More Than a Score (48 page)

JH:
I want to get into looking more specifically at what the performance-based assessments look like in a minute. But before we do that, I really liked what you said about how the school may have started around looking at alternative assessments but has really a bigger picture of what the purpose of education is and what skills we need to cultivate. And I was reading your book
Talk, Talk, Talk
and I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about what a discussion-based classroom is and how the inquiry method works.

PT:
What happens in a discussion-based classroom is you're asking kids to take more responsibility for their own learning by participating in class, by expressing what they're thinking, what their ideas are, how they're responding to texts, how they respond to each other's responses to text. For a teacher, learning how to facilitate that kind of discussion. You know, it's interesting, I have a lot of opportunities now to observe other classes in other schools, including non-consortium schools, and I'm always struck—you know, now I sit in the back of the classroom—and I'm always struck by conversations that kids have among themselves that to a teacher who's in front of the room just looks like they're not paying attention. But so often, the kids are asking each other questions or they're commenting on something, and it never gets to be voiced to the class as a whole because it's not a classroom that values [that]. . . .

And, you know, it happens in all kinds of schools. It's been really interesting for me to see that and value even more the importance of a discussion-based classroom where kids know that what they have to say is valued.

JH:
So instead of being chastised for asking those questions in the back of the room, they're invited to share them.

PT:
Exactly. And instead of the teacher's questions becoming a question that the kid has to figure out what's the right answer that the teacher already knows, you ask these more open-ended questions so that there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer. There's an interpretation that can be supported with evidence from text or firsthand experience or building on what other kids have said in the classroom. And that's a very different kind of questioning. As teachers, we often make the mistake of asking empty questions when we already know the answer because you just feel more secure as a teacher. You feel like your role isn't being threatened. But to have the kind of open-ended questions where things could come up that you might not know, and you say, “That's a really good question. Maybe we'll have time to get to that,” or “Let's put that on our list of questions for research later on in the semester.”

JH:
Right. And is this a model of inquiry-based and discussion-based classroom that you have in the consortium schools across the curriculum for all the different subjects?

PT:
Well, you know, it's funny you ask that because I was just talking to some people and I said, “You know, I think we should have a theme for the year,” which we hadn't done before, “and I think the theme should be discussion-based classrooms.”

JH:
Nice.

PT:
Because it's not the way teachers have been trained, so it's something that you have to retrain yourself for. And at Urban, it's so pervasive that if a substitute comes in to teach, the class can run itself basically because the kids know how. And if a new teacher starts at the school, the kids will say, “Oh, yeah, you're not an Urban teacher. You have to learn how to be an Urban teacher.” What we do, and what we encourage other schools to do is to have a whole mentoring system for new teachers. It's not always possible, and especially now. I know what's happening this year is budgets are being cut severely. So that means there's less time for more experienced teachers to help the newer teachers. The apprenticeship of new teachers is a whole other issue that we've tried to tackle.

JH:
From what you're saying, it sounds like the method is to have the teacher really scaffold the discussion and point students in different directions and elicit questions from them and present material that challenges them to ask each other questions rather than present to them one fact after another to be learned. It sounds very Freireian to me and a way to engage the class in a lot deeper discussion.

PT:
Right. And you know, it takes years to get good at it . . . you're a history teacher, right?

JH:
That's right.

PT:
It takes years to have enough materials at different reading levels to make this model work well. Avram's been teaching for a long time, so he can move the class in the direction where they seem to be going—what's catching their interest and how to really develop that and how to bring in enough good materials that are accessible to kids at different levels. We do a lot of what we call packets, where you have one topic, but you have reading selections at different levels related to that topic. For example, I was teaching a class on language, and we were talking about whether languages should be saved from dying.

JH:
Interesting.

PT:
There are languages dying all the time, just like different species. And so I had to find articles about some of the endangered languages that were very accessible to kids and then others that were even more challenging—because I had a completely mixed group of kids—so that we could all engage in the discussion. You know kids whose reading skills may not be as advanced as some other kids', but they can still think. And they can still discuss. You know, they still have the sharp intelligence.

JH:
That's right.

PT:
So you had to bring in enough materials at different levels so that as a group we can still have good discussions and we can still form more questions out of those discussions.

JH:
That makes me think that real education reform would be about giving teachers time to collaborate so they can share the materials they have to develop those rich inquiry lessons.

I'd like to ask you now about the connection between your inquiry-based approach to education and then the performance-based assessments you use to evaluate and what advantages you feel performance-based assessment has over standardized bubble testing.

