Performed Learning

I’ve been sitting or the past couple of hours, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express in Dillsboro, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smokies (unimpressive mountain range in Eastern U.S.). I have been working on NECC session and workshop proposals, not the most fun thing to do. Descriptions need to be between 250 and 500 words, which is a black hole. 150 words would be easy. So would 3,000. But 500 is an uncomfortable in-between that is especially difficult for me to balance.

We are up here spending the weekend with my daughter and enjoying the Mountain Heritage Festival, which begins today on the campus. Brenda’s still sleeping, but coffee will bring her down here any minute now.

Last night, we saw a play, put on by the university players. I remember the theatre department being especially active, and attractive, to aspiring thesbians from across the country. The play was Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, and it was excellent. Before the play, I impressed my daughter and her friend, and bored Brenda, by looking up minusia about the play on my Moto Q phone. But that’s not the point!

I kept thinking, during the play, that this is the kind of assessment we talk about when we say authentic assessment. We talk about our children performing well, but performing on tests is not performing. It’s following directions. Performing in a play is also following directions, but it is much more than that. It is expressing your skills, your enthusiasm for life, your love of an art, and a joy for making other people happy (or sad).

Certainly we need to test the basics, and sometimes the bubble sheet is the best way to do this. But when we think of testing, we shouldn’t think first of multiple choice. We should think first of some form of true performance, where students are demonstrating knowledge, skill, love, and enthusiasm, within the context of people, place, and event.

Hey! I’m wasting words here. Need to get back to the conference proposals.

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5 thoughts on “Performed Learning”

  1. You’re not wasting words here – and maybe you didn’t mean it like I took it. It may be like “preaching to the choir” but when you put down these thoughts that 99.9% of the people that read it, agree with it, you also give those of us fighting the good fight some documentation that we’re not the only ones with these crazy notions. Keep preachin’ it!

  2. David,
    I completely agree that acting can demonstrate high quality understanding and the fulfillment of objectives. I also think that teachers should always have students demonstrate attainment in real ways. The problem is how does a governing agency or even a school principal know that students are learning? A principal can’t watch every student in the school act something out. Certainly, a governing agency can’t do that. But, with blogging, podcasts and vodcasts we might be moving closer to the day and age when an argument can be made that principals and even governing agencies can meaure success without administering tests. A play could be vodcasted, for example. But the question remains – how can we afford to pay a qualified assesser to watch every vodcast? I think the answer here is technology – somebody created the machine that could analyze scantron sheets. Somebody will create a machine to evaluate plays, without requiring the plays to be formulaic. Maybe one of our students will create this. Oh, the importance of teaching studnets to think outside the box!!!!!

    Andrew Pass
    http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html

  3. A “performance” can also be viewed as that writing piece that a student created, sitting with a child and listening to him/her read is also a performance. Going through the steps of the scientific method is a performance, as is working through the research process. Blogging is a performance of writing skills, pod/vod-casting are a performance of possibly reading, writing and speaking skills. Wikis are a performance of collaborative knowledge building skills. We have to redefine what we mean by assessment.

    BTW – the scores for our students test in English Language Arts that was given last January have just come out…that’s the assessment “benchmark” that we look at and what good will that do us now?

  4. These are excellent questions, Andrew. And I guess what I’m wondering here (and you all know that my blogging is mostly just thinking out loud) is why is it up to our government to measure learning. They didn’t seem to care for decades, until just recently, when it suddenly became a political lever.

    Why not leave it up to the people who care the most, the students, their parents, and their community. If the students, their parents, and their communities are satisfied with what’s happening in their schools, then their school are doing well. I know that this is overly simplistic, and does not account for the need that we have for visionary leadership to retool schools and classrooms. However, are legislators more qualified to evaluate teacher than their students parents?

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