Assessment should guide teaching and learning. Effective teachers use a mix of assessment tools as an ongoing check of student understanding, as a measure of their instructional effectiveness, as a guide for future instruction, and to ensure accountability for learning from students.
Ongoing formative assessment is a powerful teaching tool. One of the ways I have used formative assessment in my teaching is through the use of dialectical journals. My students maintained an ongoing electronic dialectical journal throughout our reading of Siddhartha, and I was able to check on their understanding through this tool as we read the novel. Here is one student’s dialectical journal for the novel: Student- Siddhartha Journal.
Assessment also needs to move beyond traditional grades to include formative assessment, direct conferencing, self-reflection, and other methods for evaluation. In my teaching, I consistently try to encourage student ownership of their learning and empower them to find meaning in text, rather than meaning the teacher delivers. Early in the Lord of the Flies novel unit, when we arrived at the “theme” lesson, rather than telling students what the themes were, I planned to invite them to discover “big ideas” in the text that interested them, then gave them the chance to work collaboratively to explore these big ideas. This was intended to shift the responsibility for analysis from the teacher to the students, which would involve them in their own self-assessment and meta-cognition in reading. Here is the assignment for that task: LOTF Big Idea Writing Exercise.
I carefully align assessment, expectations, and instructional goals in my classroom. I make sure that students understand the expectations for the class and set expectations for themselves. Creating and sharing rubrics for culminating assessments is one example of this alignment in my classroom. Here is an example of the rubric that I intended to use with my 10th grade English class at the culmination of our Lord of the Flies unit. 