Practical Ideas on Assessment

 More on Andrew Kern's Circe conference audio called:  Assessment that Blesses.

I think I like Kern's choice of the word "honor" instead of, say, "value", when he talks about how we naturally place what we honor up high and strive to reach it.  Value is a relative word; honor implies that the object of honor is honorable.

As I plan my homeschool for the next school year I want to think about what I hold in honor that is to do with education, and how I can put that in a higher position than the things I do not consider as honorable.

Now on to the rest:

It isn't that assessment is wrong, as Kern has already pointed out several times.  It is that assessment must be ordered to what is true and important, not to what is irrelevant or damaging to the student in pursuit of education

(and every child is a continual learner who IS in pursuit of education, of course, but sometimes they have mistaken assessments about the relative importance of things, too).

After all, the essence of education is turning towards what is worthy of love, as Plato said apparently.   Kern did not talk about this in the audio but I know that this is basically what Circe represents.

Kern proposes a sort of paradigm for educating in a way that can be assessed according to the nature of a human.

Model--Milestones-- Mastery

Or from the teacher's point of view:

Model-- Practice --Assessment

First, there is a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.   There is knowledge about something, ie, information.   You tell them and if they remember it, the work is done.   .

Then there is knowledge in the sense of "knowing how".  ... ie, the arts.    To be able to do something as the result of the knowledge is how mastery is measured.

The teacher's role should not be the dispenser of information primarily but the coach, making it possible for the child to do what he could not do.

To teach in this way, you provide a model.  In baseball, you show the child how the bat is held and how to hit.   Kern uses writing examples.  Say, you show a child a simile and then guide him through a process of making a simile.  But the job is not done there, since you are still helping him through it.

The child practices.   Over time he gets closer to the model.   He can now hit a ball and not just by accident, or he can independently use a simile in his writing.    Consistent ball hitting, or making his own similes that work in the writing context, are milestones.

You teach by coaching the child towards one milestone, then the next after that.   He masters a series of milestones over time.

Whereas the modern method is to spiral through the same content year after year and hope it eventually forms a permanent mass in the brain,  the traditional model is to build steps.   You still tend to see that in things like learning a musical instrument or learning ballet, by the way.  Sports is kind of hit and miss, but I think individual rather than team athletics are founded on this mastery model.

Kern points out that the spiral skimming through and hoping that the child eventually consolidates the skill doesn't seem to work in real life.    Many people say they are not math people though math is a fundamental human endeavor.  They never got solid on times tables so everything after that was shifting sands.

Whereas in the olden days, many got little formal education, but they got it in careful reaching of milestones.  Maybe you hardly knew any arithmetic, but you could add and subtract.    You learned your speller though you never had a chance to learn how to read fluently.    But if you did get a chance to build on it later, at least you had that firm foundation, not just some hazy notions.

Assessment, in this way of teaching that Kern proposes, is based on assessing the work against the model.     The assessment is objective but not in the statistical sense.     The model is an exemplar that we honor.   When the child has achieved similes he has reached a milestone.

Kern says he gives out two marks:  "I" for Incomplete, and "A" for Excellent.    Incomplete means that the carefully delineated and objective milestone wasn't reached, and A means that it was.  Nothing more to it than that.

He says that there is confidence in knowing that you have mastered milestones.   I have an example in my own house in Aidan, who because of cognitive and motor disabilities has to work harder for his achievements than anyone around him.  But this never discourages him.  He is so thrilled when he masters a new process.   He never covets his neighbor's ability.  His confidence increases whenever he manages to master something new.

Kern says that a student for whom learning is a series of milestones reached and passed will have confidence (not the insecure arrogance that comes from being naturally smart and getting As while everyone else struggles).

The goal of education, however, is not confidence per se but wisdom and virtue.   He says that this objective way of measuring yourself against milestones, though, teaches wisdom in that over time the child is able to take over the process of self-judgment.   They are able to discern for themselves whether they've met the milestone or not.

I know that my in-house example Aidan does this naturally.    He seeks out praise for even approximate efforts because he knows he is motivated and encouraged by praise.   A recent example is making coffee -- grinding the beans, pouring the water into the backfill, putting the grounds in the filter, and starting the machine.   At first he needed coaching through all the parts.  Now he has it down.   He is thrilled when someone asks him to make coffee, and has recently started a habit of getting it ready after dinner so that we can just push the button in the morning.

This would not look impressive compared to other 14 year olds.  On the other hand, it looks amazingly impressive to his therapists who have read his medical history.  But the point Kern is making is that this kind of comparison is noxious, either way.    Aidan is gaining in "wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men".   Say we sent him to school and he learned to add double digits (at present he is still having major trouble with adding) but also learned from his agemates to swear or leer at girls, as happened to a special needs kid that was on Sean's football team.    That would be a step backward in the way we are assessing.