The Consciousness of Classroom Assessment

As a teacher of writing I am often frustrated by some of the red tape that stands between real teaching and real learning.

One of my greatest frustrations has been with evaluation rubrics and state-standardized writing assessments. In the state of Georgia, where I currently teach, incoming college freshmen must pass an exam to continue past their first year of college (as if they didn't have enough standardized hoops in high school already). The exam is generally passed if a student can write a five paragraph essay – which shows nothing in the way of creativity, emotional intelligence, or multi-modal composing (the most common languages of technology, media and text that we all use now).

Seeking some theoretical and practical backing, I happened across a book that had much to say. Maja Wilson's new Rethinking Rubrics is full of eloquent historical research and gritty practical advice for teachers who find themselves limited in their ability to engage with students because of the iron grip of standardization over the consciousness of American education. Needless to say, many children are getting "left behind." So I decided to interview Maja about her new book...

AE: Why do you think we have we been so set on standardizing and creating rubrics?

MW: On a purely personal perceptual level, I wonder if we're wired to be fascinated by standardization. Forms in nature are organic and varied and messy, and so we're drawn to anything that is different: the momentarily straight line of marching ants; the perfectly packed spiral of seeds in a sunflower head; the neat and tidy rows of pine trees planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps splitting neat and tidy beams of sunshine onto the forest floor. I have no evidence other than my own experience to back up this hypothesis. I remember watching Sesame Street, and being completely obsessed with the "inside the factory" segments where thousands of doughnuts would hurtle down the conveyer belt in perfect synchrony. This fascination – this communal "wow!" we utter anytime we're confronted with some neat system designed to spit out row upon row of the same anything – sometimes shuts down other responses and questions we might have about what might be lost in the standardization, or about whether it is appropriate to standardize things such as human behavior, response, language, or thought.

On a societal or political level, the motivation behind standardization in education is a mixed bag. On one hand, it represents a misguided but laudable attempt to create equality. On the other hand, it represents a calculated and not-so laudable attempt to exclude people from opportunities. The attitudes behind these two attempts might look very different, but they're connected.

In the early years of the American higher education system, the individuals who ran the institutions didn't have to actively exclude people. The system did it for them by ensuring that only the wealthy were in a position to apply. Universities were desperate for students, and would essentially admit anyone who would bring a letter of recommendation and recite a few lines of Latin. The only students to do so, by and large, were students with money.

The influx of people into cities at the turn of the century brought people closer to high schools, creating a larger pool of potential applicants for post-secondary education. Universities were now faced with the task of playing the role of their own gatekeepers. Which applicants should they exclude? And how? And why?

The shift from away from wealth as a prerequisite for a college education seemed to be a sign of progress. A student with limited means might prove just as qualified as a student whose family had money. But how would universities "fairly" determine educational qualifications? The way that universities chose to answer this question showed the mark of other cultural patterns and trends. Think of the development of the assembly line in factories. Or the proliferation of standardization in the field of science (where poorly paid and trained scientists were used to carry out tasks conceptualized by others). Or the seeming success of the multiple-choice technology piloted by the military's Army Alpha test. All of these developments helped ensure that universities would solve their admissions dilemma by making standardization the heart and soul of any educational assessment.

So often, as Kurt Vonnegut reminds us in "Harrison Bergeron," the idea of "fairness" quickly turns into "sameness" or "conformity." In an effort to be fair about the way that they excluded people, universities created standardized writing tests and standardized tools to score them (rubrics). In the process, they created a uniformity in students' writing and teachers' responses to that writing. Students write to the rubric (the stakes are high, after all!) and teachers only see what the rubrics direct them to see. Writing classrooms become factories where students pump out five-paragraph essays, and teachers become quality control managers, sorting out the bad apples whenever they see the bruise of an original thought or the deformity of an essay without a properly placed thesis statement.

Thoughtful educators in this system are left with disturbing questions. Can we (or should we) standardize the way that our students write? Can we (or should we) standardize the responses that we give our students? Is our goal really to rank students? If our goal is to help students form, discover, and communicate their thoughts in creative, satisfying, and surprising ways, then why do we persist teaching and assessing them as if ranking and standardization is our main goal? The political questions raised by our answers to these pedagogical questions are also disturbing. Can a thriving democracy be supported by generations of students who think and express themselves in standardized ways? Another goal of standardization is to reduce the disagreement of the judges. Can a democracy be supported by generations of students who don't value disagreement?

