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Nelle Andrews discusses the many uses of formative assessment
70 Plays6 months ago
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning. Sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:21
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This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large. The learner-centered spaces podcast is now a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
Meet Nell Andrews
00:00:41
Speaker
We are so privileged and excited to have Nell Andrews on our show today. She is the Dean of Curriculum and Instruction and an English teacher and field hockey coach. Formerly, she was Director of Faculty Growth and English Department Chair. She is passionate about helping students understand how to own their learning so that they can confidently use their knowledge and skills to help others.
00:01:09
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She is an accomplished field hockey coach and earned coach of the year honors several times in Connecticut. She was also inducted into the Connecticut Field Hockey Hall of Fame back in 2018.
Rethinking Grading Practices
00:01:22
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Most recently, she's been coaching her fifth grade son's travel basketball team, which she finds very rewarding and also incredibly challenging as she has primarily worked with high school students. Please welcome Nell to the show today.
00:01:38
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Thank you. It's great to be here. And it's so awesome to have you now in this capacity. We usually talk shop, but today we're going to talk a little bit more about your journey. Can you tell us a particular experience that may have put you on the journey you're on right now? Sure. Um, so I currently work at Ms. Porter school and as an all girls school, it's a
00:02:02
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Independent School is boarding in Dan, Connecticut. I worked for almost 20 years prior to coming to Ms. Porter's at the public high school down the street, Farmison High School, and had a lot of really significant, formative experiences working there. One in particular was back in, I think around 2013 or 14 or so, when the district presented their vision of the graduate framework.
00:02:31
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And at the time I was teaching different English classes and, you know, saw this information come out and thought, okay, that's nice, but, you know, I'm going to probably just keep doing what I'm doing. I'm not really sure how this is that big of a deal. And our school was also doing a lot of work to really examine our grading practices and started to look at doing more of a mastery based standards based grading system. And so,
00:02:59
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It started to click over time that I needed to kind of rethink my practices. I was teaching AP language classes at the time. And one of the first changes that we made as a school was eliminating grades for homework, removing late penalties.
Teaching Critical Skills
00:03:16
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And this was really stressful for my AP students because they often, their assessments were practice tests, basically.
00:03:27
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The homework was a matter of compliance for the most part, but it was intended to give them a lot of opportunities to practice their skills. But for most of the students, completing the homework gave them a decent grade in the class because if they took the test and they struggled a little bit or it took them a while to master the skills, the homework was what kept them afloat. So I mentioned all of that just because it was something that forced me, making those changes forced me to really think differently about the structure of the class, the purpose of assessment and grading,
00:03:58
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And I really started to look more carefully at the vision of the graduate categories that the district had outlined and started to realize like, okay, I actually, this isn't just about teaching these kids how to do well in AP exam or how to make sense of whatever literature we were reading, but really the larger framework of thinking critically, of being able to collaborate with others, to be able to problem solve, to communicate effectively,
00:04:25
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to be self-directed and
Role Shift: Teacher to Coach
00:04:27
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resourceful. Like those were the larger skills we were, of course, teaching, but we weren't explicitly identifying those for our students at that time. And so it sounds kind of silly to me now as I think back on this, like how did I not recognize that these were skills I was teaching in my classroom, but maybe wasn't as explicit about. But at the time it just kind of clicked. It was a pretty significant aha moment for me to recognize that
00:04:55
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I had a very significant purpose as an educator to make sure that these students not only were learning these skills, but that they had the opportunities in my classroom to truly develop these skills. And I really hadn't worked that way as an English teacher previously. I know I had kind of functioned the way
00:05:17
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Most schools function, which is like, here's the five books for 10 books or whatever we're going to read in the class. Here's the number of essays kids have to write and ready, set, go. Um, without a clear path of understanding what the larger purpose to all of that work would be. And so that was a pretty important experience for me to just start to not only explore, um, my role as an educator through different lens, but also thinking about, um, really what was I doing in my classroom and why?
