For the past couple of years that I have been in the College of Education, I have been saying that I believe project-based grading is the best way to assess the knowledge of students. Countless units that feature projects as a summative assessment were created by yours truly, but until this semester, I had not gotten a chance to try my plans out on a set of "guinea pigs".
My professors have done a great job of introducing me to differing pedagogies while drilling concepts such as backwards mapping and the Madeline Hunter model of instruction into my head. While the Madeline Hunter model was originally intended to be used for direct instruction, as a constructivist, I am able to take the components of her planning and incorporate them into student-directed instructional environment (also known as the lit centers we use in our classroom).
The summative assessment for my unit was a project we worked on in class. Although the prompt was the same, I had to differentiate the requirements of the assessment based on the skill level and time constraints of each class. For my general ELA/Reading, students were required to write a two-paragraph description, create a technical drawing, and write a ballad or ode about their inventions. For my honors ELA/Reading class, students were required to do the same things, but instead of two paragraphs, they were required to write a five-paragraph essay. My honors reading class was required to write three paragraphs about their invention (why they invented it, what the invention is, and how they plan to sell it) and present the invention.
On the due date for the summative assessment, students presented their projects to each other, and those learning about the projects practiced reading skills such as determining author's purpose and making generalizations/predictions about each invention.
The entire first week of my ten consecutive days was spent assessing students' writing and editing abilities. Additionally, they explored the steps of the patenting process, learned about inventions that were created by accident, investigated the Nikola Tesla vs. Thomas Edison debate, and wrote their invention proposals. During all of this, students were also preparing to take their nine week's exam, so I was also conducting small group instruction to address those needs.
The second week was completely dedicated to the pre-writing and editing processes of the various components of the projects. While it might seem like the students could have completed these components in a day, I had them pre-write, write, and rewrite about these inventions until they could have told me about the inventions in their sleep.
As I expected, I did not have much push back from my honors ELA/Reading class, but I definitely did from the other two.
If you've read my other posts, you know that my general class has been a challenge all semester when it comes to classroom management. What I have talked about a little less is that they are also a challenge when it comes to getting them to do...well, anything. I started them off in lit centers, but after demonstrating that they could not handle that independence, I had to take lit centers away and go back to a more direct instructional style. While I don't normally like to do this, I felt that it was necessary in order for students to be prepared for the summative assessment. Ultimately, I believe that this was a good decision because it resulted in a more engaged classroom.
During the planning of my ten days, I was not sure exactly how to approach this project with my honors reading class. As opposed to the two hours of class I have to teach the others, I only have fifty minutes with them. Instead of stressing myself out by trying to think of a solution alone, I took a cue from my placement teacher and asked the students for their input as to how I should conduct their assessments. With a few reservations, the class decided that they would prefer to do the project as a group, and they would like to present in front of the whole class (the other two classes were doing a version of a gallery walk). After further discussion, we decided that students would choose their own groups, there should be no more than four to a group, and they were allowed to work individually if desired. I informed the one student who wanted to work individually that he would have to complete all of the components of the project, and he agreed that he would do it. Because I only have the students for reading, I could only assess them on their reading skills. What this means is that I was evaluating students' abilities to sequence, generalize, and determine author's purpose.
As for my honors ELA/reading class, it pretty much went exactly as I had planned with the exception of writing the five paragraph essay. I reserved the laptop cart for one class period on our final drafting day (the day before the project was due). However, what everyone involved in the reservation process failed to realize was that the cart was being used for intervention at the same time. Fortunately, our librarian at this school is amazing and worked it out for me to bring the students to use the computers in the library for the second half of our class time. This ended up not being enough time for the students to complete their essays. It took some finagling, but I worked things out where this class could present their inventions during the first half and finish their papers during the second half of class the next day (the paper was not a required component of the presentation).
In retrospect, I would make some small adjustments to my unit. If I was in my own classroom, I would've extended this project to last over three weeks minimum. Although I have every confidence that my placement teacher has taught the students specific skills and techniques to use when writing, because I have not been with these students since the beginning of the year, it was pretty hard to jump in during the middle of the second semester and plan a writing-based assessment for them. With the additional time I would include in my unit plan, I would incorporate more writing practice.
In addition to the extra writing practice, I would allow students to utilize this extra time to post their entire project on Tackk or Blendspace. This would cut down on the amount of papers I have to keep up with, and it's a good way for the students to have access to each others' entire projects for evaluative purposes. Ideally, I would like to still have a more tactile presentation component, but instead of the poem and sketches, I would perhaps have students present their sketches from rough draft to final draft with the added component of a scaled model.
In my opinion, this unit would function well as a nine weeks assessment. This type of in-depth researching, writing, and creation has the potential to encompass multitudes of ELA standards. Based on the way many of the students appreciated the freedom of exploration that came with Innovation Day, I think that this would be a great way to adapt it to an ELA setting.
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