WWMS Assess and Achieve

The speaker discusses the Healthy Human Project, which allows students to choose how they want to be assessed. The majority of assessments in the school are traditional tests and quizzes, which focus on memorization rather than application of knowledge. The school acknowledges that students are under pressure and stress to succeed, so they try not to overburden them with extra work. The health class aims to teach students how to take care of their mental health and provide strategies for managing stress. The teacher is lenient with late assignments but still expects the work to be completed. The overall message is to prioritize mental health and find ways to cope with stress. Okay, so for our last slides here, we're talking about assessment and achievement. What I want to focus on mainly is really what's on this slide here. It's the Healthy Human Project that Joe had put together. Again, this was not something that I had seen in my time moving through this middle school. So to see it now, particularly with this group of students, I thought was really important. It gives the students that opportunity to kind of work with how they would like to be assessed. I mean, with this activity, there's really no wrong answer other than just not completing the assignment. I understand that Joe created this and this was like a relevant test score for the students rather than having a specific test on mental health and wellness in that subject or that unit for the health class. So there definitely was some wiggle room in terms of how this one kind of plays out in terms of how they were basically being assessed. However, through the semester and the quarter there, most of the assessments tended to be either quizzes, exams, tests. So not a lot of choice for the students in how they would like to be assessed in particular. The host teacher, this was mainly how he was assessing the students, tests, quizzes. But this Healthy Human project was at least the one assessment where students had a little bit more wiggle room. And again, there were very few really wrong answers other than just not completing the assignment on the whole. As far as assessment goes, that again points in the same direction of students falling back on just reciting information, being able to memorize facts, and then just regurgitate those facts back onto either a multiple choice or short answer questions. So not a ton of taking that information and then finding ways to apply it to situations or scenarios or how that's going to affect them later in life. Again, really just falling back on what they're used to, particularly for their core academic classes as well, which are revolving around memorization of facts and then being able to recite those facts when it comes to test time. Now, during one of the conversations that I had with Joe, he had spoken to me about a meeting that he had had with administrators as well as the principal there. And they acknowledged that the base of the students that they're working with are under a lot of pressure and under a lot of stress from just their families to succeed and do well in school, even at these early ages in middle school. So just in terms of the health classes, they're not pushing them to be super strenuous in how much work is being delivered to them, like for after school activities, like extra homework and assignments, since these students tend to be inundated with such extra classwork outside of the zone of school, whether they're going to after school activities that their parents are signing them up for, they don't want to add on additional stressors. So that's kind of how I think that they're viewing themselves as being able to support the students by pulling back when they can, giving them the information that they need in school, and supporting with homework when it's relevant and called for, but not just trying to assign and assess unnecessarily for these students who already seem to be under such intense stress. With that said, there is always the expectation that the work will be done, the students will be able to pass the class, be able to recite the information that they've learned. But again, I think that the school views, at least the health classes, I mean, it's important information, but I don't necessarily think that they want to take that class where usually a phys ed class would not be assigning additional work. I don't think they want to overburden them by adding in an extra class for most of these students. As far as students who are struggling in the class, if it's an issue like handing in homework on time or assignments on time, Joe, who was my host teacher, I found to be very lenient with that. He always allowed students to hand in work whenever they could. There usually was some sort of penalty associated with it, unless they had a legitimate excuse, but they were always able to hand things in. An assignment wouldn't just automatically be a zero just because it wasn't handed in on a particular day during the school day. I think that the overall message that was being conveyed to the students through this class, particularly with the healthy human unit, was just trying to give these students the tools to be able to take care of themselves, particularly with the stress that they're under from their families or the stress that they might just be putting on themselves. One, you have to take care of your mental health. You have to have strategies and ways to deal with that. For some of the students, it was listening to music, talking to friends, hanging out with friends, being around their families, and those were important for them. That in combination with what kind of physical activity, is it going to the gym, is it playing basketball with friends, is it playing cricket with friends, is it doing yoga, going for a walk, just finding strategies to take care of themselves so that when they're going through those stressful moments in life, it's not just a crushing weight over them, but they'll be able to deal with it and continue moving forward in life.