Self Assessment at CFL

As the first term this year drew to a close and most schools were busy conducting examinations – many of them squeezing in two exams a day to make up for the unexpected loss of working days, we at Centre for Learning, Hyderabad, got down to our almost week-long exercise of self-assessments with the children. Almost a week spent by the children (mostly 10 years and above) and teachers huddled in a room just talking can seem to an outsider as a gross waste of time, when there is so much of the “syllabus” still to be covered, and so much time has already been lost due to various bandhs. But these exercises remind me, as they always have time and again, how amazingly self-reflective and honestly self-critical children can be when we repose faith in them.Not just that, they are also capable of providing the teacher some insightful feedback and criticism.
The assessment exercise usually starts with one of the teachers introducing the children to the exercise we were doing. For the benefit of the newer children, she gives a few broad guidelines for looking back at the term – some of the key aspects that are suggested for each academic subject are understanding of concepts, coverage, interest, and confidence level in the particular area, effort, and feeddback on the respective teachers. In addition, there are some overall aspects like learnings that were personally important/exciting, behaviour, attitude, and level of responsibility shown. They are of course free to say anything else that they wish to about the term they just completed. Children are reminded that they are to measure their achievements against their own efforts and not compare themselves with others. After the initial and minimal introduction to the exercise, it is left open to the children to start off, in no particular order but leaving it to them to decide when each of them would like to take the turn to speak. Usually, children who have been longer with the Centre and have done this exercise a few times in the past, start off, as they know that they can speak their mind here without being judged. The newer children, with a little time and when they see the others speaking candidly, open up, if not the first time, very often, after a few sessions like this. Engaging with children to look at their own work and attitudes is a continous process through the daily routine. However, a milestone activity like this affords a different kind of space in two ways. One, since it is not related to an immediate task, or a particular behaviour that the learner has been involved in, there is a little more objectivity and a lesser need to be defensive. Secondly, as it is a collective exercise, seeing others look at themselves, makes children feel more secure in doing it themselves, and also helps them see that failure and weaknesses, are acceptable and not shameful to admit.

In the group of 8-12 year olds, Radhika who is 9, turning the pages of her English notes, felt, spellings was one area that she needed to work on. One 8 year-old felt he needed more practice in division. Giving their criticism on the teachers, a 9 year old said, “Although your handwriting on the board has improved, your writing in the books is still too difficult for me to understand,” – (the ‘still’ was because she had told me not to use running handwriting in the last couple of assessment sessions too!). And as another 10 year-old said, “Sometimes when you are angry with one of us, you also tend to show that anger with others”. Both these criticisms I had to accept as true, when I thought about them.
Anthony, a 15 year-old, who has been in and out of the Centre a few times, talked of how on the one side, he really wanted to study and would resolve to do his work at home, and how once he reached home, he would get totally overwhelmed by the urge to watch TV, or to go out with his friends and then would come back very late. Talking about his significant learnings in the term, he mentions the visit to the cancer hospital and says, “I know all the bad effects of smoking, but I still somehow cannot stop smoking totally”. We talk about his problem with TV and friends and how we could together overcome it and think of a few ideas that we would try out – including his coming to a teacher’s home to do an hour of study time with her.
Clara, a 13 year-old, feels she hasn’t made any progress at all this term. With stark honesty, she admits that sometimes she just gets very bored with most of the academic subjects and then the quality of her work slips. When asked what interests her, she mentions dance and embroidery.
As we go along, we came to know that Arun feels his interest in math has gone up this term, but still doesn’t feel very confident, he also thinks he gets into fights and scuffles much less now compared to last year, Navya is satisfied with her progress and thinks she has put in her best efforts. She loved her dance and singing, Rajesh and Suresh enjoyed compering for the Independence Day and enjoyed dancing on the stage for the first time in their lives.
At the end of the sessions, we not only had an idea of how the children felt about their progress in academics, but also about what excited them, what kept them from doing their best, situations at home, their interests, and what they thought about their attitudes.
Examinations are useful tools of assessment. If designed well, they do help to evaluate a learner’s understanding and to some extent application of their knowledge. However, they still can only throw light on WHAT the learner doesn’t know. They are limited in scope in answering the question, WHY has the learner been unable to learn what is expected in the examination, and treat the learner as a black box, in the sense that it just measures the output (read: performance of the learner) with respect to the input that she has got in the classroom in a particular period. Self-assessments, on the other hand, provide insights to the teacher into the learner as a person, her motivations, interests, what is personally meaningful to the learner and the different persona within that person and also help the learner become more self aware, which in itself is a valuable end.
For an exercise like this to be truly meaningful in an educational space, it demands that the role of teaching itself moves radically – from treating it as a job of efficient delivery of a present syllabus to that of a sensitive, caring, critical thinking, dialectic engagement with learners – from a 9 to 5 job to that of an act of love. Otherwise, an Anthony’s situation can be quickly dismissed as one of individual irresponsibility and utter waywardness instead of seeing him as a product of his circumstances and context, and also seeing that side of him attempting to overcome his situation, weak, but still alive and trying! Clara’s frankness in admitting to boredom in most of academics can easily be dismissed as sheer indolence (which is a possibility but not a certainty!), without raising deeper questions on the epistemic skewedness of what we deem as important knowledge – marginalizing and devaluing crafts and almost glamourizing the intellectual.
For an educational space that genuinely believes that a learner-teacher relationship can be democratic and is seriously committed to helping learners become self-motivated and independent learners, self assessment is not only a very important evaluation exercise, but is, in itself a direct and important learning activity towards the achievement of curricular aims.
As we bade goodbye to the children and prepared to leave for the holidays, I wondered if Anthony would survive the battles inside himself and still come back after the holidays … and wondered what to do with this girl named Clara… or rather what can we do that makes sense to her too! But the worry about the incomplete syllabus bothered me too…
(Names of the children have been changed to protect their identities)