New Framework and Assessment Rethink
00:05:46
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And.
00:05:47
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what were the experiences that my students were having and how could I enhance those and really play more of a coaching role for my students rather than feeling like I had to do all of the work and engage, and it allowed me to engage them differently. And I guess what was somewhat ironic was that I was probably already doing all of that in my coaching role as a field hockey coach because I had,
00:06:14
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always been to try to teach my athletes about the importance of working hard and practicing their skills. And yes, it's important to do well in games and to reach goals that we have set for the team for the season. But it's always so much more important to learn how to work with their teammates or to learn how to, you know, work through challenging moments and how to have a growth mindset and how to stay focused and be positive and all these other sort of life lessons that were embedded in all of that coaching work.
00:06:43
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And I just hadn't really thought about my time in the classroom in the same way. So all of this shifting of the framework that our school district put into place really kind of led me down a different path.
Formative Work: Practice Not Grades
00:06:57
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That then ultimately led me to think differently about assessment and grading practices as well. And of course, when I read Star's Hacking Assessment book, that was
00:07:08
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Another aha moment that really helped me make sense of different ways to engage students in their thinking about assessment and thinking about their learning and how they could own that learning process a little bit differently than they maybe had before. Can I ask you to tell us more about you mentioned at your previous school district about eliminating late penalties and not grading homework.
00:07:35
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And you mentioned that your AP students were struggling the most with that. And I find that here. So I work at a school that is very high achieving. And we're not AP, but we're very high achieving kids.
00:07:48
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And many of them do lean on that homework grade as a fluff, right, to their grades. So I'm curious, how did that get resolved or did it get resolved as far as meeting the kids' needs, you know, because they need that good grade, quote unquote, need, that good grade for college acceptances. So what happened there? So it took a while to really talk to the students a lot about like, what was the purpose of homework?
00:08:17
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And what was going to be the way that they could sort of think about their homework differently is think about it as a formative practice. Like think about it as
Holistic Rubrics and Student Control
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a way that you kind of, we did use a lot of sports analogies. Like you go to practice every day, you practice your skills, but like the game is where, you know, you show what you can do. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And so it's just the same kind of concept with formative and summative work in a classroom. And if you're,
00:08:44
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assigning homework and you're not doing it, you're not going to do well on the summit of assignment. And so we had to kind of help teach kids to see that doing homework shouldn't be about compliance. It should be about, OK, this is a chance for me to practice my skills. And it was really a lot of direct instruction around that. There were definitely students who didn't buy into that idea for a while and then realized when they would get to a final project or a final assessment that
00:09:14
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They really weren't prepared because they didn't do any of the practice work along the way. And then it would take them a while, but they would figure that out. In my AP class in particular, I worked with one of my colleagues to essentially develop a different reporting practice. And we had permission from the school to experiment with something different. So we told the students that they were no longer going to have individual grades on all of their
00:09:41
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practice tests that we were doing in class. We just said, you know, we're going to give you a score based on the AP rubric, and we're going to give you
Self-Assessment and Student Development
00:09:48
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feedback. All the lessons that we're going to engage in between these assessments are going to be designed to help you practice this work. But we're not going to calculate a grade on a daily basis. At the time our school was using power school, kids and parents had access to that. It was expected to be updated every two weeks.
00:10:06
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We were putting information and data into PowerSchool, but we were listing everything as formative. Therefore, it didn't calculate into a final grade. We developed a holistic rubric for the class. It was based on a 9-point AP rubric scale. We lined it up with that. Most kids say in their first attempts on an AP essay would be earning something like a five or six, and we had
00:10:36
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detailed language that outlined a student performing at that level would look like this. And we had a whole bunch of things of descriptors. I can't remember off the top of my head what they were. But then we used that as a way for students to then say, OK, here's the qualities of work if I'm at this level. Here's what I want to strive for. And then we also required students to compose a self-study at the end of each quarter, where they had to write a one to two page reflection that
00:11:04
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evaluated the evidence of work that they had engaged in that particular quarter where they had to say, OK, here's what I know I'm struggling with. Here's what I'm doing well on. And here's my goals for my next quarter of work. And then I conference with every single student. And we would have a conversation about what they thought their final grade should be. So based on the nine point AP rubric and the one that we had kind of built for the class, which we call just like a quarterly assessment rubric or something, I think we called it.
