Classroom Activity Systems to Support Ambitious Teaching and Assessment

• In Event: Classroom Assessment and Assessment Literacy Practices to Support Equitable and Ambitious Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes classroom learning environments as activity systems consisting of elements that can create a learning environment that supports ambitious classroom practices for all students. Centering ambitious teaching, this paper then provides a framework and use cases to guide supporting classroom assessments.

Common principles of ambitious teaching, grounded in sociocultural theories, include (1) centering the interests and experiences of students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds; (2) engaging students in rich, authentic tasks with scaffolds to support their participation; (3) inviting students to be active co-constructors of and participants in their learning through productive classroom discourse that involves reasoning, explaining, analyzing, and justifying; (4) developing students’ disciplinary knowledge and practice in a community of learners; and (5) including assessment designed and enacted in alignment with these goals. A sociocultural view compels us to: (1) consider classrooms as organized disciplinary communities of practice that attend to the interconnected cognitive, social, emotional, and cultural facets of learning and development, and (2) consider both teachers and students as key participants who bring their previous knowledge, identities, and lived experiences into learning environments. A sociocultural perspective endorses a theory of learning that moves beyond an emphasis on acquiring information and skills to an emphasis on rich conceptual understanding, reasoning, and problem solving in a domain.

From a sociocultural perspective, assessment means observing, documenting, and analyzing how students use and modify their knowledge, skills, and engagement in disciplinary practices over time to participate in a classroom community. It follows that classroom assessments should be designed with learners’ interests and identities in mind. Ambitious assessment (like ambitious teaching) should involve the ways of acting, interacting, seeing, and valuing the disciplinary world.

Classroom assessment is based on the idea that much of what teachers and students do in their classrooms can be described as potential assessment opportunities for collecting evidence of students’ learning. Assessment, then, is a part of social interactions and is a socially situated activity. What students say, write, do, and produce are potential sources of evidence of learning towards rich learning goals. Gathering or eliciting evidence about students’ learning, analyzing and interpreting the information is framed by the ambitious learning goals being pursued (what assessment is about). These assessment activities (gathering, analyzing and interpreting, and acting) can happen informally or more formally. Engaging learners in assessment (both formative and summative) provides them with opportunities to assess themselves and their peers and to take or provide feedback. These activities help learners to develop criteria of what counts as evidence of their learning as well as being agents of their own learning.

This paper provides an organizational framework for classroom teaching and assessment which connects learners (including their interests and identities, linguistic and cultural capital, and knowledge about themselves), curriculum, instruction (including teachers’ knowledge, discourse-rich learning environments, assessment literacy, self-reflection), and assessment within the classroom learning culture. It then uses this framework to provide implications for the design of classroom assessments to support ambitious instruction.

Authors

• Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Stanford University

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder