Response to Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning

Response to Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning

Again, the idea is to empower students to not only take control over their own learning, but also to help other students and assist them with their own learning.  When the issue of journaling came up, I felt like this article was written for me and my student teaching experience.  Every day the students enter class and work on a journal entry, usually based on a word that the teacher displays on the document camera.  The students are only required to write the equivalent of one half of one page, then the teacher and the students spend anywhere from ten minutes to forty minutes discussing the quote.  I never understood what the teacher was doing, or how to grade it, until I read, “make it clear to students that you are using journals…for the purpose of evaluation.”  One might see the informal entry-task experience is nothing but time-filler or busy work.  But, I have seen the kids turn the journal entries into the teacher and be worried about one thing: if the entries were long enough.  I don’t imagine the students know how the teacher may be using the entries as assessment—I have a feeling that they think it is just busy work.  In other words, I don’t think students know that they are being “evaluated against themselves over time based on specific criteria.”  I believe that they are missing the point of the assignment, that the teacher is assessing their ability to critically think and reason, to be willing to consider the points of view of other students.

Another point that hit close to home was the section on teaching students how to be the ones to give peer feedback.  The important idea here though, is that the teacher must “train peers to provide reader-based feedback in peer-conferences.  You can model feedback strategies…”  The important idea is to show students how to learn by modeling and showing them how to do it.  For teachers who believe that the best way for a student to learn is by standing in front of them and lecturing, they are missing at least two bits of essential learning: students are smarter than they are often given credit for, and that they want to be trusted to be the facilitator in their own education.  They are the stewards, they should be the architects.