[NOTE: The events in this post actually occurred nearly three months before the posting date.]
I’ve always imagined myself to be open-minded. Part of that means that establishing authority is an experiment in egalitarianism. I like to ask my students to circle up their desks. I frequently eschew the instructor “high chair” in the Stevenson computer labs for a student chair (nearly every day, at least one is empty). I ask questions. I encourage students to call me out, to question and to challenge my assumptions. (Last Thursday, I spent the first few minutes of the period admitting that the class went right where I went wrong.) Last Monday, during a teaching assistant’s first day leading the class, I bit my tongue, not wanting to impeach his authority. (The next day, I bit down harder as Rob and Becky took charge of the class all by themselves.)
That’s one reason I mistrust summative (often holistic) assessment. Not only does it turn a high-stakes decision into a one-shot deal, it does so while making the student the bearer of the burden of failure. No, I don’t believe that a student should be able to argue that, because he or she paid twice for a class, he or she deserves a passing grade. But I don’t congratulate myself when I give a student the “D” or “F” that might occasion such an argument. More to the point, it doesn’t cost me much—not directly, anyway—to fail a student. The student has to pay to take the course again, but I continue to register for classes for free, to collect a monthly paycheck. I’m even awarded the mentorship of two future English teachers. And on what grounds? That I was a tough S.O.B.?
Turn that situation on its head, and you’ll discover what I value about formative assessment. Formative assessment implies a negotiative, provisional, reciprocative relationship—one in which the teacher and the student share different, but (ideally) equal responsibility in the result of the assessment. Learning isn’t just about what the student does, or what the teacher does: it’s about what each does in dialogue with the other. To put it in other terms, a successful act of formative assessment teaches me what I need to do just as much as it teaches the student what he or she needs to do.
Summative assessment—the kind of judgment that either gives credit for a class or doesn’t, that places a student in a college-credit course or doesn’t, isn’t a dialogue between student and teacher. Before you interject “But the student is present in the form of his or her text!” let me illustrate what I mean by “dialogue.” If a student paraphrases a teacher’s directions and the teacher says “No, that’s not what I meant,” that moment becomes one in which the student realizes his or her need to adjust how he or she listens, and the teacher realizes his or her need to adjust how he or she communicates the desired message. Their words and actions not only have an effect on one another, but both teacher and student are welcome, even encouraged, to respond to that effect, to appeal directly to the most appropriate audience. But if a student writes what he or she sees as a “passing” essay, or collects documents in what he or she sees as a “competent” portfolio of work, and a teacher says “No, that’s not what I meant” (for a portfolio or essay submitted as an instrument of summative assessment so often is an attempt to tell the teacher what he or she means), the ensuing moment is anything but a shared learning experience—although it might be possible for the student and teacher to learn from that moment, they do not do so together. To put it another way, the effects of the student’s and the teacher’s words and actions either come from “out of the blue,” or they’re clearly visible, but inevitable in the way that the death of the cute girl is in a slasher movie.
And because they do not learn together, what they learn, so often, does not work together. Summative assessment, it seems, is not designed to foster collaborative work—at least not between teacher and student. Take the kind of assessment that “sums up” an academic term (such as a semester or a quarter). Typically, teachers—acting alone—give single, holistic measurements of student performance, and students know exactly which teacher gave what measurement. By contrast, students are usually encouraged to assess their teachers by answering a battery of questions covering everything from the teacher’s preparedness for class and availability for one-on-one assistance to their professional decorum and the appropriateness of the difficulty level of their assignments. (Students are often asked to engage in self-assessment, too, in the [problematically holistic] form of “What grade do you think you’ll get in this class?” something teachers are seldom, if ever, asked to do in return.) And students assess their teacher anonymously.
At this point, you’re probably arguing: “But students need anonymity to be able to safely evaluate their teachers, whose power might otherwise silence them, or modify what they say!” And: “Teachers have already provided a mountain of narrative feedback by the end of a 15-week semester or 10-week quarter!” But look past the typical ethical and practical objections, and what remains is this: summative assessment exists to divide—not just to separate the strong from the weak, the competent from the incompetent, but to stratify former members of a community at the moment when they know the most about one another; the moment at which, perhaps, each could do the other the most good.
