FROM THE NEWSLETTER
This is a new column where we present — not a full activity module — but a tip, a technique, or an instructional gambit — drawn from what our teachers are trying in their classes.
For this first entry, I want to relay what I have learned about how Laura Gonzales and Adam Shaw have been experimenting with Task-Based Assessment. This is a concept that has been around for a while. But Laura and Adam’s application of the concept was particularly successful.
The students are given a blank map of a town, and they have to work together to decide where the different buildings in the town are going to go. They must argue in favor of or against the location of different buildings.
The students practice debating the design of the city with their study groups. Meanwhile the teacher calls random combinations of kids up to the front to improvise a discussion. Because the students are being assessed with fellow participants that they did not practice with, they cannot anticipate what counter-arguments and follow-up questions they will be able to use.
The writing on different pedagogies is woefully prescriptive. Whenever I go online to refresh my understanding of a particular approach, I find that way too much page space is devoted to arguing against other approaches. That was my frustration in reading this otherwise excellent collection of articles about task-based assessment.
Being delighted to learn about Laura and Adam’s success with Task-Based Assessment, but at the same time having observed (and participated in) many instances of failed experiments with Task-Based Assessment, a few pointers are in order.
1) Try it. It’s alright to run an activity like this and have it not work exactly as planned. That is part of being an inspired and impactful teacher. If you play it safe all the time with activities that are easy to control (and task-based activities are very hard to control) then you are not leaving any room for genius to flourish in you and in the kids. I have watched a lot of these types of classes. 30% of the time, the activity completely falls apart, and the teacher needs to scrap it and move to a back-up plan. 30% of the time the teacher SHOULD scrap it because time is being wasted on an unchallenging activity, but the teacher feels compelled to grind through to the bitter end. But that remaining 40% of time that real magic happens for a significant majority of the kids is well worth the risk. — especially if you really do have a back-up plan.
2) Decide. Is this going to be a Coercive Assessment or a Diagnostic (Formative) Assessment. It cannot be both. Decide whether or not you are going to score this activity. If you are trying to learn all that you can about your student’s aptitude so that you make better decisions as a teacher, and at the same time you want to grade them, then you will get inaccurate information. (I have argued this vital distinction in a blog, and won’t do it here.)
3) Be honest with yourself about what you are assessing. For example, just because the activity is probably going to encourage the kids to use, say, prepositions does not mean than you are adequately assessing their mastery of prepositions — OR that you have to force the activity to be about mastering prepositions. Does the map game create a context where the students can engage creatively in the back-and-forth rhythm of a debate? Great! That prepositions are involved in some way, that is a nice bonus, but be really clear about exactly what muscle is being isolated, exactly where the challenge is. If only one thing is being assessed. Good. If two? Honestly challenging tasks, honestly being mastered? Great! But if you get to three or more things that you think you are assessing, begin to suspect some of your criteria. Make sure you are not just softballing and that you really have a way to determine wether or not mastery has occurred.
4) Build up to it. The more complex the activity, the greater the temptation to resort to Japanese, the greater the need to put the pieces to gather for this activity over a series of lessons. — making sure that the students have the language that you want them to use. — making sure that format of the activity is familiar. — making sure that the interest in the task is there.
5) Don’t be a puritan. Challenging your students with authentic tasks is wise. Other very wise people have observed that in spite of the intuitive sense that arguments for task-based assessment make, there is no strong evidence that it works. Don’t let the success of one technique argue against the wisdom of another. If after running a map task you decide to, say, bolster students’ grasp of some of the language used by running a listening activity that isolates the challenge of hearing prepositions correctly, or an oral drill that pushes them to produce them correctly. What comes after or before a task-based activity is not an offense to the task-based activity if it happens to have some other point of focus — or happens not also to be task-based. Its a sign that you are determined to bring all tolls to bear and fully exploit the value of the task-based activity. Note, also, that maps are particularly useful if what you are doing is describing locations, so if that is the skill that you are trying to build, then a task involving a map is going to work. Task-based work has been in fashion, so we’ve seen a lot of maps in class. But not every language skill can be so cleanly isolated (helping students to grasp the significance of the relationship between the past and the past progressive, for example). If everything you do has to be a task assessment, then you are no longer student-centered. You are centering your curriculum on an ideology, using the kids to demonstrate that something can be done, rather than using what can be done to better educate the kids.
The strength of Laura and Adam’s map activity is that it is bounded and focused but still leaves room for kids to say things like “I don’t want to put the baseball stadium next to the hospital because baseball stadiums are noisy and the patients need to rest.” That’s pretty cool.