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April 2016 | Volume 73 | Number 7 Looking at Student Work Pages 8-9
As teachers increasingly assign projects and tasks that prompt students to show innovative thinking and creativity, a question emerges: How do we evaluate whether a student's performance truly demonstrates creativity? In a recent article, creativity researchers Danah Henriksen, Punya Mishra, and Rohit Mehta seek to explain how to define and fairly measure creativity in student work.
The authors review existing reputable tests and instruments and discuss why few of these instruments work well for gauging creativity in K–12 student work. For instance, most instruments measure creativity as a psychological characteristic of an individual or decide whether a creative process unfolded, rather than evaluating a specific product. Quoting a previous study by Mishra and Henriksen, the authors note, "Though we value the importance of process, as educators we have to develop better measures and rubrics to speak … systematically about the creative products that students develop."
The authors developed a rubric template that can be used to evaluate where a piece of student work falls, on a scale of 1 to 5, in terms of three key aspects of creativity—novel, effective, and whole (meaning it shows an aesthetic dimension). Those aspects reflect the way that Henriksen and colleagues define creativity.
Find "Novel, Effective, Whole: Toward a NEW Framework for Evaluations of Creative Products," in Volume 23, Number 3 of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, pp. 455–478.
Starr Sackstein's Education Week blog, Work in Progress, has a seemingly endless supply of ideas to improve how we look at student work. During this school year, the high school English and journalism teacher from New York City has written about topics such as replacing transcripts with portfolios, facilitating meaningful student-generated discussions, reviewing student work to norm your department's expectations, and using Google Forms to allow students to weigh in on their peers' work. Her blog is available at http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/work_in_progress.
In a survey of more than 10,000 teachers, respondents were asked how many minutes they spend daily during the required school day grading, documenting, and analyzing student work.
19.4 minutes spent grading student work/preparing student report cards
15.4 minutes spent completing professional paperwork, filling out reports, and doing data analysis
About 36 total minutes per day spent grading, documenting, and analyzing student work
Source: Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Primary Sources 2012: America's Teachers on the Teaching Profession: www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full.pdf
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (Penguin, 2014)
Every day we receive more feedback than we probably realize—from the smile on your significant other's face after you've cleaned the kitchen to the performance review you received at work. Stone and Heen explore why feedback is so difficult for many of us to process and how we can become better receivers of feedback.
The authors describe three types of feedback—appreciation, coaching, and evaluation—and why it's important that the giver and receiver agree on the purpose of the feedback at hand. For instance, a teacher who reaches out to her principal about a classroom management issue isn't looking for an appreciative pat on the back or an evaluative slap on the wrist; she wants coaching to solve the problem. Stone and Heen also explain what blocks us from receiving feedback well—truth, relationship, and identity triggers—and the blind spots and distortions we all have, but none of us likes to admit.
There are plenty of takeaways for educators here. We can explicitly teach our students to more skillfully receive input from teachers and peers (for example, how to effectively solicit feedback and navigate resulting conversations). And when we understand the science and art of receiving feedback, it will undoubtedly influence how we provide feedback. Feedback, after all, is a two-way street.
"If you flip your class, you might be able to rid yourself of the bane of many teachers: grading papers late at night," say Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams in Flipped-Learning Toolkit: 5 Steps for Formative Assessment. Because students learn the content at home and practice in class, flipping frees up class time for immediate, one-to-one assessment.
In two videos with accompanying text, Bergmann and Sams describe how individualized assessment can work in a flipped classroom. After a student completes his or her work, the teacher does a mastery check, to find out whether the student truly "gets it" or still has some misconceptions or partial understandings. Students move on only when they've achieved mastery.
The toolkit is available on Edutopia at www.edutopia.org/blog/five-steps-formative-assessment-jon-bergmann. Find additional information in Bergmann and Sams's book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day (ISTE & ASCD, 2012).
Most of the time, the student work we're looking at is not important in and of itself, but rather for what it can tell us about students.
—Dylan Wiliam
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