00:11:35
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We would have a conversation with the kids about, okay, you think you're falling in the sixth range. Okay, the sixth range equates to about a B minus. So do you feel like that represents kind of who you are and where you are in your learning right now? Yes or no. And we'd have, we'd look at the evidence that they presented and we'd talk through their skills.
Skill Development Over Grades
00:11:52
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And almost always the kids were pretty spot on with evaluating themselves and what, where they thought they fell and what they thought of themselves and their progress.
00:12:02
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Occasionally you'd have a kid who had a pretty inflated sense of where they were, but most often we would find that students would undervalue themselves or they'd kind of rate themselves lower than where they were. But we built this out as a way to produce a grade for a report card with data in the grade book, but that gave them a little bit more power over their performance.
00:12:28
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It wasn't so much about what I thought about them all the time, but it gave them a chance to have a voice in the process. And at first, it was a little bit confusing to them, but we engaged them in some readings, like we read Alfie Kohn's Against Grades. We read, I forget now, but we read a bunch of different pieces that were like different educational philosophy pieces, essentially, that encouraged them to engage in some debate and some thinking about grading generally.
00:12:58
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And that helped them to buy into the system. We did a lot of communication with parents and stuff as well. And we found that students felt safer in our classrooms. They felt like they had more power in our classrooms. And they gave us so much great feedback about what was working, what wasn't working, that we were able to sort of make some tweaks along the way. And they forgot all about homework grades. And we framed the whole class around the idea that the AP exam at the end of the course
00:13:27
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was like the big summative assessment, right? That was the thing they were all working towards and that everything we were gonna engage them in the rest of the way was gonna help get them there, but also more importantly, it was gonna help them become a more effective communicator. They were gonna be able to write better. They were gonna be able to think more deeply. They were gonna be able to engage in really significant relevant arguments and get a good chance to practice debating ideas with each other.
00:13:53
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be able to synthesize lots of information. And so they were building all those skills without necessarily even stressing out about them as much as they might have in a traditional classroom setup.
Benefits of Learner-Centered Spaces
00:14:04
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And it was something we were really excited about. It was something I felt really proud of, but we did it for about three years before I left and came over here to Ms. Porter School.
00:14:13
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Nell, as I hear you speaking about all these wonderful things you were doing at this school, like you can't see me smiling on this side of the non-video camera. Here we're going for the podcast. But so much of what you're saying, I think folks need to hear. And I know that I've been beating this drum for a long time now. And I would say over the last few years, it's so gratifying to see so many other voices
00:14:42
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you know, like being a part of this conversation and not being alone crazy on the hill dancing by myself. So there's a couple of things I'd love for you to go more deeply into because I think they really
00:14:57
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Support the idea of a learner centered space like you've kind of talked around so many of the pieces and I just like I I've been having conversations with schools a lot recently about formative and summative work specifically in terms of the fact that like
00:15:15
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Something that kind of makes my skin crawl is when I hear folks saying that formative work gets graded and that it's a percentage of the average in terms like, even if it's a 90-10 split where it's 90% summative and 10% formative, I can't impress to school leaders enough how damaging
00:15:41
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us like grading practice work can be. And this is also where we kind of bring up the redos and retakes also that if you have a really robust formative assessment process happening in your learning spaces, there really is that your redos and retakes are a part of that process and they're getting feedback. And it's not like this formal thing that folks are having to contend with on the summative side
00:16:12
Speaker
because you're giving kids enough time to actually grapple with the learning at the appropriate time in the process, which kind of goes back to your conversation about homework also, and also, you know, kind of the struggles of being with kids who are on the high achieving side, because as you know, that was my experience as well, and kind of getting them out of their own way.
