Not Your Mother's ABCs—Understanding The How and Why of

Wildwood Assessment

Agenda

• Overview Melinda Tsapatsaris, Assistant Head of School

• What We Do Melissa Linehan, Assistant Director of Elementary School

• One Student’s Journey Jason David, Division 3 Humanities Teacher

• What About College? Amy Abrams and Julian Michael, College Counselors

• Student Perspective Lilli K, 12th-Grade Student

• Question and Answer Session

Key Definitions Formative assessment: a range of formal and informal feedback (rather than scores) for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance

Summative Assessment: Assessment of the learning that summarizes the development of learners at a particular point in time.

Performance Assessment: A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills

Rubric: A checklist of criteria for a project presented at the beginning of the project and used to assess how students are doing with the grade-level standards

Standard: What students should know and be able to do at a particular grade level http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/glossary.htm

Wildwood’s Program Elementary School: • progress reports

• parent conferences/student-involved conferences

Middle School: • rubrics

• narrative assessments

• student-led conferences

• gateways and exhibitions

Upper School: • rubrics

• narrative assessments (that get translated into grades)

• student-led conferences

• Gateways and exhibitions

Why Does Assessment Matter? Linda Darling Hammond, Stanford University

“Good Schools not only frequently tell their students ‘how they are doing’ but get the youngsters into the habit of asking the question themselves. The expectation of illuminating feedback—indeed aggressively searching it out—is a universal characteristic of an educated person. The quality of that feedback must be incisive and apt. Telling the kid, ‘you got a 57 percent on Friday’s test…you gotta do better…’ is not much help. Indeed, that 57 may tell us more about the test than the test taker. Understanding that one has not done well on a test is the barest beginning of why one did not do well. The learning is in the substance and barely in the score.”

Strengths and Stretches

“The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.”-Joseph Campbell

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks, learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

-John Dewey

Formative Assessment

• ongoing, formal and informal

• pre-asssessment and post assessment • show what you know

• demonstration

• project

• “kid talk”

• why it’s important

What Do Teachers Do? Mike Schmoker

•are clear and explicit about what is to be learned and assessed

•use assessments to evaluate a lesson’s effectiveness (i.e. student learning) and make constructive adjustments on the basis of results;

•conduct a check for understanding at certain points in a lesson;

•clearly explain and teach the criteria by which student work is scored or evaluated.

Comment from 2011 Year-End Narrative:

Demonstrates the ability to recognize the balance between collaboration and independence (Collaboration): Sandra is a promising student with a sharp, analytical mind and a powerful voice. She has grown tremendously this year and is only going to continue to improve next year. She is, however, encouraged to conference with her teacher more often and to seek teacher support with her work.

Final Essay of Division 3 - Grapes of Wrath Essay Rubric Comments:

Sandra- congratulations! I am blown away by the quality of this essay! You have come such an incredibly long way from the beginning of 9th grade when run-on sentences, poor proofreading, and lack of of organization severely impacted the clarity of your writing and the effectiveness of your argument. This essay is written incredibly clearly - your writing is generally eloquent, specific, and articulated with precision….

I am so incredibly proud of you, and I wish you had been willing to collaborate with me much earlier in this Division 3 experience. Nevertheless, I think you have learned the value of collaborating with peers and your teacher on your writing. I hope what you see clearly is that this paper is still your work, your voice, your original insights into the text, your authentic treatment of the prompt, and that collaborating is a sign of strength and confidence in your ability to craft your best essay and not a sign of any weakness.

From Her Gateway: I was challenged in Humanities, and it was not the History, it was the writing! It was mostly in the Habit of Convention where I struggled. I was not sure how to write an essay, and I was not meeting standards. I was not accustomed to the conventions that were followed when writing an analytical essay…. Of course, I would not ask for help. I struggled to organize my ideas, to proofread effectively for grammatical errors, and to be concise with my thesis.

This is my fault though. Throughout the year Jason would constantly ask me if I wanted him to read my essay, and if he could help, but I said no. It made me frustrated because I was so stubborn that I could not say yes; I thought I would learn to fix everything on my own.

Finally, I asked for help. It was our last essay and I wanted it to be different. I didn’t let him look at the whole thing, but for the parts we looked at, I was glad that he did. I might not have changed my direction completely, but that little shift changed everything. My intro was more concise, and for once, free of grammatical errors. It gave me an idea of how to construct the rest of my essay. It might not have been perfect, but now I am willing to ask for assistance because I know that teachers are here to help me, which is something that I can take to Senior Institute.

Student Perspective

• importance of feedback

• the structure at Wildwood

• my year “abroad”

• college preparation

The Next Step…

• grade translation starts in upper school

• the narrative is still emphasized

• college selection process

• the Wildwood transcript

Thank You

Question and Answer Session