MYP Assessment for Learning

Returning to English Teaching
Supporting video: http://bit.ly/15nOMey 

I have had a happy return to the world of teaching grade 10 MYP English this year. For the last two years I have lived an MYP Coordinator's dream of teaching what was basically an explicitly MYP class, focusing on teaching and evaluating student growth in the Approaches to Learning (study skills, organization, teamwork/collaboration, visible thinking/analysis and evaluation, reflection, goal-setting, motivation), leadership, Community and Service, and self awareness (Learner Profile). For the 220 students I saw weekly (all MYP 4 and 5 students at Qatar Academy) our end products have been student and teacher e-portfolios, Personal Project, Student-led Conferences,  and an MYP Exit Interview, plus what they could transfer over to their assessed classes.  Hence all assessment has been targeted on learning since there was no explicit grade for the class. All motivation also had to be internal, calling upon the need for individual growth and selling how if you improve yourself, you will improve your grades.

That moves me back to the present--where I can now apply all of those lessons to teaching English, a subject I have taught for 16 years in 4 different educational programs. How could I utilize what I had learned to become a more successful MYP English teacher? Well, if this first unit is any evidence, I think that sabbatical has helped me to finally shed a previous assessment paradigm- one that limited my ability to help my students reach their potential. This is a quick summary of what unit #1 has looked like compared to previous years.

Unit Overview:

This unit is focused on short stories that focus on the theme of coming of age, amidst the Area of Interaction (AoI) of Health and Social Education. Students are answering the question, "What does it mean to come of age (for you and in other cultures)?" In terms of skills, essay writing is being taught explicitly. Students are moving from the traditional 3.5 essays that they wrote in grade 9 to a beginning level of literary commentary. The short stories in this unit are perfect for this task, as students can quickly see what choices authors make, what tools they use in literary features (predominantly plot elements) and to what effect. The theme is constant, making one purpose of the writer (to teach a lesson) transcendent across all stories and lending focus to the choices different authors make towards a similar goal.

Final assessment pieces: 

• A literary commentary on an unseen coming of age story 
• a piece of narrative writing with an abstract to explain your own authorial choices.

Formative tasks:

• Diagnostic test analyzing an unseen story with teacher questions.
• Team writing of a paragraph, following the MEAL plan on any chosen topic (done as HW on a Google Doc)
• Characterization writing on a a favorite character or real person in the world (focus on paragraph construction using the MEAL plan).
• Practice literary commentary writing on 1-2 short stories.

Assessment FOR Learning

Now, admittedly, this unit is much clearer to me now because of assessment for learning. Upon entering the unit, I was new to the school and the unit. What I had was a collection of Powerpoint presentations, short stories, and tasks on Moodle and a rough outline of activities on Atlas Rubicon, not unlike new MYP teachers across the transient IB world. What I didn't have was any idea of what my students had done previously and what their zone of proximal development was on any of the unit goals.

Diagnostics:

The diagnostic test gave some guidance on language levels of students and on their ability to use quotations and support within paragraphs. What it didn't do was to show how students could independently organize an essay, as we gave an option of 2 questions students could ask with 3 subquestions. All students did was basically construct paragraphs based on the subquestions. As an English team, we quickly realized that we could not assess the Organization criteria.

A completely informal diagnostic test was having my class devise their own seating chart. This was day 1 and I realized, for the first time in quite a while, that the students absolutely knew who should sit next to whom better than I did, me being the new kid. While students collaborated to create the perfect seating chart, I listed to their language abilities (including defaulting to Spanish), I watched who participated, who led, and watched who retreated. I made mental notes about who gravitated towards one another and how students visually organized their charts. Some used marker on the desks (they wiped off easily,  I was relieved to see), others paper, others their laptops. I made sure I tied the whole school’s credibility to this task, since the students were showing me their organizational, communication, and collaboration skills as well as whether they were principled. I used this diagnostic to help me know how to organize collaborative work for the coming months and to get to know my class as learners and leaders.

