to that. I also want to step back and lo ok from a distance, to "macro-focus" on the endeavor of education as a whole. What is education? Why do we do it? On what basis do we do it? Paolo Freire, John Dewey, and many others, including the educators in Reggio Emilia, have investigated chis question. Frei re coined the term "banking education" to describe a one-way, teacher-controlled student-teacher relationship in which teachers misguidedly conceive of learning as filling students' empty heads with knowledge the way we deposit money into our bank accounts.

Bur I am not one to simply accept theories, unless I see their validity borne out in my own experience. I see the truth of the value of student participation confirmed every day in the classrooms in which I reach. I strongly believe that teachers' relationships with students, and students' relationships with one another and their teachers, are the center of students' learning. So, my own professional development focuses on learning about and reflecting on what those relationships need to be, and what I can do to make them better, with the hope char students will learn more. In this article, I want to focus on assessment, in the context of student participation.

In another of Jensen's books, Turnaround Tools for the Teenage Brain, he discusses "basic commonalities in . . . students' process of selecting and implementing success strategies; the student acknowledges the need for success strategies; the student evaluates old strategies, and selects new ones if needed; the student implements the strategies for a sustained amount of time; the student evaluates the effectiveness of the strategies; the student makes adjustments as needed" (I2). This is a beautiful description of a rigorous assessment process. the subject of these sentences is wont nothing: "the student." Students should participate, in making decisions about their own learning, and in assessing their own learning.

I want to macro-focus on assessment. What is assessment and why should we do it? Assessment is at the heart of what educators do. Our education systems are built on the foundation of grading- which literally means sloping- ranking students in relation to each other according m who is best, better, less good, worse. Our system instills in us the conception of evaluation, of assessment, as grading. Everything we do rests on chis system. Grading is seen as a way to prove quantitatively that student is measuring up co our standards and expecrarim1s. Grading is the way we make students ''perform."

This conception, and the structures and practices chat grow from grading, cause us many problems, including the fact that grading enforces a destructive relational dynamic of competition rather than collaboration between students in a classroom. Bur the problem I want to focus on here is that grading is one-way, a power game, a potent form of coercion. Grading secs up a relationship between teacher s and students in which we educators are insiders, the keepers of the standards, while students are outsiders clamoring to be brought in through achieving, living up to, proving themselves according to our demands. As lo ng as we grade, we hold great power over students' lives. As long as we grade them, we are not allowing students to participate in their own education. hey are subject m our power over chem. This is the taproot of the problematic power relational dynamic we all struggle with in classrooms every day. It leads to both passive and active expressions of resentment by students, which we as teachers are then forced _to spend our time and energy trying to counteract, instead of focusing on learning.

Now for some "micro-focusing” on the topic. What does the word "learn” mean, in brain terms? l embrace the definition of brain-based educators, who define learning as being able to remember and use knowledge gained whenever we need it, whether it is a day, a month, or five years after we learned it. How big a role does learning, defined chis way, actually play in our chinking and practices? How often do we educators calk or think or care about whether our practices result in learning? If evidence in the form of student "performance" proves students are not learning, do we change our ways of teaching? Unfortunately, not, because we most often focus on how we can further and more completely control students' across in response to this knowledge.

In colleges l teach and have taught in, teachers and administrators talk about how many latenesses and absences students have. We talk and care about whether they do the homework we assign. We care about the attitude and behavior they exhibit in our classrooms. We care about the scores they receive on standardized rests they are required to cake in reading and writing, scores we give them on end-of­ semester standardized tests. \Y/e discuss what level of class they can move into when they finish with our programs. [n formal meetings and in informal conversations, we discuss aspects of all these things we care about. But we do not discuss student learning. Yet do any of these aspects of the work that we care about, accurately assess or evaluate students' learning?

It might seem that the essay students write for a test administered at the end of every semester should be at least a fairly accurate picture of how well they have learned to write, how much grammar they have learned, and so forrl1. Let us examine chis assumption. In some programs, students write a complete essay in a time period we allot, often 90 minutes, in conditions we enforce-silence (no discussing with or getting help from classmates or the teacher), no use of devices such as online translators or dictionaries or grammar and other websites chat they use effectively co help them write ac all other times.

Like so many teachers of language, J have been writing (and reading) virtually my entire life. I am a published writer of nonfiction and poetry. Even when I had deadlines as a freelance writer, I needed a span of time through which to access sources, which included a full range of interviews, entries on Facebook and Wikipedia and tabloids and other websites as well as magazines and scholarly journals. I needed rime, even if it was an hour, co ponder. I had to talk with friends about my topic, to take notes, write a rough draft, let it percolate, come back to it with fresh eyes, revise it, revise it again and again, get writer friends co give me feedback, proofread it, gee more feedback, before [ sent a final draft to a publisher.

