Classroom and School Assessment of Creativity, Social Emotional Learning, Citizenship, and Health: The Importance of Collaboration, Risk-Taking, and Experimentation

• In Event: 16.060 - Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: 16.060-2 - Beyond Subject Knowledge Acquisition: Two Distinct Approaches Toward Student Well-Being and 21st-Century Competencies

Abstract

Objectives
• To describe educator assessment of competencies in broad areas of student success like creativity, citizenship, social emotional learning and health
• To consider some general emergent themes occurring across the case study that center around the importance of student and educators experimentation, risk-taking and collaboration

Perspectives
The Measuring What Matters project in Ontario is using a team-based form of collaborative assessment as the tool through which areas of creativity, citizenship, social emotional learning and health are assessed in schools for several key reasons. Good school-based assessment, evaluation and measurement occurs through educator team-based collaboration (Bruce, Ross, Flynn and Lesserd, 2011). Conditions that support ongoing and iterative collaborative analysis of student documentation help deepen educators’ individual practices within classrooms (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009). Team-based assessment practices in schools support teacher agency, participatory leadership, experimentation, and risk –taking. These practices are central to conditions that allow for expression of the broad competencies. They serve a key purpose in assessing and building collective understanding of broad areas of student learning, which can then be applied to the wide variety of school contexts in which students learn within the classroom and across the school (e.g. Bruce, et. al., 2011).

Modes of inquiry
This paper describes a case study of 12 school boards in Ontario, Canada. The case study is bounded by a set of 94 competencies and 56 school-based conditions associated with creativity, citizenship, health and social emotional learning (MWM, 2015). Twenty six schools- 20 elementary schools and 6 secondary schools are involved in a two year ongoing participatory study in which teams of educators selected a relevant set of competencies from a larger framework of competencies based on core areas that they felt were critical to their students’ success.

Point of View
The study marks a critical shift for MWM-- from one largely substantiated in scholarship and research to one integrated with practitioner knowledge and expertise. While the field trials only represent one facet of a number of different types of partnership work within the project, the information elicited will further expose and help deepen understanding of system approaches to measurement and accountability for broad areas of school success. The paper seeks to expose inherent tensions between policy, research and practice-- commonality and pluralism within understanding, perspective and educational approach (Schon, 1995).

Significance
The case study provides insights into building synergistic relationships between different knowledge types—infusing practitioner expertise and knowledge with scholarship and research.
A critical theme across the study was the continual amount of educator and student experimentation, curiosity and risk-taking that was continually a part of the pedagogic approach to assessment. This suggests that providing space within any accountability framework of student performance for the capacity to explore a wide range of pedagogic approaches flexibly and responsively may be critical to opportunities for students to express and refine these broad but important areas of learning.

Author

• David Hagen Cameron, People For Education