Students Take Center Stage in Classroom Assessment

Carol Smith and Cynthia Myers

How many times have you plunged into a stack of your students' tests and discovered that the grade distribution was just as you expected? No surprise that Irritating Irene failed the exam. She never retains anything from class. Angelic Alex turned in the top score again. Of course, he knew most of the answers before you started the unit. And Nervous Nicholas rarely does well on multiple-choice tests. The only time he shines is during class discussions.

Students hold the key to what they know and are able to do. But too often, they are the last people teachers consult when designing assessments. Instead of examining assessments for new insights about instruction, many teachers use tests to prove what they already know about students.

As members of the Alpha Team at Shelburne Community School in Shelburne, Vermont, we believe teachers should provide varied opportunities for students to make sense of their learning and to demonstrate their understanding of issues and ideas. They need time to reflect on their work, to make connections between and among tasks, and to note improvements along the way. Such personal integration of knowledge is the key to good assessment.

We took this advice to heart many years ago when we worked to embed assessment into our daily instruction. We recognized that everything teachers and students do in the classroom should focus on continual progress toward high standards. And we committed to following the message of educator and author Grant Wiggins, who urges teachers to assess what they value and value what they assess.

In redesigning our assessment process, we took advantage of our practice of "looping" students. The Alpha Team is a multi-age group of sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders who stay with the same three teachers throughout middle school. By having three years to work with most students, we can guide their progress and develop strong relationships with them and their parents.

The cornerstone of our assessment program is the student portfolio, which provides concrete evidence of learning and represents the perfect format for students to discuss progress with their teachers and parents. The portfolios also help students physically and mentally organize all parts of their school life, add important experiences outside of school, and fit all of these activities into a larger context.

We begin with Vermont's Vital Results Standards and work backwards, constantly showing students how to recognize quality work and make good decisions so they can produce it. Instead of organizing the portfolio by traditional academic subjects, we encourage students to divide their work into the four essential skills identified by the Vital Results — Communication, Reasoning and Problem Solving, Personal Development, and Civic and Social Responsibility — and a fifth category that we added — Functioning Independently.

The skill division offers students a wider view of their accomplishments. It also gives them a chance to place work from a variety of subjects into the same category, which reinforces the connections among the disciplines and the universality of academic skills. We still measure students' performance in traditional subjects, but we take the assessment a step further by asking them to make sense of their knowledge.

"Portfolios are much deeper than report cards," said Matt Gannon, a seventh-grader. "Straight report cards are easier, as there is no work with them. (Portfolios) give your parents a better understanding of how prepared you are as a student and how well you are doing."

At the end of sixth grade, her first year with our assessment format, Cara Gallagher wrote: "If Alpha was the world, then the five essential skills would be the moons. With the essential skills, I can see what skills I am developing from the projects my teachers are having me do."

The portfolio process also helps students speak and write in the language of the state standards. This is a difficult process for some adolescents because they have to examine assignments and assessments not just as finished products but as evidence of what they have learned. Where should their project on the origins of the universe go, and why? In which Vital Results category should they place their written explanation of mathematical probability? Through sorting, categorizing, analyzing, and revising, they — and their parents — also discover how they learn.

"I delight in listening to (Cara) share her successes, challenges, and goals with us, and I marvel at the depth of her understanding," said her mother, Kathy Gallagher. "She not only comprehends the subject matter, but also why she is doing the work she is doing."

Each student sets personal learning goals at the beginning of each week by listing assignments on the left side of her Goals Notebook. At the end of the week, each student shares the results with a peer who looks for examples of when she accomplished certain tasks or followed through on commitments, then writes assessments opposite the assignment. Students also confer weekly with teachers, and we conduct informal assessments of individual and group work by giving feedback on an ongoing basis. When a student hits an academic stumbling block, we work after school to help him break his learning barrier and catch up.

In addition to the many written assessment guidelines that we give to sixth-graders and other new students, we also set up an orientation session with an older student. These veterans perform mock peer assessments and student-led parent conferences, complete with work samples, probing questions, and written feedback.

