A New York City student explains how performance
assessment supports learning: "When
you take a test you don't feel like you need to know it after
it's done. The portfolio stuff sticks in your brain better."
A New York City teacher explains how performance
assessment supports teaching: "Teachers
pushed each other to answer "why are we doing this? And
what do we want kids to get out of it?" (The portfolio)
is understood to be something we need as an entire school....
I can't imagine right now trying to teach without thinking about
assessment all the time. It's easier to be in your own little
world and not be accountable to anybody. It's much easier for
me to be in this room doing what I want. But it's not the best
thing for the kids, and it's not really the best thing for my
teaching." --a
teacher at Central Park East Secondary School
Successful small schools have a clear goal: They want
all students to achieve to high standards, and they are clear about
what students should know and be able to do when they graduate.
They communicate their goal by fostering a “sense of press”
that pushes students ever further in their thinking and academic
performance. But they don’t enforce standards by setting ambitious
goals and then allowing students to fail. They provide both high
standards and high supports.
Common
Expectations Clarity and coherence are important underpinnings
for high standards. The curriculum at these schools is organized
around common “habits of mind” that are consistently
reinforced across classrooms. For example, these habits may require
students continuously to weigh and use evidence, address multiple
perspectives, make connections among ideas, speculate on alternatives,
and assess the value of the ideas they have studied, as well as
to present their ideas clearly and with appropriate use of conventions.
In many traditional schools, the goals of learning are tacit and
mysterious. It is a challenge for students to figure out teachers’
different expectations: One teacher is saying, “I’ll
give you an F if you don’t put your name on the paper,”
and another is saying, “I want you to learn to think independently,”
and a third is saying, “Just memorize what the textbook says.”
At effective schools, students are expected
to meet similar academic expectations and learn similar habits of
mind in each class they take, and the school community as a whole
has a solid sense of what students should know and be able to do
by the time they graduate. Joint curricular planning also enables
the curriculum to “add up” – to build ideas from
one course to another and from one year to the next. This also enables
more powerful learning than can be achieved with a fragmented, disconnected
course of study that leaves students with gaps, holes, and misunderstandings
as they try to put the pieces together by themselves.
Standard-Setting Successful schools often frame the issue
of common standards by asking themselves the following questions:
• What do we want our students to know and
be able to do by the time they graduate?
• How will we know if we are succeeding?
In good schools, the former question is answered through
an intensive and constantly evolving process of standard-setting
that is led by the school’s faculty. Teachers work through
the guidelines of national, state, and district standards as they
determine what is essential for their students to know and be able
to do. Many existing standards documents are unrealistic in their
breadth, so teachers must make principled choices about what is
most important – that is what ideas and skills are central
to the discipline, are transferable to other contexts, and allow
students to gain access to other ideas and skills. This kind of
discipline in choosing material to study is necessary when one understands
that students learn more from in-depth study of concepts that they
evaluate and skills they apply to new situations than from a cursory
overview of many topics.
Focus
on Student Work The latter question – how will we
know if we are succeeding? – is answered by looking at student
work as the concrete representation of progress toward the school
standards. As a result, student work is the focus of the school:
Student writing, artwork, and other projects are displayed prominently
throughout the school to demonstrate this commitment to placing
their learning at the center of the school’s mission. Student
work is also the subject of much teacher and student discussion
and analysis. Students have frequent opportunities to engage in
serious conversations about their work, and to share, reflect upon,
and receive feedback on their progress. As teachers look at the
work of their own students, they learn much more about what is working
as they had hoped and what is not than they could from standardized
multiple-choice tests. As they look at the work of other teachers’
students, they have a window into the curriculum and teaching strategies
used in other classrooms.
Performance
Assessment These conversations about the quality
of student work best occur in the framework of a well-crafted performance
assessment system. Such systems are based on common, school-wide
standards, they are integrated into daily classroom practice, and
they show students what they will need to do by providing models,
demonstrations, and exhibitions of the kind of work that will be
expected of them.
Generally these systems include:
• portfolios of student work that demonstrate
in-depth study through research papers, scientific experiments,
mathematical models, literary critiques and analyses, arts performances,
and so on;
• rubrics that embody the set of standards against which
students’ products and performance are judged;
• oral presentations (exhibitions) by students to a committee
of teachers, peers, and others in the school to test for in-depth
understanding and assess the student’s readiness for graduation;
• opportunities for students to revise their work and improve
in order to demonstrate their learning and to meet the standards.
Students develop their portfolios over time with the
support of their teachers. Class assignments are designed to meet
the portfolio requirements and judged using the same rubrics. Students
revise and improve the work they have done in class, often during
advisory time and with the help of their advisor or other classroom
teacher, to prepare it for inclusion in the portfolio. Many high
schools not only have a graduation portfolio that students prepare
in their last two years, but also ninth and tenth grade portfolios
or projects that focus instruction and help students learn how the
process of developing and exhibiting complex performances works.
When students graduate, they leave with a portfolio
that they carry proudly, because it represents the work that they
have done over multiple years, it represents who they are, what
they care about, and what they have learned, and it means much more
than a test score. Portfolios are not just evaluation instruments;
they are complex learning experiences (see Newman et al, 1996).
One student described the power of having to defend the portfolio
in an exhibition: “You take the role of a teacher when you
do your portfolio. You get to do most of the thinking when you work
with your portfolio. You have to explain how to do something or
why something is important so that someone who doesn’t know
it can understand it.”
Standards
for Teaching Thus, performance assessment is a learning
tool, a tool for guiding progress, not a method for sorting students
into successes and failures. At too many schools today, people say,
“We know we have high standards because so many students fail
to meet them.” I would argue that this is not an example of
high academic standards. Having high standards for children means
having high standards for adults in their work with children. Educators
must raise their standards for the quality of their own teaching
and work together to create a wider range of strategies to meet
student needs. We cannot separate standards and assessment from
curriculum and instruction: As teachers, we meet high standards
if we can help all of our students achieve by constructing, with
careful scaffolding, the pathway to success.
Performance assessment helps teachers hold themselves
accountable and improve their practice. As one New York teacher
put it, “Portfolios are a key way into individual work with
students, to see what’s working and what’s not, and
what we need to do better.” School-wide standard-setting and
shared public assessment strategies convey valued ideals in a concrete
way; they provide occasions to recognize and celebrate student and
teacher work; and they make clear the areas where more work is needed.
The public nature of the process is an important incentive for teachers
not only to prepare individual students well, but to work to improve
their overall teaching as well.
