Episode 076: Adventures in Reimagining Assessment

Thank you, loyal listeners, for joining us each week! You may have noticed that there was no episode in the queue last week. Never fear; we have no intention of giving up on the podcast! But with some changes to responsibilities for two of us this year, we are having a harder and harder time getting all three of us into the studio together to record a weekly episode. So we are planning to shift to an every-other-week schedule for the foreseeable future. We hope you’ll continue to join us for each new episode when they drop. We love recording and sharing our conversations with you all, and if our schedules ever line up better again, perhaps we’ll go back to every week–who knows? :-)

This week’s episode came from a swirl of several convergent streams–a quote from a book about assessment that Abby read, a question from a listener (thanks, Jess!) about assessment practices prompted by something she read on the CACE blog, and challenges we have faced in our own practices regarding assessment. With this kind of confluence, we felt a tug to think together around the topic of assessment, and share some of our experiences and adventures in reimagining what assessment is, and what it is for, and how we try to assess our students’ learning. It’s a ranging, rambling conversation, but we hope you’ll be encouraged and inspired to think through your own assessment practices by listening in.

• Here is the article from the CACE blog mentioned by our listener, Jess. We highly recommend you read it! Its title raises the key question it seeks to answer: “What If Assessment Was a Gift?” You can read it here: https://cace.org/what-if-assessment-was-a-gift/ 
• In this episode, we also discuss an article by Elaine Brouwer entitled “Assessment For Learning: A Blessing for Our Students,” which is available in this issue of Christian Educators Journal: https://www.cejonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/47-2.pdf 
• In the episode, Abby mentions an idea for engaging students in reflection even right before taking a test as a way of building community and reducing anxiety. The idea was in a video by math educator Howie Hua. You can view that video on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/howie_hua/status/1570194591227473921