PT:
The general public gleans what the media throw at them and the tendency is for people to think, “Oh, if you're against standardized testing, then you're against assessments,” which is not the case at all. What we're against is an assessment that has the consequence of narrowing curriculum and teaching and learning. It's important to realize that as soon as you institute these standardized tests, you're also affecting curriculum, and you're affecting how teachers teach, and you're affecting how time is used. And it's that connection between assessment, curriculum, and instruction that just doesn't get explained enough in the public conversation about testing. Performance assessments offer such a greater opportunity to develop interesting curriculum and structure more opportunities for the teacher to relate to the kids in front of them. So out of that relationship and out of what is occurring in your classroom, you can help develop the kinds of assessments that grow organically from the material that you've actually been teaching. Whereas when you impose a standardized exam, you wind up imposing a standardized curriculum.

JH:
That's right.

PT:
Which may or may not be relevant to what the class thinks is important, which will definitely narrow what's possible in a classroom, which will have an effect on the kind of teaching that goes on, and it just goes downhill from there. And those are the vital connections that just don't become part of the national conversation about assessment.

JH:
Yes, thank you for making those connections. Can you walk me through the process of how performance-based assessment works in the consortium schools? What does it look like when a student reaches the end of a semester?

PT:
Well, it grows out of the classroom. We have these four PBATs—performance-based assessment tasks—so in literature, it's a literary analysis that the Common Core is trying to marginalize. We maintain a literary analysis.

JH:
Resistance through reading literature!

PT:
Right. Social Studies, it's a research paper. Science, it's really working like a scientist. Kids are developing experiments that grow out of what they've been studying or coming up with a whole new idea about an experiment. And in math, it's an application of higher mathematics to problem solving. So those are the four main performance-based assessment tasks.

Now, that doesn't limit the content of it. I'll just give examples from my teaching. I taught a Latin American literature course, so the PBATs that were developed out of that would be based on Latin American literature. In Latin American fiction, one student might focus on the politics of Latin American fiction, and another might focus on the magical realism in Latin American fiction. So that varies. But the idea of a literary analysis task stays. And that goes across all the curricula.

JH:
That's wonderful. So instead of a student at the end of a semester sitting down with a pencil, paper, test, and eliminating wrong-answer choices, they have to do a literary analysis. And what does that look like in the classroom?

PT:
We have teacher-designed rubrics, and I think if you look at the rubrics, you'll understand what kind of standards we're trying to hold the students to. They are writing papers all semester long. It's not like all of a sudden they do a PBAT at the end of the semester. In every English class they're taking, they're doing maybe three literary analyses or taking in-class essay exams. There are lots of assessments going on during the year. I might say to a student, “This paper is a strong analysis and you came up with some really good ideas. I think you need to revise it , and it has a possibility of being a PBAT paper.” Whereas I might say to another student, “We need to work on a lot of revision. You still need to get your writing to a better level, and maybe next semester you'll be able to do a PBAT paper.”

Then the way the PBAT paper works is not only I but another teacher has to approve it using the rubric and saying this paper has reached at least a competent level on the rubric. And then the student conducts a presentation for someone other than the classroom teacher. Two other people evaluate a student's work. We're in the middle of Manhattan, so we've always been able to get a lot of people very interested in meeting with a student and talking to them about their work. They get the papers in advance. Or sometimes the student reads a completely new book and an external evaluator sits down with them and evaluates. We have lawyers and writers and journalists and other teachers participating. We're located very near Rockefeller University, which has graduate-level science and research, so for our science classes we've always had people come in and question the students on their work. And what's interesting is you can have a kid whose paper is at the competent level, it's not beyond that. It's not outstanding but shows a level competency. And then you listen to her defend her paper, and you can see that this is a kid who knows so much more than she's been able to express through her writing. Orally some students can sometimes express much more about what they've learned than might be evident in their paper. And the external evaluators are very impressed by what they see a student knows.

At Urban, we also have a studio art PBAT and an art criticism PBAT—each school in the consortium adds on supplementary PBATs. And we have artists come in and critique the students' work. I mean, I can't imagine being sixteen or seventeen and having had an adult come in and spend so much time looking at my work. It must be so flattering for the student to have that kind of critique and someone to take your work so seriously. That must be an incredible experience when you're young. So we have a number of people who are all too happy to sit down and have a really interesting discussion and ask the students questions.

JH:
That's wonderful. So you draw on the community around you to come in and bring in their expertise.

PT:
Yes and we've learned that the oral examination can be very much a learning experience, not just an assessment experience, and that's what we really want. We hope we can reach that level with every kid, where a kid at the end can say about our assessments, “That was really interesting.”

JH:
That seems like a big difference to the standardized test that is wasted pedagogical time. So the assessment is inspiring rather than mind-numbing and anxiety-producing.

PT:
Yes.

JH:
That's great. I want to ask you a follow-up question on this because I was reading a book by Daniel Koretz called
Measuring Up
.

PT:
Sure.

JH:
And he has some critiques of norm-referenced standardized tests and some important things we need to look at in terms of pitfalls that the tests can create. But he also has critiques of performance assessments and I'm wondering how you would respond to his charges that performance assessments are difficult to score reliably. And he also charges that they're hard to compare the scores year to year and that this makes them invalid.