Admittedly, the next month was a bit blurry as we went through a medley of beginning of the year activities, including an Inter Class Competition that lasted a full week and pulled all focus away from normal academics. Still, interim reports were approaching and I knew I had to see if the students had reached the goals of the unit. One of my colleagues was nearly complete and ready to move to the next unit and I was definitely behind, having done the ATL assessment and, upon finding that my class had no idea what their assessment criteria meant, I had done a mini-lesson to show how they would be scored and communicated to all year, knowing that all of my feedback would be of little value if they didn't know what a 6 meant in criterion A. I had already had students ask, "Is this formative or summative" and wanted to quickly erase any programming that indicated that any learning was secondary or less important. 

Writing Reflection Journals within an E-portfolio

Following some of this early grade-focused instead of learning-focused dialogue, my team of English teachers decided to found a Writing Reflection Journal component to the student e-portfolios, a mechanism that had been trialed in Technology class the year before. After conversations with other disciplines, we founded a Google doc per student and embedded a tracking table so students could see their growth as a writer in English A (criterion A and B), Humanities (D), Math (D) and Science (A). This gave a tracking system to an interdisciplinary initiative that had begun the year before. Each teacher would respond with all assessment feedback on this doc, meaning that all writing feedback across these 4 disciplines was posted in one spot (as opposed to having some comments on paper, some on Moodle, some on Turnitin.com, etc.) Additionally, peer and self assessment would be included.

There was an essential agreement made by all teachers in the initiative and the students that we would not give any type of grade until our comments had been read and the student had responded with clarifying questions or statements about what they had tried to accomplish. Early assessment would help the team of teachers and the student to know exactly which areas the student needed to improve upon and we would all target our comments towards this specific improvement. This action research project will be written up for the IB Journal of Teaching and Learning at its conclusion, but this became one of the best artifacts to show assessment for learning. An example can be seen here, though trial and error will make it stronger throughout this semester.

The final piece of the Writing Journal was a place on the e-portfolio (Google Site) for students to place final and rough drafts of work from all of their disciplines. In this way, students are tracking their own growth as a writer while gathering quantitative and qualitative evidence for the grade 10 research team.

Summative Assessment-"Oh, wait..."

Sometimes happy accidents help us to learn something we wouldn't otherwise learn. And happy accidents tend to occur more frequently when you're new to something. When I planned this week of instruction, I created a timeline that I needed to go over with my team. Problem was, as in many teaching situations, we were meeting after I had taught some of the classes included. So, I entered the week thinking that it was the last chance for my students to try literary commentary writing. It wasn't until I met with my team that I discovered there was a week that I hadn't included on my plan.

Following this meeting, I moved into my class, knowing that I had told them they would have their final assessment on this day. I had given them the story so that they could annotate and prepare for an in-class commentary writing, giving them plenty of time to plan, show me their plan, write, edit, and submit. Though I was less than impressed with how some students had utilized their evenings, they were basically under the same conditions as students who had been absent and the same conditions as the diagnostic test. So, everyone took the assessment concurrently.

As students began writing, I circulated the room to know not just what they wrote, but how they were attacking the task. I first evaluated their ATL's. Were they prepared? Had they annotated? Did they make a plan before writing? Were they able to access the notes they had taken in class and were the referring back to the writing journal so that they could correct previous mistakes?

As I circulated, I received some questions on what the question was that they were supposed to answer about the story. Or, "What are we supposed to write about?" So, I wrote a question on the board that would lead to a commentary writing: "What has the author attempted to do in this story and how did she accomplish her goal." As I moved around the room, now observing the pre-writing and beginning of the introductions, even my best students were showing signs that they were struggling to move from their usual thesis statements (responding to a teacher-generated question like, "What Scout a dynamic character?") to generating their own thesis. Ordinarily I would have had to say, "Try your best" at this point. Which I did. But, I started to give some coaching advice to help students find their way, knowing I had that extra week. I also asked key questions to figure out what was going on in their heads. 

After speaking to students at different levels and answering questions, I could see that there was a conceptual piece missing--students didn't really understand the concept of purpose and audience. I saw clearly that they were only going to go so far towards being able to make this transition from teacher-generated questions to student-generated thesis statements if they had that concept. Yes, I could have given them all the same thesis recipe, like "Doris Lessing creates the theme of a rights of passage through the use of characterization, setting, and conflict" or something like that, but they still wouldn't know how to do it the next time we tried if I gave it to them.

