First Day back from Christmas: Assessment & Inquiry

Dear Pete,

It was just so, so wonderful to spend this year's Christmas with you.

Thank you again for being the precious little brother you are to me.

This Christmas was full, simple and love-filled.

As I mentioned to you, today was my first class back to class.

While it was pretty difficult to focus since I've had so many restless nights recently, I was glad we covered what I have been interested in for a while now: assessment - or, "celebrations of learning" as I often say.

Here are some of the key pointers of today's class.

---

There are three types of assessment in education: assessment for learning, assessment of learning, and assessment as learning.

Let me explain further on what the differences are.

Assessment for Learning

Do you remember the times when your teachers would give you small worksheets or even quizzes at the beginning of school year just to see where you are at? Those are often key examples of assessment for learning.

Basically, assessment for learning is a snapshot or evaluation of students' level of competency or knowledge to guide the teacher in their lesson planning so that teachers are better able to tailor their lessons and activities to suit the skill level of their students. So it's called assessment for learning since it is a piece of evaluation that is designed to better direct teachers to appropriately engage students in learning.

Assessment of Learning

Assessment of learning evaluates what knowledge or skills you have acquired thus far. Examples of assessment of learning often include plain computational questions in mathematics, regurgitating history dates in social studies, knowing how to balance equations in chemistry, etc.

Assessment as Learning

Assessment as learning is the type of learning I want to practice the most in my teaching. To concise it down, assessment as learning are pieces of evaluation, where students are challenges to use their metacognition to complete the process of assessment. In other words, students are required to engage in strategies, various pieces of information, and skills acquired during class to successfully complete the assigned task. It often promotes critical thinking, understanding big ideas and connecting pieces of learning that was done throughout the unit/lesson.

So examples of assessment as learning is something like giving math riddles/puzzles - you have to use different skills and knowledge to piece clues together in order to arrive at an answer. During the process, you would have come to learn how math concepts are related to each other, and gave you an opportunity to practice a new strategy or refine an old strategy.

Shift in Balance

Education once focused on practicing learning of assessment (where students are evaluated if they have successfully acquired the content delivered). Now, there is the shift in the education, where a greater emphasis is put on learning as learning (where students are being challenged to further their knowledge and skills while applying understanding that was acquired during lessons).

This helps students to develop a further critical thinking and develop greater self-regulated learning and use of metacognition.

---

Connection to the Course:

Shelley Moore: Backwards Design: A Great Way to Move Forward!

Backward design is a method to plan units and lessons by starting at the end in mind: assessment. We think of what assessment and what do we want students to take away from the lesson . Then, we begin to scaffold our planning to reach that goal.

Pete, if you get a chance to look at the video- it's phenomenal.

I think it's a great method to think about especially when we create assessment of learning since it gets at what students need to know to perform x.