If I need these things, how much more do students not fluent in the language in which they are writing need them? Brain research backs up this need. Learning happens in a series of recursive stages, each of which muse cake place. The process of writing is a process of learning- learning about our topic, through research, and through writing to think-learning- constructing- what we chink as we write for readers. When I rake the rest myself, and try to write an essay in 90 minutes, I end up with an illegible mess of arrows and cross-ours. What are we assessing? Students' ability to follow a sec of prescribed seeps we teach them to do in order to boost their rest score? If so, chat is not writing. By test preparation, we are so much of the rime instilling habits and practices in students that they will have to forget, if they are ever to really do the scary, open-ended, chaotic, creative work of writing. We are evaluating their ability to perform steps we have made them memorize within a short time after they have memorized them. Will they remember or care about these steps next month or next year? Do these steps promote deep thinking, critical thinking, caring about subjects, curiosity, motivation, self-discipline- any of the actions and mindsets that actually express learning? l submit that they do not. I submit that there are more effective ways to assess students' learning, ways based on student participation.

People are born learning. We are learning creatures, from birth to death. No one has to be forced to learn. We are learning all the time in order to survive. And no one likes robe cold what to do and not have a choice about it. Students, like all other people, want m learn, and need to learn in order to survive. Students, like all other people, like ourselves, crave the ability w cake part in decisions that have a strong impact on their lives.

Applying this thinking to assessment, we should participate with students in articulating goals and strategies- what they want to learn, why, and how they will learn it. Then, we should use goals student’s articulate as the bas is for participatory assessment of their learning.

I invite you to question the assumption, the paradigm, that it is our job to decide and to control what students learn. Yes, we are teaching particular classes in particular subjects, with specific goals and objective’s But because students have signed up for the course or program, they have already exerted choice and agency. We should start there and build on that. Even if our course is a required course, students, like all people, do want to learn, and are learning all the rime. Do we want to continue teaching them what they have been learning in school, how co pass costs and get As? Or do we want them to learn new, deeper knowledge, critical chinking, in formation, and perspectives? Within the framework of our, subject, we can ask students to tell us what interests them. Working together, we can design goals for how each unique person in our classes can move from where he or she has begun to where he wants to bear the end of his special time with us. We can engage all our students in assessing their own progress toward that end.

Learning goals and assessment must be intertwined. All human beings have questions about the world, about their lives, that the content of our courses can help them answer. \Y/e can invite and facilitate students' posing of these burning questions. We can approach and explore students' questions with them, using the vocabulary and mindset of our discipline or subject as the lens. Students also have specific questions about our course, about what they need to know from our course in order to get good grades in ocher courses.

Students are in remedial programs because they failed the CUNY entrance rests. These programs are ways CUNY helps them increase their fluency before they take the rests again. Students in these programs need to know English as a scarring point for all the aspects of their lives in this country. Our work is to facilitate their making the connection between that pressing, large, general goal of theirs to the specific areas of reading, vocabulary, grammar, and writing that they need in order to pass the CAT Writing and Reading rests and begin their college; studies.

When students have questions, they have learning goals. ''How can l learn English?" can be turned into a self-focusing lens, to become "I need to learn English grammar, and be more aware of what verbs agree with what subjects in sentences"; "I need to learn to find connections between rexes and write clearly about them'';"] need to develop my ability to think and write critically about texts." Such declarations reflect the skills required to pass the CAT-W.

If students tell me they need to learn these things, I can take part with them in them learning them. In Turnaround Tools for the Teenage Brain, Jensen recommends Backwards Goal Design (137). We begin by a articulating a " big dream." Next, we connect char dream to our long-rang e goals. We then create goals with specific out­ comes. We create intermediate seeps we will take to move toward those outcomes, then we create goals for this week. Finally, we create goals for today, which will take us one step closer to our big dream. I implement a version of this strategy witch students each semester. With my guidance, students create Learning Goals, and they use those goals to measure their progress each week, at midterm, and at the end of the semester. I then also invite students to identify a goal each day, and I check in with each of them at the end of the day when each one talks briefly about whether or not and in what ways they have met or have not met their goal.

I continue to evolve and reline my methods, and do not claim m have

the most effective ones. I offer this account of my own thoughts and practices, nor because l feel they are in any way ultimate or authoritative, but in the spirit of sharing what I care about. I am in an ongoing process of learning. Let us continue to reflect on and question together how, and why, we do what we do. Let us assess our assessment and our teaching as we continue our own learning throughout our lives.

REFERENCES

Jensen, E. (2013). Turnaround tools for the teenage brain. San Francisco: John Wiley.

-. (2008). Brt1in-based Learning: the new paradigm of teaching.' Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: listening, researching and learning. New York: Routledge.