Re: boycott -- RESIST

[Joan Jaeckel <jjaeckel@WHOLE.ORG>]

Abril writes:

>But to suggest that teachers are better at designing tests than those who
study the
>area of assessment is to operate in ignorance.

Teachers in Waldorf school routinely design the assessment as meticulously
as they design the lesson.  It's part of the whole.  And it's not only in
Waldorf schools.  I recently visited a public elementary school in LA, in a
financially challenged part of town, in which the teachers were implementing
teaching processes designed together with the Galef Institute.  The teachers
and the students *together* were designing the assessment.  Not all the kids
even spoke English.  It was a very large class;  they were all engaged.  For
example, they had talked at the beginning of the lesson work about how they
would know whether everyone had participated successfully.  The students
spent several days working out what 'success' would look like.  They
included things like teamwork and leadership along with factual retention.
Factual retention was the smallest part.  They had designed the learning so
that it was practically impossible for anyone to fail.  Everyone being
responsible for one part of the whole, so that no student could just float.
If kids are 'failing', it would come out way before the assessment.  Only
then did they proceed with the actual learning project.  This is what we do
as adults.  We decide on the outcomes we are going for to measure our
success.  Assessment is not divorced from teaching and learning.

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