“Throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks” Fuck! (I’m not gonna say sorry) I think this is the most graphic explanation of what teachers do in the Chilean educational reality nowadays I’ve ever heard. Mind shaking statement this is. It’s quite appalling to read it and see that it is as real as the sarcasm it bears.
This is our system. Well, I don’t believe in the perfect system, and I believe we will never have one. We can certainly improve it, by all means. But a clockwork system, to be honest (even though you can call me nihilist and pessimistic) it’s not possible. Most of us rely on good feelings and good intentions towards the improvement, which is perfect, and I’m very glad that some people put these nice feelings in their efforts. Also, I am really thankful about having read this book because it was eye-opener, yet my final feeling is that we are doomed, at least until someone with common sense directs the education in the country; otherwise, it will take ages to fill all the gaps we need to improve our field.
“Teaching as a means to an end” is one the hardest beliefs to wipe out, and replace Teaching by learning is even harder. For me this is the core issue of the book (or the chapters we’ve read). Some days ago, one heavy-neuroned person told some teachers and me that the only solution is to eliminate all teacher trainers from the universities, and force them to apply again by demanding competence to see whether they deserve teaching at university. It made all the sense of the world. The kings of the activity-base and coverage based education should be eliminated from the system. Once teachers learn to revolve around learning, and kids as the core, within a fair system of course, things will really improve.
Subjectivity in the summative assessment is a difficult to control problem in a objective desired environment let’s say. It is still present no matter how many numbers, scales or rubrics we use when evaluating. Is this in the end judgement guided by criteria or criteria guided by judgment?
My impression is that subjectivity is something we cannot get rid of when talking about validity, especially in this kind of assessment for understanding. There’s a definition within the text that reinforces my puzzled idea about understanding assessment: Validity refers to the meaning we can and cannot properly make of specific evidence. This process of obtaining this desired meaning is the one that makes me think that no matter how “objective” the evaluation instrument is, there will be a judgment behind; bias is always present.
To avoid this subjectivity, we naïvely tend to think that by paying attention to scores we go more objective ”in part because scoring for correctness makes assessment so much easier and seemingly objective”, and consequently, more valid.
Now that we learn that what matters is the interpretation of the score, the previous belief goes discarded. Having these instruments called rubrics discussed, are they really objective? I guess again they can be difficult tools to be conceived, since my criteria might not be reflected into the descriptions meant to appear in my grids.
I have seen that some rubrics (along with several other assessment instruments) are created just for the sake of score. And when evaluating, it’s the subjective appreciation the one that predominates in the end, “because the student did more like a bit more about this than this other point”
In the end it’s your judgement the one that imposes over my seemingly objective rubric.
There is one solution provided by the text, which provides a solution quite plausible: “it doesn’t matter what tests you use as long as they are varied and many” and I would also add that their interpretations need to be shared too with some other colleagues to reduce this blind spot in evaluation.
