Designing Authentic Tasks…

We set out with this blog to create a resource for educators interested in assessment, and particularly authentic assessment. That is, designing tasks that are complex, that require critical thinking and synthesis of information. Tasks that are more real world and, more importantly, enjoyable for students and teachers.

A lot of the readers who come to this blog are searching the web for resources on rubrics – often for specific disciplines like nursing and engineering.

So I’d like to take the opportunity to describe a relatively simple philosophical shift when designing work for students. I’ll start with an example many of us can relate to: memorizing and reciting a poem.

Teaching Efficiency…

As teachers, we tend to focus on pedagogy as the great hope for improvement.

We spend our professional development and meeting time talking improved syllabi, new theories of learning, better designed assignments, or improved feedback.

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And these are clearly, and massively, important.

But long ago (1980s), engineers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals looked to technology to save time. Spreadsheet softeware, CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, and other tools are now integral to these professions.

Educators are famously reluctant to look to technology for help. Sure, every school has its 10 to 15% (my estimate) of technology early adopters. But there hasn’t been a compelling reason for educators to embrace technology. In 1982 you either learned CAD as an engineer, or looked for another job (okay, or got promoted to management).

Thankfully educators are not usually under such autocratic rule, but perhaps it is no accident that the two industries with the least productivity over the last 20 years, and the largest year-on-year cost increases, are medicine and education. Both are people intensive. If you want to teach more students and cure more patients, you have to hire more people. Technology companies and accounting companies do not have their productivity tied to people-power in the same way, and so many medium-sized companies that had full-time accounting departments 20 years ago can now look to a single person or two, or simply outsource the work.

PACT – Performance Assessment for California Teachers – and Waypoint Course-Embedded Solutions

We have been excited to receive a number of inquiries from California Colleges of Education in the last few weeks. We quickly learned that PACT – a consortium of CA schools – had recently released a library of rubrics designed to assess teacher candidates. Here’s their blurb:

PACT (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) is a consortium of teacher preparation programs at a number of California Universities. These institutions have joined together to develop a teacher performance assessment. Successful completion of the teaching performance assessment will be required to earn a California Preliminary Multiple Subject or Single Subject Teaching Credential.

The teaching performance assessments consists of Embedded Signature Assignments (ESAs) and the Teaching Event. Together, the Embedded Assessments and the Teaching Event measure all thirteen Teacher Performance Expectations (TPEs)

With a growing number of Colleges of Education using Waypoint nationwide (look for a listserv created by profs at William Paterson University to start soon for Colleges of Ed using Waypoint), we are in a great position to help the consortium.

A number of the inquiries have come from schools running an assessment/portfolio solution (the kind where students have to pay the cost) to satisfy other accrediting bodies, but these tools are separate from the institution’s Course Management System (Blackboard, Moodle etc.) and way too complicated for faculty to use on a regular basis to assess students.

So Waypoint’s course-embedded solution – embedded rubrics AND potentially embedded in the Course Management System – can have schools up and running in a matter of days.

We’re building in the entire library of PACT rubrics so they are available for our clients and look forward to seeing how they work on the iPhones, iPod touch, and Windows Mobile devices for assessing teachers in the field.