So, I announced to the class 3 things:

#1: This assessment was going to take longer than I had proposed and would become homework to allow for extra time and learning, removing the pressure that might have led more to panic and less to growth. 

#2: If a student was able to reach their academic goal on this assessment (as agreed by me) then they wouldn't have to try this again. We would keep their grade. But, the rest would use this as a learning opportunity to learn more and show that in another assessment. Students still needed to submit their writing on their writing journal and still had to reflect as a writer on what they had struggled with. Then I would then give them a grade.
#3: I would coach everyone on their ATL preparation and thesis statements, since quick scrutiny of those 2 areas would give a pretty quick idea of whether they were going to succeed or not. (Note--My take is that grammar is going to be across the board and time consuming. Walking around and saying, "You missed that comma" is not going to help that much. Plus, it's 1 of 3 criteria. But if you don't understand the story, can't label what a writer has done, and can't organize yourself then you will bomb 2 of 3. We can edit grammar after that has been accomplished.)

Miraculously, not a single student objected. None decided that it had just become "formative" and that they wouldn't try. They recognized that they weren't going to reach this goal if they didn't give this a couple of tries. And they didn't always know why they couldn't write in this new way, but they knew that they were going to have to learn (I had told them that they would be writing in this manner for the rest of high school) and that they needed help to get there. 

Had I not inherited an additional week, I would have "had" to just proceed. And sometimes assessment deadlines force us to do that. But, seeing how unfair that was to the students, I changed my paradigm. If your assessment shows that they haven't arrived at your proposed finish line then you need to allow yourself the educational freedom to respond to learning needs. When students see this they also understand the purpose of assessment and can move beyond grades.

Yes, this was more work for me. And, it was more work for them. But, we were all bought into doing what it was going to take to get to the goal. And the submission rate was the highest of any assessment we had had during this school year (pending). They also understood the nature of “holistic assessment”, as I explained that our ultimate goal was for them to be able to read and annotate a story, make a plan, write a commentary, and edit it in one  1 ½ hour period. And none of them could do that yet. For those who might question the "rigor", I would ask what had been more difficult and what had helped the students to advance more? Students were reading and annotating an extra short story and were writing an extra commentary. They will reach higher levels than they would have. Isn't that more rigorous?

Stepping away from this experience, I reflected on how I used to stick to an "it has to be fair" assumption of assessment. I still agree with that, but is making everyone hit the same assessment deadline regardless of their rate of learning more fair? If the other classes in grade 10 had reached a more masterful level of learning on this skill in the same time and were ready to move forward then those students had received the time and instruction necessary to help them reach the objective. If mine hadn't due to this new teacher who was figuring out a unit, that isn't exactly fair either—to any of us. Or, not throwing myself under the bus to quickly, maybe this is an area of the curriculum we need to include prior to reaching this task so that students can build on their conceptual model. Had I not had the time to work alongside students and to use assessment as a chance to see what they could and could not do, I might have missed this. And by the times students move into the IB Diploma program, this is a skill that is somewhat assumed.

So, as a conclusion, I think I would include several opportunities to reach an objective in a unit and make that agreement in the early unit planning phase so all students have that opportunity. When a student has reached the goal, then, by all means, let them move on to something more challenging. Have a back-up extension opportunity. But not at the expense of those who still need some re-instruction and another chance. In this way, all assessment is formative and summative (though the words were designed to show how assessment is ongoing). No matter the label, assessment marks how far the student and teacher have been able to improve together-not just how far the student has progressed- and this feedback should also show aid lesson planning.

For example, this assessment helped me to determine the order of instruction for the rest of the unit, focused on the same objectives but revisiting a missing concept:

1. Reteach author's purpose and audience but make the content easy so we can focus on the concept (enter children's books like Dr. Seuss, Berenstain Bears, etc.).

2. Have students lay out their own narrative writing, thinking of what their purpose and audience will be and the decisions they will make.

3. Move back back up to the necessary reading level with another short story analysis. See if that concept had enabled them to reach the goal of literary analysis.

4. Have students write their own narrative pieces on coming of age, including an abstract that explains the choices they have made as an author and what effects they should have.