On Friday, Nov. 4, while many teachers attended the ISACS Conference, two University High School teachers stayed close to home. Erica Posthuma-Adams, Chemistry Teacher, and Susana Bollinger, Spanish Teacher, spent the day at Noblesville High School.
Adams met with Noblesville’s AP Chemistry teacher to discuss strategies for moving through the curriculum, and she also toured the school’s Project Lead The Way classes and Innovations class. “Innovations class is different for every kid every year,” said Adams. “Don Wettrick is the teacher. He wrote a book about teaching innovation. In the class, students are presented with a design challenge, and they brainstorm ways to address it.”
Bollinger spent the day visiting Spanish classes and observing various approaches to assessment. Standards-based assessment is a method that University High School’s world language teachers began exploring last year, and they spoke with Noblesville’s Allison Larty, a Spanish teacher, about how she uses it. Larty invited University’s teachers to visit her classes, and Bollinger did so.
What is standards-based assessment? Posthuma-Adams said, “In a standards-based classroom, every assessment question or task is tied to a learning goal (a simple “I can” statement designed by the teacher). The score a student gets on an assessment is less important than the feedback the student gets from it. For example, I can use an assessment to see that a student is flipping factors, so I can have them go back and look at those relationships. In some cases, future scores on assessments replace previous scores because teachers believe it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to master a task as long as you have it at the end.”
There are critics of this method, however. Some teachers question the the role of homework or the approach to take when learning objectives are sequential. Others struggle with how to pace classes in order to serve students who master material too quickly, or not quickly enough. Bollinger also visited classes that do not use this approach.
“Some Noblesville teachers are doing standards-based assessment, and some are not, so it was nice to get information from both sides,” said Bollinger.