Going Meta – Week 10

A deep sigh… only a few more weeks left of Educ 471 and I am stoked about how these students receive feedback, respond to feedback, and provide feedback. We have been working on developing and selecting curricular competencies to be evaluated on. We spend class time discussing assessment and their assessment to ensure that we all have a shared understanding but also ensure that there are no surprises. They have a lot of say in their assessment and evaluation process as we had embedded it as part of our curriculum development in our curriculum development course. We’re thinking about our thinking. We’re going meta.

One conversation caught my attention… and yes, it was about assessment and evaluation. We are fast approaching the end of our course and it is of great importance to me and my students that we are clear about expectations and evaluation framework. One of the final assignments is called the SUMMATIVE JOURNAL ENTRY. We’ve been journalling each week through out the course and from our entries, which reflect what we have learned and thought, we would write a final journal entry to conclude the course and their big ideas from the course.

One student had their computer ‘destroyed’ during the course and lost all of their journal entries to date. This is devistating as I love listening to the 10 minutes of click-clacking during the class when we have a moment to reflect on our learning. This student’s intentin was to rewrite all the the journal entries lost becaused I had asked the students at the beginning of the course to hand in their draft journal entries along with their Summative Journal Entry. This student was going to comply but last class seemed overwhelmed by the task. I would be too.

The most interesting part of this conversation for me was that this Summative Journal Entry was the only document I was going to assess and evaluate. The draft journal entries was only for accountability. I know that this student lost their journal entries in their ‘destroyed’ computer and this person had to buy another one. Then, this student had full-intentions of rewriting them so that they could “comply to the rules,” which in hindsight made no sense when I was only going to mark the Summative Journal. I had to rethink about what I was doing.

Luckily, there was another student listening in to the conversation. Here comes student voice… this student offers a solution. Why not cite date, source, thought as part of the Summative Journal instead of handing in all 10-12 weeks of entries? Why not. Great idea. Not everyone in the class was click-clacking away during class and everyone has a different way of processing their thoughts and reflecting. This was a win-win solution. Remember (to self) we only evaluate what we value. It was the big ideas or “take aways” from the course that mattered to me, not the compliance of journal writing, even though this is an integral part of the assignment.

I love how this class gets me thinking about my thinking and I love how they are spending their time thinking about their thinking. There are parts of this course I would redo or improve on for the next time… no question. This is my first time teaching at SFU as a sessional and I appreciate the students’ insight on what works and doesn’t work. They have come a long way and I’m so proud of the work they are accomplishing. Students keep me humble. BTW: they did great on the third round of curricular competency development. #thumbsup