To this end, I am also finding that grading based on performance and skills feels disingenuous to me. I have students whose writing skills range in pretty extreme ends of the spectrum, but the effort that is being put forth feels like a more true basis for a grade. I am still unsure if that is the best approach, but I can’t imagine giving a student whose writing skills are rudimentary, but whose effort shows a clear level of dedication, a lesser grade than a student whose writing skills are more developed. I want to keep this in mind when I develop rubrics because I want to be sure that my guidelines for grading rules are a reflection of student engagement, effort, and attention to the lesson, and not predicated on what writing levels I think students “should” be performing at based on their grade range. I am going to hold myself to a standard of culturally responsive pedagogy in this way and make sure that my approach to student work is about meeting them at the place where they ARE (not where I think they “should” be). 

Today I am going to be working on developing a rubric for my EdTPA unit, and it feels like a great opportunity to apply some of these thoughts. There are concrete aspects to the grading rubric that ostensibly feel like they will make my task of assessing and providing feedback more clear for students to interpret, but I am also hoping to develop relational attributes to the rubric that reflect student connections to the content that are personal and authentic as the primary basis for my grading practice. 

Some rules I am going to follow: give feedback early and quickly so that students have the opportunity to work with it. Make sure I follow-up on feedback given to assess it’s efficacy (and make sure that feedback cycles are built into my weekly work flow). When I have my own classroom (whether distance learning or in-person) I hope to have one-on-one student feedback sessions as often as possible, and would like to build them into my lesson units as a part of the summative assessment process. I think for now, this is where I would locate my thoughts. I am still feeling very early in my experience of this important pedagogical praxis (and I have yet to have much agency in my cooperating classroom to really apply a lot of the theories I am analyzing here) but I do feel that I am developing a very personal sensibility about assessment and feedback. I would consider myself emerging in this capacity. I do struggle with being too complimentary and perhaps still a bit shy about giving feedback pointers, but I am going to get better at that as well. 

In my own class, I’m finding I’m having to awkwardly or at times subtly undo and unravel some of the assignments and assessments built into the curriculum that are assumed to have worth by merit of existing, when in actuality if I had to explain the purpose of some of these to students, if I did choose to assign them, I would dread having to use the anti-response of a single “because”, because that’s where the reasoning ends on some of these. Put under an equity lens, too many things fall to pieces. My transparency with students regarding the purpose of every assessment, every assignment, every bit of reasoning for each grade, and the personal philosophy I’m cultivating around these topics seemingly breaks through a new roof on weekly bases. Through my openness about these subjects and the conversations I have in class, I feel like I’m at times teaching or suggesting to my students what a teacher should be or needs to be (or could be?), spotlighting the possibilities; not that I am that teacher at the moment, at least not yet, but this is a permanent becoming anyway. I do not mean to frame this as any type of aggrandizement; quite the opposite, actually, if not an inadvertent apology.

I feel that I keep coming back to this idea of an experiential component of teaching that is extremely human. One way to describe this would be in juxtaposition to the industrial model of public school, which remains the dominant structure so long as school is an assembly line with fixed endpoints at which students are decidedly placed back on the belt for reassembly/education or reluctantly deemed failures of some sort and left alone (excuse the palpable cynicism). This is very mechanical, very inhuman. Counter to this would be a system in which each student is their own grading system and on their own timeline, valued and properly challenged in a way that is vitalistically motivating, not being compared to others due to blanket procedures or sacrificed as collateral when the the year’s gradation time arrives. This type of romanticism, while weighing heavy on me, admittedly, is still motivating. Idealism is impossible in wholeness, but echoes of ideals can show up where we can express creative and loving agency in our own teaching, creating spaces where teachers and students can be humans. I didn’t want to end this reflection with the tone of frustration as expressed above. But it is a creative frustration, importantly.

I think one of my main takeaways from this class is just to focus on the act of reflection. Reflecting upon our students' interest, engagement and performance is the best way to gather data about their journey as learners, which in turn is a direct reflection upon our abilities as teachers. Something that really stuck out for me during a conversation with colleagues in a breakout room is the simple question "How do I know what my students know?" As simple and obvious as this question is I think that letting it be at the forefront of what guides me in my assessment of my students is fairly pivotal. Keep it simple. Bam. 