Why do we ask why

This article was published in Teacher Plus and is available here
http://www.teacherplus.org/2009/july-2009/why-do-we-ask-why
In teaching and learning, questions are a regularly used tool… Teachers use ‘Why’ questions with children as young as 5 years. But what do we want to teach the children through these questions?
In most classrooms today, children are given the answers to standard questions and are made to learn (read memorise) the answer. For a question like ‘Why do we have a bath every day?”, the teacher might give children the answer , ‘We have a bath to keep ourselves clean and tidy and stay healthy’. The child passively accepts and memorises this and reproduces it when asked, either orally or in writing. Now for this child an answer that says, ‘We have a bath to stay fresh’ is not valid because it has not been handed down from the teacher – the authority for knowledge. So one has killed an opportunity for the child to think on her own and decide, on the merit of what is said whether the response is valid or not. Worse still we are conveying to the child that there is just one valid reason for having a bath and that any other reason cannot exist or is unacceptable.
Questions like why we have a bath daily don’t have one right answer; of course any answer also may not be right. But there can be many reasons for one to have a bath. By giving a standard answer to the child to memorise; at best the child is learning a few spellings. The child is also learning that only what the teacher gives is right, and there is only one correct answer to a question and that they can’t with the knowledge they have express their own ideas – they need to depend on the teacher to hand them the right answer. Or that there may be many reasons, but in school this is what ought to be said/written. Is this what we want the child to learn?
Encouraging children to think and write their own answers expands the learning possibilities. For one, they are thinking on their own, rather than passively expecting an adult to give them THE ONE RIGHT ANSWER. Then they are expressing on their own, which means that they are learning to use their vocabulary and their knowledge of sentence construction to make meaning and give expression. What can be more exciting for a learner than to know that she is able to make use of what she has learnt!! And what is written is HER OWN CREATION – it helps the child believe in her ability to think, reason and use her knowledge to give expression to her idea. That is a very important learning. Even a spelling like ‘stadi’ (for study) – which is so obviously wrong, when looked at carefully might actually suggest progress for a child who has just started learning the sounds of letters, because ‘stadi’ is a perfectly legitimate phonic construction! The child has understood the phonic logic, now she only has to learn that the English language has its idiosyncrasies.
Responses from children can give a rich insight into their thinking worlds to the teacher. These responses can become the starting point for a discussion on the topic. Listening to answers from others and reasoning about their validity allows the child to think beyond her initial answer and broadens her own understanding of the concept/issue. After the discussion, the teacher can now ask the children to rewrite their answers. This kind of a participative exercise enriches learning.
Learning to think for oneself, learning to give expression to one’s own idea and appreciating that there can be many possible valid responses to a given question are more valuable learning objectives than presenting well-memorised, perfect-looking sentences.

