Assessment For Learning: The start of a project

Recently, as part of my new professional growth plan, I have begun focussing on trying to improve assessment practices in my school.  I have put out an open invitation for any teacher at our school who would like me to work on any project with them.  I have offered them time, collaboration, research (I will sort through the research for ideas for them), and a temporary teaching partner in exchange for them trying something new and pushing their practice a little. 

The first project is focussing on using visual literacy (Graphic Novels, Film, Video, Websites, Art, etc.) to represent student understanding of the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  We are focussing on using self / peer assessment combined with group developed rubrics to evaluate the projects.  We are playing with the idea of having the students (Gr. 8’s) develop their projects to present to the elementary students to give them a focus for their work. 

We are also working with a slightly modified idea from the book Putting Assessment into Practice by David Spendlove (great book by the way) by having the students develop 1 question for us (the teachers) to ask them from each level of Maslow’s Heirarchy.  Each question would, of course need an answer, and would then be evaluated by another student.  The evaluating student would need to assess what level (of the heirarchy) that question represented and state why each answer did (or did not) adequately answer the question. 

The other ideas we have been exploring in relation to Assessment is the use of classroom question/discussion time as an assessment tool.  Spendlove speaks of “targeted interventions” in his book and the strategic use of questions to assess the understanding of specific students (or groups of students).  One possibile way this could look is to pose a question to the students and tell them that they have 15 seconds to discuss with their parner then we will randomly choose someone to answer (This has Barrie Bennett written all over it).  Each class we will specifically target the questions towards specific students whose understanding we are assessing.  Through this process we will be able to gather the ‘assessment’ that we need, but will also have the entire class on task and thinking during the process.  We will see how it goes.

We are still working on creating this project and any ideas you have would be appreciated.  Thanks.