Episode 1 - Assessments

The host of the podcast, Spill It, introduces herself as Elizabeth B. and explains that the podcast aims to make education more accessible to everyone. She emphasizes the importance of education and how it impacts the world. Elizabeth, who is a teacher with four and a half years of experience, wants to simplify educational concepts for her listeners. In this episode, she focuses on the term "assessment" and breaks it down into two types: formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments are smaller, informal checks for understanding, such as questions with immediate feedback or assignments. Summative assessments, on the other hand, are more formal and are used to evaluate the effectiveness of a unit or class. They can include tests, projects, and quizzes. Elizabeth clarifies that assessments are not meant to punish or intimidate, but rather to gather data and improve teaching methods. She encourages feedback from her listeners and expresses her eagerness to learn from them. Th Hi everyone and welcome to Spill It's inaugural episode. I'll be your host, Elizabeth B, and I'm here to spill the tea about school. For those of you that aren't aware, which would be all of you since this is our first episode, Spill It is an educational podcast about education. My goal is to make education feel more accessible to everyone because when it comes down to it, the school realm is unavoidable. Education is something we've hopefully all experienced and it's something most people hope that generations to come will experience. The education of the youth of our future is an important area and it has a large impact on the world. You have a right to know and understand the things that are going to impact your world. My goal is to have the school world and all its secrets come to life. Please know as we continue on through our series that I myself, of course, am a teacher. I've got four and a half years of teaching under my belt, thank you very much, and I've taught a lot. I've taught grades 6 through 11 in two different states and I've done private and public school. I'm always going to do my best on this podcast to make the content more accessible. That's literally what my job is, to take something that's new to people and put it in ways they understand. This means that when I define things, I'm going to try and put it in a way that makes the most sense. I want you to remember, please remember, that teaching, like any other profession, differs from person to person. I'm going to explain things the way that I understand them and I might oversimplify as to not overwhelm you, the listeners. This isn't meant to be heavy, this is meant to be helpful. What I mean by this little disclaimer is not directed at my non-education people. I'm begging my lovely technical peers, please don't come at me for things I'm just trying to make understandable. However, please do correct me if I say something wrong. I, of course, am always going to reference my own education and things that I've heard and learned in my own experience. But I am very, very fallible and don't want to misinform my listeners. I am always down to learn. Now, the topic I want to cover for our first episode is, somehow both big and small, I want to cover a specific piece of lingo that carries a lot of weight and a lot of different meanings. And that is the term assessment. I'm going to take that in. Assessment. I want you to take a breath because assessment is a word that is thrown out and around quite a bit in schools. And it's because it's a great word. It encompasses a lot of things, but it's very, the use in the world of schools makes it a very confusing word. The word assessment truly just means that we, teachers, are trying to gauge the level of understanding. If I am assessing a child, I am checking where they're at. That's it. I'm just checking where they are at with a skill. The problem is, checking where a child is at changes in importance based on what we're checking them for. There are a lot of different types of assessments, and I want to talk you through them. To keep things very, very simple, well, as simple as I can make it, I'm going to talk about two basic types of assessment. We're going to talk about formative assessments and summative assessments. These categories are a prime example of why I think resources like my podcast are necessary. I, someone who spent four years at college to become an educator, I've taught in two different states a variety of, yeah, we've covered my credentials. I have heard many different definitions of what qualifies as a formative assessment, what qualifies as a summative assessment, and what counts as neither. This is totally fine. I am not saying that any of these things that I've heard are right or wrong. I just want to break them down into categories that I think, no matter where you're located in the U.S., most educators are going to know what you're talking about, and you would be able to follow along listening to them talk about it. So we're going to start with a formative assessment. The first thing I want you to put in the back of your brains when you hear this is that this isn't the type of assessment that's study for hours with flashcards the night before assessment. Formative assessments can be thought of as the smaller type of assessment. They're no less important, but we're going to categorize them as the smaller assessment. These are for checking your knowledge on the way