00:16:36
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so that they could enjoy the learning again instead of being so hyper-focused on the labels that come with their high achievement. So if you could speak a little bit more to the formative assessment process in your learners' spaces and how that helps to develop that learner-centered space. Sure. I think the more you can remind your students that
00:17:05
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essentially every day of their life is formative, right? Everything that we do that helps us learn is formative. And we have opportunities in our lives to show what we know and can do in those moments in time. And that's what summative assessments should be.
Formative Work as Learning Tool
00:17:22
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And sometimes some students are going to need more practice. They're going to need to go back to that formative process. And just like in life, you're going to need to go back and redo something or
00:17:34
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you're going to need to go revisit a conversation you've had because you've messed up a relationship with someone or something. You know, like there's so many different ways in which I think as a teacher you can help students to see that the formative process is, it's not just about did you do your homework. It's about like where are you learning? Where are you actually taking a lesson out of an experience? Like what are you getting out of an experience that's going to help you move forward?
00:18:03
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And so much of that work is metagogy of work. It's not always about, oh, well, I have to wait until a teacher gives me feedback, right? So much of this is like students can do this work themselves. They know how much effort they're putting into something. And they sometimes will struggle to see what more they need to do. And that's where the teacher can come in and help them. But I think it's important for us as educators to really
00:18:33
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help the students to see the value in practicing the skills that they want to get better at and that they need to also practice evaluating themselves along the way, that that is also a piece in the formative process. I don't know if that's making sense or not, but you know, they can get feedback from me as their teacher, they can get feedback from their peers, they get feedback from
00:19:01
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their parents, you know, or their advisor or whoever else might be around them, but they also need to look critically at themselves and reflect on their choices and their efforts and what's working, what's not working and recognize when they need help and so much of that is part of that formative process. So when we as teachers reduce formative work to
00:19:28
Speaker
saying it's just homework, that can be a problem. When schools, as you mentioned before, start, incorporate formative work into the final grade somehow, that also is problematic because that sort of goes against the whole concept of formative work. And really, we want kids to see that there is a space that is safe for them to take risks, safe for them to really practice and to fail and to
00:19:56
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use feedback to grow, and that takes a lot of educating. They're not going to understand that overnight. They have to learn that through a lot of patient teaching and through a lot of experience.
Innovative Assessment Methods
00:20:15
Speaker
But once they understand that, I think that once they understand the value of formative work, I think they can buy into it a little bit more.
00:20:25
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understand how to use their formative experiences to really grow and to be able to shine when it comes to something that's a little bit more intense or more summative or even more of a final project kind of point in time. So this is going to shock you and star, but I work with many teachers who've been teaching a very long time and they do give grades for formative work.
00:20:52
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And it's very difficult, I know Star is probably like, oh, you know. It's really hard to convince or to promote change with some teachers who grade everything because that's how they've always done it. And that includes homework, informative assessment. But I also work with educators who don't do that. And so there's a push pull, I think, with the traditional and more learners centered in my school.
00:21:22
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So I'm curious, Nell, what advice do you have for a teacher who is like-minded, like you and me and Starr and many of the others you've mentioned, who do want to lean into the learner-centered assessment and grading practices and redos and all of it for the sake of students? What advice do you give for someone like that?
Engaging Students Through Assessment
00:21:46
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I think the best advice is to just try doing something different.
