So i was thinking about “standards” for self assessment after jotting down an anecdote that Daniel Pink mentioned in his interview with Steve Hargadon in tonight´s Elluminate session.. The point Mr. Pink made was that, sometimes students asses their own progress more critically than teachers do!
After considering some personal doubts regarding the validity of my personal goals and how reasonable they are... i decided to try and chart all the types of evaluation that generally occur in the classroom...
i started with these six:
Teachers evaluate:
- student interaction with the content
- their own interaction with the content
- their own interaction with the students
Students evaluate:
- their own interaction with the content
- their own interaction with the teacher
- the way the teacher interacts with the content
[see fig 1 left: T=teacher S=student C=content]
One of the interesting things about this over simplified diagram is that it demonstrates the symmetry of the relationship between student and teacher. Although many of these processes aren´t taken into consideration in most cases, by either student or teacher (and by extension their respective institution) i imagine that they do occur...
The other thing that occurred to me is that, although its nice to imagine that both student and teacher share responsibility for tracking learning progress... it would probably only make sense in high school or at least in college/university contexts... but whereas in kindergarten the relationship is most likely to be productive in a hierarchical format, as the student continues his/her education, the opportunity presents itself for a shift in the traditional “power structure”, gradually conferring more responsibility for this aspect of education onto the students themselves... and in that way allowing for more authentic communication between learners.
After looking at fig 2* (above) for a while, it dawned on me that there are really three “objects” that are the focus of constant scrutiny in the classroom... which led me to redraw the diagram in a this way... [* in this diagram i just flattened all six interactions from fig 1 into one...]
If we imagine that each of the dotted lines in fig 3 (above) are interactions (communaction of sorts) the relationship inside the classroom clearly becomes much more dynamic than the traditional model would imply... [see fig 4 below]
In a very real sense, students have traditionally been disregarded as observers of their own progress/reality... a situation which distorts their role in the classroom, and cuts off many valuable opportunities for interaction among both participants. As far as i can tell, assessment has always been considered an integral part of learning... So my questions are ¿at what point does learning to evaluate learning overshadow content learning? ¿are assessment and learning really the separate actions we typically think of them as?