to forming your full understanding of the topic. Formative, forming your understanding. Formative assessments in the classroom can generally look like one of two things. The first is something called a check for understanding. Checks for understanding are not considered assessments by everyone I've met, but I think they fall perfectly under the category, and I want to explain why. First and foremost, a check for understanding is very rarely something you'll see in the gradebook. These are exactly what they sound like. Sometimes there's a lot of information that we, the teachers, need to impart in a single class period, and we want to make sure that the students have understood what we've said before moving on. Checks for understanding are a quick question with immediate feedback that allows me as a teacher to know if the class is ready for me to move on. These checks are simple things like thumbs up, thumbs down. Do you think you could do this skill for a grade and get a good grade? Point one to five, one being low, five being high. How well do you think you understand this skill? It could be something like providing students with a practice problem and saying, go to the left if you think the answer is X and go to the right side of the room if you think the answer is Y. When a teacher references one of these, when they talk about a check for understanding, they're talking about a really quick snap gauge of the student standing at that moment. Checks for understanding are going to be informal because they're pretty socially influenced. Some kids will answer based on those around them. You're gauging everyone at once. They're going to be able to see. However, generally enough are willing to be honest for you to know whether or not you can move on or if you need to reteach. Checks for understanding are a great tool for day-to-day learning, but it is rare for you to see them referenced in formal grading. So that's one category of formative assessment. The other type of formative assessment are just plain old assignments. Assignments aren't given to you as a way for the teacher to sit on their butt and not have something to do. Assignments are given so that teachers can, as I said, gauge your understanding of the topic. You're going to learn a new skill in class, and when you're given an assignment to practice that skill, your teacher can then see how well you are forming your knowledge of that skill. Formative assessment, forming that knowledge. We get it. Assignments are much more formal types of formative assessments. Obviously, we see these in the gradebook more often, and some schools even put them in the gradebook under the title formative assessment. So we have assignments and checks for understanding. Formative assessments, those are the general categories that it's helpful for you to understand. They're quicker. They're more frequent skills checks with students, and they are not the one that tends to intimidate people. The other type of assessment is the one that people think of when they hear the word. Tests, projects, quizzes, these are all called summative assessments. Summative assessments, in my opinion, they often get a bad rap. They're thought to be punitive, that we give them just to punish kids who struggle or weren't paying attention, and this really isn't the case. I tell the kids all the time, I don't have the time to hold a grudge against you. I got too much to do. This isn't a way to punish you. The point of a summative assessment is to check the effectiveness of a unit or class. Just to clarify, this also isn't meant to punish teachers. It is just a tool to check to see if we did our jobs well, or maybe we did the job really, really well in every aspect of the unit but one. That's something we need to know. A lot of teaching is self-reflective. Summative assignments are used to know what might need to be retaught and what we can move on from. They help us collect useful data on our students' progress that allows us to plan accordingly. They are a tool, not a weapon. I want you guys to know that state testing, end-of-year exams, benchmark tests, they also fall under this category. These tests are just collecting data on a much larger scale. Just like teachers need to look for strengths and weaknesses, so do schools. The point in these assessments are that we can better ourselves so that the students we are teaching are getting the most well-rounded learning that they can. I know that was a little shorter, but we're a little more familiar with summative assessments. All right, assessments, I hope you feel like you've learned something today. It seems so silly to me to spend all this time talking about one word, but that one word carries so much weight and it can feel so intimidating, especially to parents. As we wrap up our first episode, or as I clean up my spill, so to speak, I want you to please take a minute and think about if there's anything you could share with me. Did I make assessments more confusing? Did I teach you something new? Do you disagree with my categorizations of what qualifies as what assessment? Please let me know. Like I said, a lot of teaching is self-reflection. Learning goes both ways, and I hope to learn as much from my listeners as they learn from me. Until next week, my friends. Tune in next Sunday for a new episode of Spill It. Elizabeth will cover frequently asked questions and common misconceptions about teaching with a guest star. Hope to see you there.