The descriptions in the tables of any standard-based curriculum are fantastic. They have already cross-mapped:
- Age
- Dimensions of Self
- Core Skills & 21st Century Skills
- Learning Outcomes
The individual outcomes and skills and their definitions are very clear. Teacher training, teaching practices and the overall (chosen) school philosophy can be extracted meaningfully from this. When implemented correctly, we will see the kind of holistic and experiential classroom engagements that we are working towards. The trade-off is in how “progress” is “recorded” and “presented/reported”.
The descriptions give teachers enough clarity to design activities and to engage learners meaningfully. At the end of the learning cycle, the teacher must report the “progress” of the learner in each of these areas. The best way to proceed from the descriptions in these tables to an accurate representation of the learners actual progress will have to be a well-organized paragraph or statement that “each” teacher would have to compose. Then, and only then, will we have a chance to look at progress in a learner’s skill-set.
The advantage of this is that, if teachers have strong writing skills, it will capture the nuances of each learner and the teacher can also include points that can help learners understand how to improve.
From a purely ideological stand-point, this kind of “assessment” is probably the kind of feedback that will help learners achieve the goals that they have set out to meet.
In reality, however:
- most teachers (currently) are not equipped with this kind of observation/recording skills.
- the teachers who have these skills will end up compromising on the quality of assessment. Eventually, they would write one or two very vague sentences so that they can meet the deadline for submitting progress cards for “all” the students that they are teaching. Our current estimate for this is a minimum of 10 mins per section that they would have to fill for a single student. Typically, a teacher would have to assess:
- progress in the topics/themes/subject competencies – this is a very complex section, requiring up to 30 mins per student
- progress in skills – if all references and observations are available before hand it would take about 10 mins per section.Table 5.2 lists 10 skills so that makes it about 100 minutes per student
- a short note to summarize the term/semester: this takes about 20 mins on average
The total comes to 150 minutes per student – 2 1/2 hours
Class teachers have to add an extra hour to make sure that all the sections are filled out correctly. So class teachers must put int 3 1/2 hoursGiven the current teacher/student ratio in schools, with 40 students per class and each teacher teaching about 4 classes, the teacher ends up having to prepare 160 report cards, where the total time would be 150mins x 160 = 24,000 mins = 400 hours
This is actually 50 full working days.
This also discounts the work that is needed to record and organize student work to support the statements that the teacher eventually ends up writing.
We have struggled with this in all the nine years of our teaching practice. The only way we could manage an honest assessment was to use pre-write paragraphs for each section, by achievement level (approaching, meeting, exceeding) and then use that as a template to fill in the report card. Even so – we needed close to 30 minutes per student. For a class of 30 students, that is 15 hours, so we could finish the assessments in 2 days. 1 week, when we taught 3 classes.
We think it is very important to look at these numbers as well. This is a physical limit that we will reach in order to implement this vision. So some of the trade-offs are
- A teacher only handles upto 50 students per year.
- We reduce the sections in the report card
- We accept “cut-paste” assessments (because that will happen when humans can’t meet a deadline but their survival is threatened)
This is really the only practical reason that we see why the current mark-based reports continue to work. It is only so that the system allows 1 teacher to handle 160 students a year. The economic forces that govern the profitability of this model and of course, the immense possibility for teachers to “finish corrections” in a sustainable amount of time by using 2 digit numbers is something that we must consider.
So, how do we make holistic assessment and reporting practical. Rubrican is our solution to this problem.