I’m describing, of course, complementarity. That’s typical for someone of my training: any good theatre geek knows that a play is a communal thing, and that each part of that play—every spotlight and blackout, every hat, dress, and cufflink, every gesture, step, thrust, and parry, every word, shout, shriek, sigh, and keening cry, every stage hand, props man, actor, sound tech, even every audience member’s stunned gasp or wet-eyed stare—cannot be understood without even one of the others. That’s why, when I read someone like Sarah Warshauer Freedman, who asserts in describing a study she conducted that “readers judged consistently, their traits not affecting the variance in the scores” (289), and that she values Diederich’s thoughts about “how to train readers to lose their biases” (290), along with her attempts to ensure that “differences in evaluations caused by mode of discourse would not have to be examined” (291), I cringe.
I don’t question her motives. (I had a Facebook friend who called “those with Ed.D. degrees” a special kind of “varmint.” He’s not my friend anymore, simply because I asked him what he meant, and he didn’t feel obligated to reply. In my view, one does not even implicitly question the motives of an educator without care and tact.) But I do wonder what she’s missing.
I remember my first day teaching in a college classroom. After asking my students to put their chairs in a circle (“How 1960s” I can hear Gabe Gudding quip from over my metaphorical shoulder, even as he helps me move a desk), I played a special kind of game I learned as a student teacher for a theatre class, which I like to call “The Dictionary Game.” Starting with the classmate seated to my left, the first person makes up and spells an imaginary word:
“Farandola. F-A-R-A-N-D-O-L-A.”
Their neighbor gives that word a part of speech and a definition:
“Farandola. Noun. A special kind of dance move that occurs just before one falls, usually unintentionally, on one’s behind.”
The next person then uses that term in a sentence:
“He tried to do the Running Man, but the resulting farandola sent Mom into the freezer for her ice pack.”
On that particular day, Rachel stalled, staring nervously at the ceiling. Her neighbor, Chris, reminded her of the word and prompted her to use it in a sentence. After a few moments of anxious silence, Rachel looked squarely at me and used all five of the words the class had created so far in a single sentence.
My first response was the same as Freedman’s: I had lost control of the environment, and I wanted to stop, back up, even wipe the slate clean and start over. Rachel had misunderstood my instructions, and in so doing, had introduced an unintended variable into my experiment. But I resisted that initial impulse, and almost immediately, began to see the benefits behind what had happened. Rachel had, in fact, done exactly what I had asked—illustrated an appropriate example of a term’s usage. But she had also synthesized—pulling together all five words (correctly) into a single unit. By doing that, Rachel taught me that the task I had set before my students asked for—and consequently, measured—skills for which I had not designed it. I felt, I imagine, similar to the scientist who discovered aspartame (an artificial sweetener) while intending to create a new form of adhesive. Or Rutherford, who, upon finishing an experiment designed to test his theory of the structure of the atom, remarked that he felt as though he had shot a cannonball at a sheet of tissue paper, and it had bounced off.
What complementarity suggests (what, I might add, the whole of human intellectual history suggests) is that nothing can be understood without being taken on its own terms—those terms being the variables that experimental procedure tries so hard to erase. Assessing writing on its own terms, rather than controlling for variables, searches for them. Interrogates them. Even celebrates them. That’s clearly a situated opinion—my training as a creative writer has taught me that the fulcrum of most effective writing is the element of surprise—but it’s not a lonely one. Practitioners and theorists of writing assessment note that teachers tend to disagree. Champions of communal writing assessment even assert that this disagreement can be mined for information. And I can’t help but wonder: What would happen if we introduced a student into the carefully-crafted environment of the “norming” session? Not a “model” student, or a graduate assistant. Somebody who, by our definition, doesn’t know anything. What do we think would happen? And more importantly, what might happen in spite of ourselves?
Work Cited
Freedman, Sarah Warshauer. “Influences on Evaluators of Expository Essays: Beyond the Text.” Reprinted in Assessing Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Huot, Brian and Peggy O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. Print. 289 – 300.
