Let Assessment Guide your Teaching

Hello everyone,

There is a cycle that must be constant in teaching. It has a variety of names, depending on which educational program you trained under, but the idea is that you plan, you teach, you assess, then you review what happened. Then you repeat.

The assessment part of this is very important. It tells you what you do next, and you need to be willing to adapt your plans to accommodate what the assessment has revealed about your students and your lesson.

Occasionally, I talk with teachers that are frustrated when they give a test, and they find that the students have done poorly. "I don't know why they did so badly with this," the teacher may say. "I told them all of this!"

A few problems are revealed in the teacher's lament. First, the teacher is taking the students' failure personally. It's not personal. It simply means that the students didn't learn the material in the way the teacher hoped. I suppose in a sense, it means that the lesson failed, and the teacher may have been deeply invested in the lesson. Still, that investment cannot cloud the issue; the students didn't learn what the teacher wanted the students to learn, so another approach needs to be taken. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that WE have never learned something on the first telling, even if that telling was superbly done; we should not despair when THEY don't do it.

In some subjects, skills are closely connected to content. If students fail an assessment, we must know if the failure was a failure to correctly apply skills, or correctly learn content. When we remediate afterward, we ought to remediate appropriately. (Don't reteach content when the failure was a failure of skills; you will only frustrate everyone, including yourself.)

A student's failure in an assessment should not be a stick to beat ourselves with--or to beat the students with either. (I grant that it may be a stick to nudge us to greater achievements; I just object to the beatings. If a shepherd uses his staff to beat the flock, he will eventually lose the flock. If he uses the staff to guide the flock, he keeps them together.)

Sometimes a student will sit quietly, take notes, and seem to listen, then announce at the end, "I don't get it." Sometimes the student will get fidgety, be distracted, and look for entertainment elsewhere, then announce the same thing. We tend to love the first and hate the second, but they are two responses to the same problem: the student didn't "get it."

Sometimes we ask, "What didn't you get?" and the student will reply, "Nothing" (or "everything" if their grammar is better). You may assume that the student's self-assessment is inaccurate, but you are left to find out where you lost each other. It is possible, even likely, that most of the class is having the same problem. Working with the one, in this case, may often be working with the many; feel free to take the time to re-assess the lesson in smaller chunks until you know which chunk was wrong, then reteach that portion. Don't reteach until your assessment tells you where the problem lies, or you will frustrate yourself and your students. (You wouldn't rewire your whole house because a light bulb went out in the bathroom, would you? Not without assessing the problem and doing the easiest fix first, then reassessing afterward.)

Let your assessments guide your teaching. If your students fail the assessment, reteach and reassess until you're all satisfied that they have what you wanted them to have when you first set your objectives.

Jeff Combe