In this article, I share provocations about assessment, learning and identity, which I discovered on Twitter. I share some tweets and my reflections and thinking.
My Prenatal Report Card
This got me wondering about how far back in our lives we are plunged into a system of assessment. I wonder how I scored on my prenatal report card?
There is this delicate balance between capturing evidence of observations to share with parents and assessing, grading or scoring. I know from experience this is a tricky balance for educators in the early years.
The Tweet from Dr Emily Kate reminded me of this piece from Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone on receiving feedback.
Before you tell me how to do it better, before you lay out your big plans for changing, fixing, and improving me, before you teach me how to pick myself up and dust myself off so that I can be shiny and successful — know this: I’ve heard it before. I’ve been graded, rated, and ranked. Coached, screened, and scored. I’ve been picked first, picked last, and not picked at all. And that was just kindergarten.
Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone (2019), Thanks for the Feedback: The science and art of receiving feedback well
The Design of Self
Nick Covington’s reference to Frank Smith’s quote had me reflecting on concepts of self-awareness and identity. Formidable capabilities even for adults. Most coaching conversations we have are about self-awareness and identity. The work continues well into adulthood.
If, according to Smith, learning depends on who we think we are, and who we see ourselves as capable of becoming, what happens to those who have not developed self-awareness. Or students who have no sense of a future self yet.
School helps us learn what is possible and redefine our limits.
Frank Smith’s quote is from his work The Book of Learning and Forgetting. In which he “ explains how schools and educational authorities systematically obstruct the powerful inherent learning abilities of children”.
Being a student is not an illness
Nick’s second reference is also a great provocation. A good reminder that we deal with correlation more than causation in teaching and education. This got me thinking about how we check for assumptions, understanding and mutual interpretations.
Consider Biesta’s quote alongside Dylan Wiliam’s simple yet powerful statement that “children do not learn what we teach.” Wiliam explains that despite targeted instruction, children do not learn what we teach.
Wiliam refers to the work of Denvir and Brown (1986), who explored the developmental path of learning number concepts with 7–9-year-olds.
You can access a webinar here in which Dylan Wiliam explains this in more detail, have a look from the 01:48 mark.
This discrepancy and unpredictability is a powerful provocation.
I tracked down the rest of the quote from Gert Biesta. In the opening sentence, he refers to a causal approach to education, similar to medicine.
This first problem with this approach is the role of causality: apart from the obvious fact that the condition of being a student is quite different from that of being a patient — being a student is not an illness, just as teaching is not a cure — the most important argument against the idea that education is a causal process lies in the fact that education is not a process of physical interaction but a process of symbolic or symbolically mediated interaction. If teaching is to have any effect on learning, it is because of the fact that students interpret and try to make sense of what they are being taught. It is only through processes of (mutual) interpretation that education is possible. Despite the attempts of many to transform education into a causal technology (often based on the idea that we only need more research in order to find and ultimately control all the factors that determine learning), the simple fact that education is not a process of ‘‘push and pull’’ — or, in the language of systems theory, that education is an open and recursive system — shows that it is the very impossibility of an educational technology that makes education possible.
Gert Biesta from Why “what works” won’t work: evidence based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory (2007)
Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth University, Ireland, and Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, UK.
The throughline is how we form meaning from social interactions. It is about how judgment and assessment norms change the people around us who, in turn, change us.
That social sense-making is about identity and figuring out what we are learning together.