As far as summative assessments go, the more and more I think about the ways that education is changing and progressing for the better, to create more equitable opportunities and reduce unnecessary stressors, I've come to the conclusion that projects are a great way to assess student growth. Luckily in World Languages this works quite well and the projects are actually usually extremely informative and interesting! And I always learn just as much about my student as a person as I learn about what they've learned in my class. Which I think are, honestly, equally valuable.

The stairs and stars assignment was really eye-opening for me because I realized that I think I should be giving more feedback than I have been giving. I think, of course, in a brick and mortar, in-person classroom setting there really is just so much more direct, in the moment feedback naturally happening because there's just so much more actual interaction happening between teacher and student and among peers. I do think I am actually fairly good at this in person, but the stairs and stars activity helped me reflect on the absence of this in my online classes this year. It's something that I think is just as important as ever, and since it comes less naturally in CDL it's something I'm going to have to more conscientiously focus on creating opportunities for and following through with. That has given me plenty to think about and plan, and will no doubt be a continual journey for the rest of this CDL experience.

I think all in all I'm still emerging as a well-rounded educator in charge of not only planning and administering lessons as well as getting to know my students and encouraging them to try their best and be their best but also in concrete assessment and feedback that I can provide for students. It is something I appreciate being pushed to hold myself to improve upon. 

On a recent hike with my mom, who is an elementary school teacher, we were chatting about learning and language objectives and my confusion being able to differentiate and clearly express between the two. Similar to another realization in a breakout room with colleagues, where I realized that assessment was just simply "How do I know what my students know?" my mother also gloriously and simply explained learning/language objectives as "How will the student show us what they have learned?" 

As I expressed in my reflection one how I was becoming more and more aware that active and direct feedback was something I wanted to focus on in CDL, as well as of course continue on into in person classes, I think that having students engage in self-assessment is something else that I definitely want to incorporate more into my classes. And, funnily enough, I feel like feedback and reflection through self-assessment are quite closely related to one another! In any case I think that rubrics are a good solution to incorporating more feedback and self-assessment. Not only do they provide clear guidelines and expectations of what an assignment or project should include, but they create a clear framework for dialogue around a summative assessment, both for teachers provide feedback but also for student to analyze and determine their own concept and assessment of their performance. 

So, given all these fairly recent aha moments and realizations and slight clarity into some of the larger issues of what it is to effectively teach, I would still consider myself emerging. But, I'm aware of these things as well as the many many many other things that teachers need to be constantly and continually aware of in their classroom and lesson planning endeavors, and being aware is, and my humble opinion an okay place to be. We are all constantly working to be more aware, more effective, more well-rounded, and just generally better versions of ourselves, and I'm definitely somewhere along that process! 

Thinking ahead, I hope to involve my students’ opinions more for creating more interesting and interactive lessons and assessments. By gaining a stronger grasp of my student’s strengths and weaknesses I will be able to better support my students. An area that I’ve been paying more attention to is my learning targets - my principal pointed out that it’s best to use clearly defined achievement language, meaning that students know without a doubt when they’ve reached the lesson objectives. 

Without a doubt, this school year has been extremely difficult for teachers and educators. As we make our way back into the building, we’ll need to teach our students how to be students in schools once again. It’s going to take some time but will definitely be worth the challenge. In due time I hope to use some of the strategies my work colleagues use such as, involving students in the assessment process. Such as displaying a blank rubric on the screen and filling it up with students, asking students how they can successfully self-assess, and sharing what I’m specifically looking for, and so on. I can color code the rubric as well to keep it more organized. I’m both eager and anxious to return to the building, sooner or later that day will come. 

Something about homework comes off to be as very ‘summative’, but maybe it’s really just up to me what type of descriptor I’m adding to it. I could convince myself that anything is a formative assessment, realistically. Giving something as homework has the essence of saying “okay, show me what you’ve got”, and it’s really my own assessment or grading of that work that labels it as either formative or summative. If something is formative, I’m hesitant to put it in the grade book with a number attached since this work is by nature a work in progress toward a greater goal and a greater understanding. Summatives are demonstrations of learning that has happened and that has been internalized. It’s not that learning necessarily ends with summative assessments, but they act much more as markers in a student’s progress across the entirety of a class than formative assessments that really happen on a daily basis. For these reasons, I don’t like to assign homework unless I feel like I need to. If I am giving students something to do at home, it’s because we’ve either “done enough of it in class and now you’re showing me what you can do”, or less favorably because there’s just not time to do something in class. I’m not entirely sure what I’m getting at here, but summarily (or summatively hehehehe) I suppose I’m saying that giving grades for formative assessments that ultimately impact a final grade seems hypocritical to what formative assessments are supposed to be. 