At one point in your book, you mention that assessment should be conversational, reflective and even narrative. What sorts of resistance have you encountered to these ideas and how have you handled them?

Reflective, conversational, and narrative assessments resist being reduced to numbers, so those who demand quick "snapshots" of learning in the form of numbers, charts, and graphs find these forms of assessment problematic. In the best-case scenario, those who are obsessed with data want to know how x student compares to y student or, how x school compares to y school. In the worst-case scenario, data-mongers don't even want to know these things. They simply want to compile and then store these numbers and charts and graphs in locked file cabinets.

But I'm not interested in data or how students or schools compare. I'm interested in talking with a student about how her words compare to her intention. This conversation not only resists reduction because we can't quantify conversation, but also because the kind of assessment I advocate shifts throughout the process. As I ask questions, students' intentions might change, and as they articulate their thoughts about their writing, my perspective might also change. Quantification demands certainty, and a conversation requires responsive flexibility.

Unfortunately, obsession with data seems to be a pre-requisite for moving up the chain of command in the school system. I've spent quite a bit of time explaining to administrators and the powers-that-be why I won't be participating in their common assessment data-generating schemes. I did a bit of grass roots organizing in my department several years ago to resist a mandate that required all English teachers in the county to give common writing tests and use common rubrics. We wrote a letter of protest, met with administrators to articulate our concerns, and eventually were given permission to opt out of the mandate. Later, the institution responsible for the mandate gave a presentation in which they staged a Q and A session. In response to the question, "Why do you collect all that data?" they said, "Because that's what we do! We collect data!" This answer simply isn't good enough for me, especially when the effort to collect data violates the nature of language itself, which is unquantifiable and irreducible. Those who attempt to quantify language should remind us all of The Royal Society's Thomas Sprat, who tried to rid the English language of all metaphor and other forms of language that couldn't be reduced to a one-to-one correlation of meaning to word.

Explain the "Golden Rule of Assessment."

This emerged from my feeling that if anyone were to respond to my writing with a rubric, I'd be furious.

I started to think of all the "transformative" responses to my writing that I've received, to see if I could think of a way to provide these kind of responses for my students. When I was in middle school, I always shared my writing with my friend Sarah, who would scribble comments all over my papers and have long conversations with me about what I'd written. When I participated in writing workshops as an adult, the questions and responses I received from other participants helped me to see my writing in new ways.

When I worked with Gloria Pipkin, my editor for Rethinking Rubrics, her responses to my writing throughout hundreds of email exchanges not only made my writing "look better," but also deepened my understanding and discovery of my own intentions. The similarities between all of these very different responses? The readers had found a way to put into words how my writing affected them (whether the effect was positive or negative). By seeing inside their minds as they read my words, I learned something incredibly valuable about what worked and what didn't work. Instead of being bombarded with "rules" of effective writing, I was watching the interaction of my words in their mind--almost in real time. The Golden Rule of Assessment, to me, means that I don't want to respond to my students' in ways that I wouldn't find transformative. It means that I want to give them the "gift" of responses that have helped to make my life as a writer rich and rewarding.

Some would say that "response" isn't assessment. But what is a rubric? It is a codified, systematized, anonymous, often quantified form of "response."

How do you respond to the charge that this interactive notion of assessment demands that English teachers become therapists? Is it possible to teach meaning-making and interpersonal discovery in student writing with the kinds of teacher/student sensitivities present in our culture – a culture that is highly sensitive to the fear of lawsuits, violence, and prejudice?

To do all but the most perfunctory spell and grammar-check, we need to interact with students' minds and experiences. This presents certain challenges. Can we do so without violating important boundaries? What is the difference between challenging a student's thinking and trying to indoctrinate him? Do we ask about a student's experiences in order to help her deepen and clarify her writing, or do we ask invasive questions to satisfy an unhealthy curiosity that reflects our own unmet needs? These are critical questions to consider. If we aren't healthy and aware, it is possible to do real damage to students. But this danger is present any time one human being interacts with another, and it is better to pose and attempt to answer the questions rather than to focus only on the surface. This focus on the surface not only produces vacuous writing and response, but also allows us to forget the importance of healthy boundaries, making us more likely to violate them in other ways.

This approach requires conversation and transparence. We need to create school cultures where it is acceptable for teachers to talk to each other about the way that we talk with students and conduct our classes. Last week, I witnessed a teacher yelling at students with something akin to pure hatred. And I didn't speak up. As much as that is a product of my lack of courage, it is also a failure of my school's culture.