A review of 'Teacher' by Sylvia Ashton Warner

This article was pubished in Teacher Plus, and is available here http://www.teacherplus.org/2008/september-2008/where-the-child-is-the-resource


Teacher is an autobiographical account by Sylvia Ashton Warner about her teaching experience of over 20 years – between 1938 and 1954. It is relevant to note her own background as a child and later, to appreciate the ideas that she proposes as a part of the book. She was born into a family of nine children. Her father was crippled with arthritis and so the family was dependent on the mother, a teacher, who taught in remote rural schools to make a living. She was often at odds with the educational authorities. Warner’s accounts seem to suggest that she had a childhood with not many friends, and not a very pleasant schooling experience. Her siblings and the natural world around seem to be the sources of her interaction. Her work which largely reflects a fantasy world and highly romanticised language perhaps come out of this time spent alone with nature.
Ms. Warner was not a teacher by choice. She wanted to become an artist or a writer and felt teaching would limit her creative aspirations. She took to teaching to earn a living.
The book, Teacher, was published in 1963 many years after she retired as a teacher. The book captures her experience in teaching Maori children in State- run schools in New Zealand. It’s a book about an unorthodox teaching effort, written in a rather unorthodox style as a ‘write it as it comes’ narrative, presenting her ideas and approach to teaching interspersed with classroom conversations and other tidbits. Embedded in the often sentimental and romanticised narrative are some very powerful ideas of the author.
Key vocabulary
The key concept in the book is ‘organic teaching’. Warner believes that children’s natural energies and urges should form the source of pedagogy. She contends that externally prepared and induced efforts stunt the child’s creativity and can often be alienating and uninteresting to the child.
Warner’s attempts at evolving an unconventional pedagogy was a response to what she saw as ‘lifeless’ and uninteresting content and methods in use at the time.. She proposes that the child’s imagination and the ‘inner world’ should form the basis for building a child’s language and vocabulary. She sees the mind of a 5 year old as a ‘Volcano with two vents, one of destructiveness and one of creativity’. The more the child is allowed to use the creative vent, the less destructive the child will get. Dance, music and art find an important place in this approach. There is a strong Freudian influence in her proposition that the key vocabulary of a child is around two key instincts – Fear and Sex.
Warner’s ideas force one to stand up and look at the creative energies that a child brings to the educational space and the rich potential that these have – It reminds one of the Fukaokian concept of ‘do nothing’ farming – the power of nature and natural forces for creation. But, can this approach be readily applied in our own contexts.
Warner worked with a Maori tribe, which lived in their own villages with a distinctive culture. From this book and other accounts, the habitations and the school itself was located amidst rich and beautiful natural surroundings.In a way, the settings were much more natural than what is available as an environment to modern school children especially in India. So, the big question is how natural is natural? Can we, despite the setting, carry the romantic notion that all energy that a child exhibits is ‘natural’ and ‘organic’?
Or is there, because of the situation we are in, a need for more external inputs to correct and counter these influences? If societal influences are conservative, highly casteist, gender-biased, is there no need for using external means, through consciously designed content and use of symbolism to let children question these?
Natural farming is possible when the land still has the capacity to be regenerative, and there is the necessary flora and fauna to keep the natural processes active. If modernity has abused land with repeated use of chemicals and the ecology around has been destroyed to eliminate the local flora and fauna can we really leave the repair to nature? Or are some minimal interventions needed?
Playing the role of a teacher
Starting off reluctantly, she goes on to be a very intensely involved and empathetic teacher who goes beyond the classroom to understand the culture and the ethos of the children’s lives. Her knowledge of a child’s inner world, their milieu, culture and living suggests a teacher’s work is mostly out of the classroom. In the classroom, the teacher brings all this understanding to facilitate the child to channelise her creativity.
However, what is of concern is the kind of social vision that is reflected in her book for the Maori people. It seems from the book, that she is merely helping them transition from their culture to the ‘mainstream’ dominant European cultural paradigm. There seems to be no vision of what the role of education is for the children when the community is faced with the growing influence of a largely western conception of modernity. Is it just to let the Maori children make a painless smooth transition into this way of life – as the author seems to suggest? It makes one wonder if all of this is just to have a vibrant, culturally distinct and rich social group transition to and conform and fit into a homogenous social order that is largely a western definition? Her view that the ‘browns and the whites’ can never mix – is rather disturbing. Perhaps the book does not allow one to come to any conclusion on her views on the political and social implications of education but what comes out as her vision of the kind of social order that education should attempt to build, from the accounts in the book, are very narrow and limited.
Conclusion
The book, without actually building a theoretical frame or even referring to any, very powerfully speaks for constructivism. Especially, in language learning. It makes one put down all the charts, worksheets aside for a moment and look at the child, her energies, interests, excitements and remind oneself how important, rich and valuable resource these can be.
Except for the tinge of sentimentality and the sometimes-desultory organisation the book is a worthwhile read for teachers and an interesting peek into the wonderful life of Maori children.
And finally, for a person who is a reluctant teacher and who is apprehensive about this forced career choice coming in the way of her more desired creative pursuits, teaching only enriched Warner’s equally celebrated literary and creative work. This should go towards removing the rather prosaic image of teaching as a routine, unimaginative profession.
Reference
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/ashtonwarner.html