I think especially given that I plan to have more creative projects that students have time to work on to demonstrate their learning and understanding of language and cultural contexts in the classroom, I feel good about that breakdown. I think this really helps keep the assessment portion less stressful, but at the same time I do kind of worry about only 20% of the grade being daily work and that not contributing to motivating factors to attend class or participate in classwork and homework. Teenagers are at a developmentally appropriate stage of not quite having mastered time management and self-control and self-motivation, especially when it comes to school work, so I do hesitate leaving the gradual learning process more up to them and grading so heavily on a final product that maybe they are not equipped to produce if they haven't been doing the practice work to get to that level. 

But I think that's the point of making classwork and homework engaging, so that students are getting in that practice by feeling excited and interested in coming to class and participating and practicing the activities in their own time. I've had an idea for a while that I'm not necessarily putting into practice with my student teaching which I feel kind of bummed about, but I would love to have students turn in a portfolio of their most interesting and/or meaningful work samples, and use that as a portion of the assessment at the end of a quarter or semester. But, I don't feel like I have been generating enough assignments for them to adequately choose from that would work well within a portfolio system, so that is something I'd like to work on developing and implementing more as I gain more experience as a teacher. 

This immense emphasis on importance of course informs all actions that relate to the assignment of something. All assignments should be accompanied with feedback, possibly advice, courses for improvement or increased cognizance, and the feeling that students can take the risk. Turning in anything is a risk since we have to judge the work, but it’s the relationship between teacher and student that allows that risk to be taken and for that feedback to be understood and meaningful. This allowance and safety of risk-taking has been one of my biggest takeaways. Obviously, all students are coming from someplace different and that attitudes towards the class, content, and even purpose of school are going to differ, but the environment of “it’s okay to try” needs to be felt by students as it is reflected in the assessments and grading practices of the teacher. The action must connect with philosophy.

At this time of this self-assessment, I’ve learned a lot about assessment itself. I’ve come to care about this topic within teaching with as much rigor and intent that I can offer to myself and to students without pouring over into the unhelpful plane of becoming too explicitly critical of school at school, where I need to be there for my students. My assessments, the grades I give, have the potential to have profound impact on students (not that it necessarily will, but as I’ve said innumerable times before, everyone’s a microcosm), so being clear, focused, purposeful, understanding, and considerate is vital.

In terms of the work I’ve done in this class, I’ve maybe been the most verbose in these reflections as I have in any other writing I’ve done during grad school (that I’ve turned in, at least). Not that word count or adjective-choice represent my effort, though I do wish to emphasize the amount of thought I’ve put into my own practice. It’s a lot. I think about this stuff all the time. I think I think about it because I think it’s important, that it’s important to think about it. Also, it’s honestly taxing to convey. On my course towards articulation of these things I often get caught up in the spiderweb of my own thoughts and get stuck for a while and tire myself as I attempt to loose myself. I don’t know what the spider is in this analogy, but I’m keeping the imagery. Overall, I've done the same earnest approaching of my goals that I've always attempted (actually far more now as I care about my students more than I could ever care about an abstract company). I always try, spiderwebs aside.

Since you could say I’m some sort of “fan” of the 1-4 proficiency grading system, I’ll use this for my own final self-grading. I could just as easily argue a 3 for myself as a 4 (however, I couldn’t be so as self-debasing as to attempt the 1 or 2 arguments, since empirically those grades would not hold weight). If the purpose of this class is to initiate a plethora of thought processes and consideration, then yes, I would give myself a 4. If part of the purpose is to attempt demonstrate these thoughts and care into ‘work products’ of some sort, then despite the lateness on a couple assignments (actually, I don’t even remember if I had turned in anything late in this class. The classwork blends together too much for me. Nonetheless, I don’t believe in marking down for lateness), then still a 4. If I argue a 3 for myself, it’d be on the basis of that I can always improve and then teacher betterment never ends, but I know this. I don’t need to mark myself down for something that I know. So, 4.

The final grade I propose for myself in this class is an B+. I have worked hard to learn, finish my work assignments on time, worked hard to obtain a good grade. All my learning reflects on my grade. I gave myself what is right. I feel that I had learned so much and able to used the skills that I had learned to practice with my students. I know that will make a change to myself and my students one day.