1, 2, 3 What Are We Assessin' For?

Ask any teacher in my district about the merits of our current report card and s/he will blankly stare at you. If said teacher is part of a group of teachers, s/he will turn to her/his colleagues and say something to the effect of, "What'd I miss? Our report card has merits?" (See, because most of us think that it doesn't...)

It is a perfectly functional piece of paper with a lot of statements on it that sound pretty good and I am sure, at one time or another, it served our district well. The problems with it now are many and everyone knows that it's an item in need of some serious attention. As a member of a district-level team that talks a lot about curriculum and meeting the needs of all of our students, particularly through personalized learning, I have become more and more keenly aware that changing a report card, even for six elementary schools and one middle/high, is like turning around a battleship. Doesn't mean we don't know that it has to be done. Doesn't mean that we don't think (a lot!) about doing it. It just means that you can't just decide to do it one day and that's that.

Kate's Note: Well, yeah, you can. I mean, I feel pretty strongly that a well-paid group of dedicated teachers who "get" the CCSS and NGSS and who "get" the things like the project-based and personalized learning that our district already does really well could transform the report card in an intense July work session. I mean, I'd certainly sit at the table for that. Just sayin'.

But anyway...

Back to the title of this post and what inspired me to write it (I'll come back to report cards in a bit). A couple weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a wonderful parent of a student in my class joking that a late-July backpack cleaning session had produced a report card. Another parent chimed in that a mid-July backpack cleaning session had worked the same magic at his house. I laughed to myself and them, knowing that summer is hectic and, these being families who are in touch with teachers and active members of the school community, there was probably a strong sense of their students' achievements already. A report card was probably going to be confirmation of things they already knew about their children as learners. Fair enough, right?

But then I got to thinking: If these two families aren't clamoring to find the report card at the end of the day on June 16th, then who is? If reading a report card escapes the minds of parents--albeit busy ones--who are involved in their children's learning and in school community, then what about the ones who aren't able to be as active and involved (for whatever reason)?

I started to think about what I had heard from parents about report cards I had issued over the course of the year and the answer was almost absolutely nothing. One family had raised a couple of questions at the beginning of the year that we addressed at a conference, but for everyone else, there were crickets...

Initially, I had been nervous sending the last two rounds of report cards home because our existing report card didn't reflect the NGSS standards I used for the makerspace engineering and design unit that comprised the bulk of my science program last year. Our system's option was for me to enter the code "N" in each of the spaces where a pre-loaded standard was listed that I did not assess. In this system (PowerSchool), "N" stands for "Not Assessed." For the sixth graders in my Connected Math Program class, I had to write a bunch of Ns as well because we didn't assess certain standards just by virtue of the scope and sequence of the program. There are only a handful of options in both math and science and they are so broad as to cover an entire year's worth of content. It would be impossible to meaningfully (and legitimately) assess all six or eight of the standards at once!

Kate's Note: Just to be clear here, I don't teach a "canned" science or math program. If something that comes out of the box isn't part of the CCSS, then I don't teach it. But if our report card doesn't reflect the standards my programs are aligned to, I'm not really giving anyone any valuable information, am I?

Back to all of those Ns making me nervous... I was really worried that parents would see a few Ns and think to themselves, "Well, if she's not assessing this, this, and this, then what the heck is she assessing?" Knowing the limitations of our report card before hand and to be safe, I had written my own set of rubrics that did assess the science standards I was teaching. That felt productive, but also added a pretty giant layer to my trimester grading process. Not only did I have to go through 20 report cards and write "See attached rubric" in the field for science curriculum, I had to score a design tech and innovation rubric for each student. Now, a good rubric will make grading easier, but it doesn't make it any less thoughtful or time consuming but I knew that my rubrics were bridging the gap between what I was teaching and how things were being reported in our system, so I thought sure that I was sending along enough information to spark a dialogue. For my math reporting, I tried a different tack and relied on extensive narratives for each of my sixteen sixth grade students, sharing with their parents what we had worked on and what particular successes and challenges their mathematician had uncovered through that course of study.

Report cards went home on a Friday and I tried my darndest not to check email so that I wouldn't have to face the vitriol I was imagining for myself. No rubric will save me from a torch-wielding mob of legal guardians who think I am not assessing their children! I even drafted an email reply while I was still clear-headed so that I could just cut and paste it into the thousands of angry missives I was sure to receive.

Remember those crickets?

Sounded like the first night of summer camp in my inbox.

No vitriol, no complaints, no questions, no comments, concerns, input, or ideas! Okay, okay. This was weird and when things get weird, I really get to thinking: If parents don't seem to be particularly keen on reading and responding to report cards and teachers (at least many in our district) don't find our version of this document a valuable reflection of the educational targets we set for the students in our classes, what the heck are we spending hours every trimester to get these things done (including numerical scores, narrative comments, rubrics, collating, copying, filing, folding, getting the blasted things to print without one side being upside down...)?

But before you, dear reader, get out your pitchfork and join the angry mob I invent in my mind every time I go out on a limb, remember that it doesn't take a piece of paper with an alphabet soup of standards coded on it (even one that is CCSS-aligned!) for teachers to know what works and doesn't work with our students. Any time you have ever said, "Yikes, that didn't work" or "Okay, so this kiddo needs X instead of Y" you're assessing and, to my mind, that is the most valuable form of doing so. It is tailoring teaching to the needs of the student in a moment, a series of which is more than likely on the charted course of learning needs that student is going to have for a good chunk of your working relationship with her/him. As we all know very well, those needs aren't always neatly identified by a code. Sure, sometimes they are, but what of the times they aren't? And what of the times when how we report doesn't reflect all that we are accomplishing? And what if our efforts to report--however we feel about them--are being lobbed into space to float around (for whatever reason) and that communication loop never re-addressed or even closed? Is this a problem that only I have?

It can't be.

So what is the balance? Who cares about formal and standardized assessments like report cards? Hey, why do we do them? What do parents want to know about their children as learners? What are we missing?

Then it occurred to me. The way we personalize learning experiences for students in our district should be reflected in personalized assessment plans for them and their parents. After all, what value does a report card have to anyone if it isn't something that actually does what it's talking about and reports on things that we care about as a teaching and learning team? Parent A might want numbers, maybe a few comments. Parent B might really only be concerned with the social side and has identified a narrative with key examples as a way to help their child succeed. Parent C might want comments for ELA and numbers for math. Parents D-Q might be happy with an email alert if things start looking dicey and a conference at the end of each trimester. Parents R-W might never tell you what would help them and Parents X-z are probably still looking for last year's report card. I'm not bothered, though, because they are all getting what they need and what they asked for and I'm doing record-keeping that is focused and relevant.

I stumbled upon this listicle by Mike Barnes over at Brilliant or Insane and it got me thinking even more about the conversations we should be having with parents--from both sides of the table. I feel like I need a customer service vest with a pin on it that says, "Ask me! I'm here to help" because the only way we're ever going to know how our kids--and I do mean our--are doing is if we talk and use documents or strategies that are useful to a plan of action for everyone involved.

Does any of this ring true for you? How does your district do things? How do YOU do things at report card time? Do you feel like it's time well-spent? How do you engage parents at report card time? What advice do you have for me?