Week 11 —- Assessment “Crisis” - Some thoughts about my approach during COVID

Managing assessment remotely with language learners who are challenged by the technology is hard. Not only language but digital skills are being developed in less than ideal circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been insufficient preparation for the students to easily engage with the media through which the assessments are being delivered. Progress is being made. I think it is observing my students develop the skills to access and return the materials, rather than the tasks themselves, which is most fascinating - and valuable. 

There are now ‘smart’ automated means to assess, analytics that can applied, a range of whizz bang apps and platforms potentially at a teacher’s disposal. And if only I had a software engineer as a volunteer to help me out ...my worries would be sorted.

Though seriously, in this situation where crisis management is the order of the day, one has to ask how realistic it is to incorporate more interactive and automated tools from a distance with my low level learners? 

Like Kalantzis and Cope I dream of a day when the ability to track learner progress formatively through Artificial Intelligence and intensive data collection at each point of a learning cycle becomes common. This will be a time when summative assessment approaches will be left for dead, or at least be subsumed into an over-arching, formative assessment process. 

Put simply, those dreadful, one-off, classroom staged, paper based tests that we pretend are somehow indicative of broad skill development over time really need to go. As ‘assessments’ they actually provide us with very little information about what students know or are capable of doing.

Our goal should be to make assessment integral to all learning insofar as continuous feedback would be provided and progress tracked. Assessment would then become so pervasive that it all-but disappears. Literacies are an ideal site for the development of such a seamlessly integrated learning and assessment environment. What if we move all assessment data collection into the space of learning? Then all we would ever measure is the substance of learning. There could be no need for after-the-event inferences, because what we are doing is measuring learning itself, at its source. And the more data we collect, and the more we view this data through the greatest variety of lenses, the more valid and reliable our assessments will become.

From Cope, B., Kalantzis, “Technology-Mediated Writing Assessments: Paradigms and Principles.” Computers and Composition 28:79-96.

But reality intervenes. I feel I am in an odd situation with my learners who have been thrown into the online “deep end”. 

For me, the approach has been to design and collect a number of varying, formative tasks which have been prepared for through research and work with others. The assessments have been returned to me across the term, I correct them, collate them and convert them into complete PDFs for each individual. I am limited by having to make reference to a range of Elements, Required Knowledge and Skills outlined in standardised tests. So there are obvious constraints and parameters to work within. I am stuck with one foot in the world of a tired traditional approach, the other online (with my head in the clouds?)

On the practical delivery level, all assessment tasks are finally transferred to a shared folder that my coordinator can access, download and process at her end.

I have to admit, my dreamy head is spinning. 

It has taken me a lot of time gathering all the parts, collating and converting. (In the future all of this could be done by a bot or some form of AI - oh yes, please 😂) but I’m stuck having to cope with this alone for the time being. 

There are a range of technical challenges and I’ve brought in some ‘industrial strength’ conversion and compression software to deal with huge file types emailed or messaged to me by the students and/or their “home-schooler/helpers”. These helpers are usually their  (grand)kids and this impressive collaborative work, (considering my students knew little or nothing about ways of conveying files electronically), is precisely the type of relevant, hands on learning we should be promoting.

There are also official cover sheets requiring signatures and various sections that need to be completed by the teacher that need to be integrated for compliance purposes. Pages are missing, further communication has had to occur - and that takes a lot more time to rectify than it normally would. 

It should be remembered that my adult language learners do not (as yet) have the skills to work in the same way as young, tech savvy college students. 

They started studying online with a single week’s notice and very limited training. At best what can be hoped for is the gradual initiation into ‘smarter’ ways of working. 

What’s required is a revolution in our approach to both classroom based teaching and assessment that I believe will eventually filter down into the adult literacy, language, numeracy and basic education field.

Again, I am in agreement with Cope and Kalantzis, 

...curricula and assessments in their traditional formats and media are in need of updating in order to make optimal use of the affordances of these digital spaces, and to create learning and assessment environments which are manifestly contemporary in the communicative options they allow.”

(Op.cit)

Week 8 —- Bringing Individual Learning Plans to Life Online

N. and Dale meet for a 30 minute  'mini-lesson' in which N. is interviewed by Dale who scribes and assists in prompting what his learning goals are, what resources they could use and a strategy for study that can be monitored, adjusted and documented as they go.

The ‘Individual Learning Plan’ units within the EAL Frameworks curricula at all levels (Access, Employment and Further Study) are the bane of many teachers’ existence. It’s often remarked that they are impractical and at odds with the ‘packaged’ units they are taught alongside. Delivery, unavoidably, happens in the context of a group - often times a large one - so in classes all students are (rightly or wrongly) assumed to be more or less at the same level and are collectively moved through language units with clear, common goals in sight.

