7.+Teacher+Interviews

Thank you to both of my interviewees for taking the time out of your busy schedules to chat with me about your thoughts on assessment.

The first interview that I had the privilege of conducting was with Alicia, a teacher in Chicago who worked for seven years and grew up bilingual. Alicia earned her bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and continued her education completing two master’s degrees, one in administration and one in library science. This second master’s degree was chosen to have an option outside of the classroom should the need or desire arise in the future. During the seven years that Alicia taught she worked in a wide variety of classrooms including Kindergarten, 3re, 4th, and 6th grades as well as an ESL pull-out program, a bi-lingual lead teacher and 7th and 8th grade math and science. I felt as though her varied experiences provided for a rich conversation about her experiences with assessment.

Throughout our conversation the major theme I noticed is that assessment in the classrooms is a time-consuming and stressful process! Alicia was familiar with several different types of assessments, both formal and informal. When talking about the pros and cons of standardized testing she saw only one positive: that they are a measurement tool that can help you plan your curriculum. The major downside based on our conversation is that the content can feel like a mystery. She also identified bias, uncontrollable testing conditions (e.g. unplanned interruptions), and the unfairness of basing so much on one test as other negative aspects. On the flip side only one negative aspect was identified for classroom assessment – how time consuming they can be. Many positive aspects were discussed such as the ability to differentiate, create your own, assess exactly what you want to know about the students’ learning and you have more choices.

When asked which type of assessments give the most information Alicia was quick to identify teacher created assessments. In her opinion they give the best information because the teacher can target them to get the information that she is looking for, compared with standardized test, which she feels are more arbitrary. Additionally they can be modified and adapted to best suit the students that you have in your classroom. Not surprisingly when asked what her favorite type of assessment is she named project based assessments. These are her favorite for a number of reasons. First they are generally used in conjunction with units and they allow the students to take more ownership of their learning and the products that they are creating. Alicia likes that because projects are student created they take some of the pressure and work-load off of the teacher. The students are provided with choices and a set list of expectations (rubric or check list) and then given some amount of freedom to express what they have learned from the unit. Alicia also feels like projects are a good way to see what the students have learned because they are so open. The students have to know the material in order to produce a well-thought-out or well-constructed project.

The most interesting part of our conversation involved talking about administration. When I asked her what administrators could do to assist teachers the first thing she mentioned was getting them more help. In one of the classrooms she worked in she mentioned how much help it would have been to have an extra pair of hands because of all of the different levels of students. Additionally Alicia would have liked her administrators to provide her examples of what they said needed improving during her evaluations. For example if an administrator thought that she needed to do better with differentiation then Alicia would have liked an opportunity to observe another teacher who the administration thought was really good at differentiation. I really like her thoughts on this topic. I think it is really easy to tell someone what to do, but more difficult to tell them how to do it, or how to do it well. How powerful would it be to not just have your boss tell you what you need to improve, but then to also provide you with an opportunity to go about fixing or improving that skill!

I highly enjoyed talking with Alicia. I found our conversation to be informative as well as stimulating.

I had the pleasure of conducting a second interview with another Chicago teacher. Dalia completed an alternative program for bilingual teachers and will be entering her third year as a teacher this fall. She used to work in an alternative high school setting with the mentally ill and homeless and this year will be entering into her 2nd year as a 2nd grade teacher in a gifted bilingual classroom. Her first year was split between 1st and 7th grade. I really enjoyed speaking with Dalia because we have a similar work history and she is a new teacher, so her perspectives made a lot of sense to me as I start my first year of teaching this fall. Like Alicia, Dalia agreed that assessment is a stressful and time consuming part of being a teacher. For Dalia part of the stress is being a new teacher and wanting to be successful and serve her students in the best way possible. This is one of the reasons that classroom assessment can be so time consuming because teachers are often looking for new resources or reading information about the best ways to use assessment in their classroom. Differentiation is another part of assessment and instruction that takes a significant amount of time.

Many different types of assessment are used in Dalia’s classroom. There are formal assessments like the ACCESS test given once a year and IDEL, M Class Math as well as a reading assessment that are conducted three times in a school year. These math and reading tests give Dalia great information about how her students are doing in both of those subjects. She mentioned that the reading program includes weekly tests that help her assess the reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of her students. The students seem to almost like the math assessment because she is seeing that many students are striving to reach the next level and pushing themselves. Her favorite classroom assessment, like Alicia, is projects. She mentioned a really interesting math project that allowed her to gauge how well her students understood the properties of geometric shapes.

When I spoke to Dalia about standardized tests one of the cons that she mentioned was that they do not use critical thinking as much as she would like. Also because they dictate what is included in the curriculum it can be difficult to include other topics/activities that are also important. This is an example of the pressures that high stakes testing imposes on teacher and schools. The positive that she sees is the picture of her students that emerges with the results of the tests. Next we talked about the pros and cons of classroom assessment. Dalia did not see any cons but feels like the biggest positive is the ability to see from day to day how your students are progressing with a topic or unit.

Dalia seems to have a great program set up for communication with the parents of her students. She mentioned that the parents are very involved and communicate to her in various ways. They talk on the phone, through e-mail and with notes back and forth. The students have a folder specifically for parent communication. Additionally the weekly reading tests are sent home for parents to sign. In her classroom the parents are not surprised by the grades on report cards because the parents know how their students are doing in the classroom on a regular basis. When we talked about ways that the administration could help teachers Dalia felt like the best help would be immediate feedback. Finally, when we are told what to improve on in a timely manner then there is time to implement those changes instead of being told at the end of the school year when there is not a whole lot of time to work on the suggestions given.

I also found my conversation with Dalia informative as well as enjoyable.