What is with all the "projects" and not so many tests in the classroom? Aren't test the clearest and cleanest way to assess student learning?
Anyone who walks into my class in the fully swing of a project knows that I like to let the kids get messy. The students are around the room in various stages of the project working independently or in small groups hashing out the what and why of their next step. This week they are fake Tweeting about Wonder to dive into character's perspectives, creating time machines and brochures to sell the time machines, and creating our own colonies so that they themselves can make better choices than the first few rounds of English colonist. While I know what I want the students show in terms of understanding, I don't have a precise idea of what the end result of any of these should look like. I like that I don't know EXACTLY what it should look like in the end. So it is messy and I love it.
These activities are a mixture of projects that I did previously and ones that I added this year in my effort to increase the rigor of student work in the classroom. The school district's goal is for all teachers to increase the rigor of student learning. My goal in creating these projects wasn't to create inquiry directly, but from what I have read on the art of defining inquiry, I would say that these classroom activities line up. So now what I am trying to figure out is how closely does creating a learning activity that is rigorous and one that is based around inquiry have in common? It would seem that they are closely related.
When we decided to teach Wonder, rather than just read it aloud, I jumped on developing learning activities that would be on going throughout the book as the characters developed. It would give the teachers time to model what we wanted the students to learn and give the student time to practice the different skills. During this set of lesson the students have been able to openly discuss what they think of the way that characters are behaving, what their motivations are, and how they feel about the interaction of home and school life with the students in the book. None of it is multiple choice and little of it has hard and fast right or wrong answers. In the fake Tweets they are inferring how a character would tweet about what is currently going on in the story. Wonder is written from multiple points of view, which works perfectly for this. They are then able to interpret the characters deeper feelings and shine part of themselves on these characters. Part of me then argues, "But that isn't a question. Aren't questions inquiry?" While I didn't phrase it as a question, it is there. The questions are, "How did this event affect the other character that is not writing this portion of the story? Why is what is happening in the story important to them?" Our group discussions have shown me that they can back up numerous arguments about how they interpret the character would feel in these situations. This is so much better than options A, B, C, or D.
How does assessment fit in with inquiry assignments? If there is not a defined and predetermined answer, how do teachers and students know when quality work is being done? For the larger projects, I do create a specific rubric. I do share the rubrics with my students early on. I do not want them to get deep into a project to find out that their nitty gritty didn't match. Even though I do provide them with the rubric, I know they don't pay close attention to it when they get excited. When I first discovered rubrics, I thought they were the best thing ever. They tell you exactly how to get an A. It was like cheating, I always needed to guess when I was growing up. Now though, I do find some pit falls when I am making a rubric. How do you fully explain what you want without tying the hands of your students and limit them in something that they could make great on their own? The authors of The Inquiry Page feel that it is not best that teachers are increasing relying on rubrics and predefined assessment guides. I struggle with this. I think that some children need a firmer guideline on what they need to do, or they are lost and floundering. Other children have taken a project and outdone what I had thought, but the work did not meet with the exact guidelines. That is where I step in as a teacher and make a choice. If they are showing me that they understand the skill, which wins out over the precise wording of the rubric. These are underlying thoughts I have had before that I had clarified after reading about assessing inquiry this week.
Is there a line where inquiry stops? I am thinking of this in specifics, because otherwise I think the questions is too big. Am I right to think that the students working on Creating Colonies is inquiry? Let me give you a bit more information about what they are doing. They have been given four choices: what people to bring, what items to bring, where to build the colonies, and what to do when they get there. There were options to choose from for each four choices based on historic facts from Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Connecticut. I don't have a right answer for any one, but they needed to explain each of the four choices. The answers need to be whole and fit together to fit the basic needs of food, water, shelter, and safety. Their explanations are more what I judge than anything else. To me, that open opportunity to make their own choices after reading about historical mishaps allows them to explore the time period better than a matching test of names and colonies. What do you think?
References:
Definition of Inquiry. (1998, January 1). Retrieved January 24, 2015, from http://www.cii.illinois.edu/InquiryPage/inquiry/definition.html
Inquiry Assessment. (1998, January 1). Retrieved January 24, 2015, from http://www.cii.illinois.edu/InquiryPage/php/assessment2.html#Rubrics
Palacio, R., & Knopf, I. (2012). Wonder. New York: Random House Children's Books.
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