In a ‘Standardised’ approach to teaching and learning, the elements for most units of language instruction are clear, envisaged outcomes are tangible, required skills are easily defined. But when it comes to those units about developing personal learning skills - it’s the ‘messy’ individual who is placed at the centre, in a position where things become a lot more difficult to nut out. How do we ascertain what the student needs or wants to learn and how does the teacher go about negotiating this within the context of as many as 20 other students with 20 other differing, individual learning plans?

N. talks about the cultural and language obstacles he faces - s well as his strengths and advantages - in
 becoming an importer of oil from India. 

I’m in agreement. There is something of a contradiction between this involved process of individual goal setting, articulation, development, review and documentation and the apparent impossibly of ever actually realising it in the context of the face to face classroom where time is in short supply and other units (which are much easier to deliver to the group) nonetheless must also be taught and assessed. “It’s a joke!” is the typical response of many frustrated and struggling teachers.

They have a point. How does the classroom teacher conceivably negotiate one-on-one, individual plans with as many as twenty students, monitor progress, review and adjust the plan while monitoring the process of all the others within the classroom context?

Once a course of action has been negotiated, Dale and N. meet for their next mini-lesson. N. has done some of his own research and preparation on the subject of products and importation. In this exercise N. uses the prompts to describe the procedural stages in a supply chain - from manufacture to transport, distribution and retailing of the products he dreams of importing. N. practices the use of the Passive Voice and experiments with new vocabulary and lexis he has already studied..

I dare say that under these conditions, the learning plans of the many are more likely to be ‘dictated’ rather than developed by the teacher at a single sitting. At best, some options can put forward to the group and individuals are encouraged to pick and chose and even copy those authored by the teacher. The follow up reviews are negotiated in the same vein - as long as the annoying assessment requirements can be got out of the way is all that matters.

In this guided dialogue, N. adapts a model text about dimension, weights and measures to describe the products he is interested in importing

This is not what an individual learning plan is meant to be about. And it is a pity considering the huge potential for genuine individual learning such a course of goal setting, study, review and reflection can achieve.

In the time of COVID-19 something has started to occur to me that I think is hard to appreciate in the fast lane of ‘real world’, face to face, classroom teaching. That is, the traditional classroom group is in many ways the problem and a conservative system in which summative assessment is king, distorts and works against any chance of individualised learning and gradual, formative assessment and development occurring.

At this stage, Dale introduces the subject of "specifications" or "specs" so N.
can practice the language of comparisons. All the while Dale is recording the session,
note taking and observing.

Communications between the individual student and teacher remotely distanced from one another, on the other hand, provide an opportunity for this more intimate, one-on-one teaching and learning to take place. COVID has provided lots of time and breathing space for student and teacher to meet online, (or even just to talk by phone) about their learning, in a way that the time gobbling nature of a large class precludes. At least, this is how it appears to me.


There is also an element of bad timing when introducing learning plans. There are very few providers which introduce a substantial process of goal setting and developing an individualised plan at the time of a “Pre-Training Assessment” of skills. This would appear to be the logical or optimal time to combine assessing and goal setting. This is a “Zone of Proximal Development” that Vygotsky (1926) might describe as a moment to determine what the student can do and can’t do - as well as knowing what she wants to do and doesn’t - and to start erecting meaningful scaffolds for learning. The point is the process requires time, individual attention and appropriate scheduling.

N. and Dale look through a text they are using and decide upon where they next logical step for study should be. Here N. is taking some responsibility for articulating need and interest. Dale will think about the sorts of activities to plan around this for their next mini-lesson

The mammoth task usually falls to the teacher to get underway at the start of a term - usually during the first week of classes - when she is preoccupied initiating her students into the course and getting the ‘real’ teaching underway. There’s no time to waste and little freedom to cater to individual needs - the assessment schedule has been determined and must be met. The class is swept along from one week to another, from one assessment task to the next ...but the learning plan seeking some complex individual time and interaction, is barely touched.

What occurs to me from this period of online teaching is that the structures of learning: the timetabling, the configurations of traditionally delivering to a large number of students all at once in classrooms largely happens at the expense of denying time for dialogue between teacher and individual students. We need to dramatically renovate our teaching and learning arrangements and architecture - from the way we manage the time available to us to the ‘real’ and virtual environments we use.

Dale has recorded the lesson in Zoom and has made notes with screen shots as they go so N. can develop a portfolio of notes. Dale intends N. to take on this role of note taker and recorder in coming lessons.

Kalantzis and Cope (‘Literacies’ 2020) have drawn attention to the great results in learning and enhanced mechanisms for assessment that can be gained by reorganising classes through online learning into flatter, more engaged, collaborative and communicative smaller groups where teacher input can be less intrusive and more strategic. If such a model can work it would also provide the teacher and an individual student some much needed time and space to conference more privately and meaningfully about what and how the learner might want to learn. Does dramatic change in group learning provide the necessary conditions for individuals to take greater control and for learning plans to actually begin making sense? Could a model of organised learning - whether it be wholly online or blended - which provides flexibility, a liberal time frame, freer study choices and opportunity for a greater range of interactions, activities and roles to be negotiated between teacher and students be the answer?