Jon Stewart sure does like the word “metric”, yeah?

But for real…

    Michelle Rhee talks about balancing testing with more innovative and relevant forms of assessment. This makes sense, although a part of me wants her to just condemn testing altogether. She doesn’t say we should get rid of testing completely; she talks rather of bridging new forms of assessment with testing strategies. Testing certainly shouldn’t be the focus.

     What I take from this mainly is the chance here to infuse relevance into not only our lessons, activities, and practices, but in our assessment as well. Let’s use real-world forms of assessment. In a job, your boss is not going to assess your achievement or effectiveness by giving you a multiple choice test with one five paragraph essay at the end. I do not have many answers at this point about what more relevant forms of assessment would look like besides many that we have already covered in classes before: portfolio grading, peer assessment, self-assessment, publication or performance, seminar or discussion. There just seems to be such a push towards making school make sense—such an importance put on answering the question of “Why are we doing this?”—and these ideas should bleed into our assessment just as well. 

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After my first few hours at Lancaster Catholic I haven't had time enough to settle in and meet students one on one so I am unable to talk about different profiles of students. I plan to focus on this in the coming Fridays. 

-Tyler Barton