Welcome back! Last time I outlined some questions that I had when I first started out. As I got to know my students, I also started to wonder: how could I make assessment more equitable so that we were assessing a student's true levels of understanding and knowledge? For this, let's turn to the experts!
Margo Gottlieb, author of Assessing English Language Learners: Bridges to Educational Equity (2016).
Eunice Jang, author of Principles for Assessing Young Language Learners (2014).
Larry Ferlazzo & Katie Hull Sypnieski, authors of The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide (2012).
Reading the authors above made me consider my own practice, students, and the various ways that I could deepen the connection between assessment and lesson planning/teaching.
When designing assessment, we must consider:
Students need time to self-reflect. I still like to use the prompts, “I used to think/Then I learned/Now I know.” Student portfolios with co-created rubrics is something that I need to focus more on as well.
How about you? What are some assessment methods that you've found equitable?
Margo Gottlieb, author of Assessing English Language Learners: Bridges to Educational Equity (2016).
Eunice Jang, author of Principles for Assessing Young Language Learners (2014).
Larry Ferlazzo & Katie Hull Sypnieski, authors of The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide (2012).
Reading the authors above made me consider my own practice, students, and the various ways that I could deepen the connection between assessment and lesson planning/teaching.
When designing assessment, we must consider:
- Multiple pathways for students to reach their goals
- The complexity of language so that it does not mask students’ academic achievement
- Visual, graphic, interactive and linguistic supports
- Potential linguistic, cultural, gender and socioeconomic bias
- Ways in which students and teachers can receive and use feedback
- Dimensions that measure the purpose and degree of standardization
- Assessment tasks that measure essential core skills and that are cognitively rich enough to elicit knowledge and skills
- Assessing content knowledge and language separately
- That assessments are data-informed and NOT data-driven
- Allowing students to assess the class and the teacher!
Students need time to self-reflect. I still like to use the prompts, “I used to think/Then I learned/Now I know.” Student portfolios with co-created rubrics is something that I need to focus more on as well.
How about you? What are some assessment methods that you've found equitable?