00:21:52
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There are a lot of arguments against making these kinds of changes or people who are sort of stuck in the way they've been doing school forever. But you just can't remain stagnant. You have to try something new. I mean, that's what having a learner mindset is all about. There's always a different way to do things. And one of the best ways to get started with that is to think about what it is that you are assessing in your class and why and to really
00:22:18
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take a hard look at the purpose of assessment in whatever class it is that you're teaching. Are you just asking students to regurgitate information? Or are you asking them to actually do something with the content that they've been learning in your class? And what could they be doing with that? And how would you give them opportunities to actually shine in those final assignments that you're asking them to complete? And how can you design those in such a way that
00:22:47
Speaker
you actually don't need to be worrying about a grade because you've created an assignment or an assessment that is exciting a student so much that they are forgetting about that process completely. So
Understanding Students for Effective Learning
00:23:01
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I don't know, I feel like there's so many different ways you could go with this, but certainly building in choices for students, really getting to know your students well so that you have a sense of
00:23:16
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who they are and what they care about and what makes them tick. You know, that's hard when you have 100 and something students a day. And I recognize that that is, I'm in a very privileged position to be in such a small school right now, but really taking the time to engage in conversations with students is a great way to just start to understand
00:23:40
Speaker
how to engage with them differently. And then back to thinking about assessments. Sorry, I'm jumping around here a little bit. Thinking about the purpose, thinking about how to build an opportunities for students to engage with a specific audience can make a big difference. And I don't know, there's lots of different ways that shifting assessment practices and shifting the type of assessments that you're asking students to engage in can actually
00:24:11
Speaker
lead your course in a different direction or lead your students in a different direction, most importantly. And I don't know, those are a bunch of different things to focus on. Sorry, I'm kind of thinking of a lot of stuff here. But if you were someone who wanted to engage your learners differently, there's a lot of different ways to go about that. I would say most important is getting to know your students first, thinking about choice.
00:24:38
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and what choices they have to engage in the materials in your class, what choices they have to show their learning. And there are lots of ways that even a teacher who's hesitant to engage in something different could maybe even have a small group of students participate in designing an assessment with them or brainstorm something together about what exactly do we want to show
00:25:06
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off by the end of this class, like what's something that we've been working on that we know we can be really proud of by the end of the course and have students participate in that process.
Resources and Influences for Grading Innovation
00:25:14
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As we're starting to wrap up now, are there any people, folks who are listening should be aware of, like who in the space should they be following? Who should they know about who's doing really good work that helps to inform the work you're doing?
00:25:28
Speaker
I'm always following the work of Jaye McTye was just as far as like curricular planning goes and mapping backwards and things like that. I know I put in my notes for the podcast that one educator that I met many years ago that was very inspiring to me, who I have not been in touch with in recent years, but Marcus Yore is from Brewster High School in New York and he was very
00:25:55
Speaker
kind in letting me come visit his school the very end of the school year and back in I think 2015. He was doing all kinds of innovative work with grading practices and what he calls grade abatement and has developed a really cool system for students to evaluate themselves and he has since built like a maker space kind of as he calls it in his classroom where it's essentially a flipped classroom model but
00:26:23
Speaker
It's a really cool concept that he's designed is very innovative and he was someone who introduced me to the concept of having students publish work online and really building a more authentic audience for themselves. And so that's someone I feel badly I haven't been in touch with.
00:26:44
Speaker
but who has done some really cool work with students. Teachers Going Gradeless, I follow all their stuff. So I'm always listening to other podcasts that they've produced, and I know they've linked to your podcast as well before, and articles that they publish. I follow a lot of different people on LinkedIn, but the Teachers Going Gradeless website is something that,
00:27:12
Speaker
I started following a long time ago and really have found that to be a nice place, a nice kind of forum for people to share ideas, to get help who are trying to change practices. And
Conclusion and Engagement
00:27:26
Speaker
that's something I would definitely recommend for people who are sort of new to some of this. Now, after listening to you, I want to work with you.
00:27:37
Speaker
I want a colleague like now, please. I do have many colleagues like you, but I want more of you. So our listeners are probably feeling the same. Where can they connect with you online if they want to? Probably the best way would be through my LinkedIn page. That's what I'm most active on these days. All right. Thank you. I will put a link to your LinkedIn on the show notes. We appreciate your time this evening. Thank you.
00:28:06
Speaker
Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com. You can follow us on Twitter at MasteryForAll and on LinkedIn on the Mastery Portfolio page. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.