Creative Assessment

Developing assessments that fall under the umbrella of my requirements for being considered creative is a challenging task. In my mind, creative means that it needs to be innovative and out-of-the-box. If I can’t say “I haven’t thought about it like that before,” then I have a hard time labeling it as creative. This is a personal obstacle that I struggle to overcome when it comes to creating assessments. The great thing about needing to make an assessment based on randomly generated techniques and structures is that it forces you to shift your perspective in a way that hasn’t been done before. When I challenge myself to create within these unknown parameters, I feel my motivation swell to the surface at the thought of a challenge. It’s at these times where I start to see how effective assessments are made, because during these times, my mind isn’t focused on grades or ease of implementation; I’m focused on the experience.

Grading assignments holds me back from truly letting loose with my students. It makes me worry about how feasible it will be for me to get all of the assignments graded, or what will happen if my students don’t score the way I want to. I come up with my most creative assessments when I design them without ever thinking how they will be graded, and it’s usually these assessments that prove to be the most successful amongst my students. Alfie Kohn (2011) states, “the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing,” which aligns with my observations from these gradeless assessments. During these, my students aren’t worried about what score they’re going to get because we never brought it to their attention. They’re able to apply all of their attention to the lesson without the idea of success or failure distracting them.

Sometimes we forget what it’s like to be a student in the classroom. We become too ingrained in the pacing, evaluations, and grades that we lose sight of the reasons we became educators in the first place. I know that 6th-grade-me and students in my current classroom would both sit through some assessment I give and think “there has got to be a more entertaining way to do this.” This has to be similar to what Wiggins and McTighe (2005) meant when they asked, “What activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills?(p.18)” during their breakdown of the 3 stages of backwards design. It isn’t asking what activities will get the students the best grades, or what activities will give me the most data to boost my evaluation and observation. It’s asking what we can do as educators to help teach our students the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.

References:

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design, (2nd Ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Wix. Class [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_b90f0c409dc344ee994650889eac446c~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1110,h_740,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_b90f0c409dc344ee994650889eac446c~mv2.jpg

Wix. Teacher [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_af87bbe91778445b82c551db5c144d73~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1110,h_741,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_af87bbe91778445b82c551db5c144d73~mv2.jpg