One might ask right about now on this blog, “Who has time to read the recent barrage of articles and posts on authentic assessment? And why don’t they talk about anything else? I’m too busy and they keep talking about only one thing!”
I would ask, “Who can risk not reading them?” Why?
Because I say that we are sleeping and need to wake up!
Some of us have just spent almost twenty years studying how to teach using comprehensible input and now we have arrived at a final barrier that is keeping us from getting it going in our classrooms and we just fall asleep at it, unable to get our feet to take us up and over it. Asleep at the barrier. Asleep standing up. Asleep in our classrooms.
It reminds me of how in about 1760 we were and had been for quite some time a sleepy and exploited people who accepted English law and oppression without questioning. But then ordinary people started writing inexpensive pamphlets. They became the galvanizing medium of their day. The pamphlets addressed the most fundamental concerns of politics of the day: the nature of power, liberty, rights and constitutions, etc.
Plain old farmers (John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania) and future Presidents (Jefferson) wrote. The most significant one of course was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Through the pamphlets we got the idea that we didn’t have to be oppressed and that we could govern ourselves in a world where only despots ruled from Japan and China to the great oppressors of the world in the form of the European kings and Czarinas and all of those crushing forms of government.
The analogy may be a stretch but I don’t think so. I am saying that we are oppressed in our buildings and that it is connected to the assessment piece. Hear me out:
Who has oppressed us, who are asleep at the barrier? Oh nobody in particular, except the textbook companies and a legion of freak memorizers-turned-language-teachers (a Super Pac) who don’t want us to wake up and who now are about to get the wake up call of a lifetime if only we can wake up at the assessment barrier, get over it and do what we are called upon to do right now when we assess our kids.
What are we being called to do right now? It is to assess our kids in the human way and destroy all vestiges of the old “tell and test” model, which shames children. True, the way we teach doesn’t shame children, but if the way we assess in our CI classrooms does shame them, then it’s a wash. The result is the same – we will get no buy in from the kids because for them in schools it’s all about grades.
So if you are sitting there and think that you might be asleep at the barrier as you read this, then I urge you to just find the time and a good cup of coffee and read the 20 or so articles which have taken over all other discussion here, which hasn’t yet happened in our decade long association of sharing ideas about CI instruction here.
Hmmm. Asleep at the barrier? Might I be asleep? Might I need to set some time aside to read all those articles? Might I really need to change the way I test in my CI classroom before my CI classroom can even work? That sentence in italics is my key point in this article.
Hmmm. Could it be true that kids being presented with a new way of teaching but who are being assessed in the old way of assessment might then end up unintentionally sabotaging the new way of teaching?
Maybe we need to wake up, look down, see our sleeping feet, realize we have been sleeping with our heads on the assessment barrier, grab our feet, pull them up one at a time over the barrier, and start changing how we assess kids in our CI classrooms. Hmmm.