"You know, it's a ton of work and scary at first, but now I think it's kind of fun," seventh-grader Tim Johnson told a friend who was new to the Alpha Team and nervous about his first parent conference. "You get to talk with your parents for as long as you want and no one interrupts you. We bring snacks because we talk about my work for so long. Here, let me help you; this is what I think the Vital Results mean."

Because we work with a multi-age team, including a totally inclusive special education program, we are able to see tremendous growth from one year to the next. Sixth-graders are frantically trying to find and organize their work into the Vital Results sections. In their transition year, seventh-graders usually can organize their work with some support. Eighth-graders are the old pros, looking forward to discussions with their parents, using their work samples as evidence of their achievement.

"Organizing my work into my portfolio every trimester has helped me to develop my organizational, visual, and reflective skills as well as to look at the progress I made in my work in the trimester," wrote Willa Koerner, an eighth-grader who didn't always perform up to her capabilities in earlier grades.

Willa said she no longer falls back on the careless cramming-work-into-a-backpack stunt because she knows that she will need her assignments for weekly peer conferences, weekly teacher feedback sessions, and trimester conferences.

"The portfolio makes me organize my work, show my work, and assess my work based on the progress I have made from previous trimesters," Willa said. "I can easily see my growth and see what areas I need to focus on."

At the end of each trimester, we turn those weekly goals into a progress sheet listing successes and continued challenges, which help frame new goals for the following trimester. Parents and teachers get copies of these reflections and provide additional comments. Then we all come together for student-led conferences, which last from one to three hours each.

Parents play an important role in this process, so they must be familiar with their children's portfolios before arriving for the conference. Prior to the end-of-trimester conferences, we host an evening presentation for families, during which parents and students who participated in previous years answer questions. We also try to teach parents how to be respectful of their children's performances. If a member of an audience wouldn't dream of interrupting a ballet before the finale, neither should parents prematurely stop a child's explanation of learning.

We let parents know that the focus of the conferences should be on learning and growth, not a show-and-tell display of student work. They should sit beside their children, listen to and trust their children's assessments of their learning, and ask good questions. We encourage open-ended questions, such as "Why is this a good example of…?"

Said Jan Gannon, Matt's mother: "I like that each child is learning to evaluate his or her own strengths and weaknesses and then present them to his or her parents. Self-evaluation is an extremely beneficial skill that many adults do not have.

"I (also) value being able to provide input into the evaluation and goal-setting process…Completing the essential skill sheets forces me to not only look at what areas Matt needs improvement, but also to focus on what he does well…The conference provides much more input to me as a parent than a written report card with just letter grades."

Through this evaluation process, everyone on the team — student, teacher, and parents — is involved in the accountability loop and gets the chance to have sustained and focused conversations about learning. We remember one boy who turned in an empty portfolio in the sixth grade, much to his father's displeasure. The father was skeptical of the assessment process and wondered whether his son was learning under our direction. However, by the end of eighth grade, after his son had provided a sophisticated explanation of his well-developed portfolio, this father turned to us and said, "Thank you for making me trust you because this was the most exciting experience I've ever had."

Our assessment process doesn't just make parents feel good, it works. Our students' high scores on nationally standardized tests and on the Vermont assessments demonstrate over and over again that our students are learning. We recently studied the long-term progress of students from the fourth to the eighth grades and found exceptionally strong and consistent growth among Alpha students.

Reporting progress through student-led portfolio conferences is a natural next step for teachers and teams in their continued efforts to integrate learning and listen to students' voices. It creates a purposeful way for young adolescents to talk with adults about their learning and for parents to play a direct and active role in their children's education.

Carol Smith recently retired from the Alpha Team at Shelburne Community School and is now an independent education consultant working with teachers and administrators in Vermont. You can reach her at CarolSm@aol.com. Cynthia Myers continues to serve on the Alpha Team at Shelburne Community School with fellow teachers Meg O'Donnell and Joan Cavallo. You can reach Myers at CYNFRED@aol.com.