Assessing Learning: The Missing Piece in Instruction?
The first thing I noticed was that librarians are fighting the same fight as classroom educators. "School library media specialists from all levels often gather at district meetings to share their war stories. You'll hear the following concern from elementary folk, "We have to teach the same skills over and over again because the students just don't remember them." At the same time, the middle school professionals chime in, "Whatever you teach the students at the elementary level, they still can't use the library when they come up to us!" Then the school library media specialists in the high schools add their concerns by stating, "What are you folks teaching the students in the lower schools? The students are pretty clueless when we get them."" I don't know how many times this conversation has come up over basic classroom knowledge and skills as well.
Our school has recently made the shift to become Professional Learning Community and I can tell a difference with changing our focus from teaching to learning as the article suggests. Changing the focus requires a change in assessment and the way we determine when learning is taking place. Having the background of working towards that change in my classroom will help me sustain the change and transfer it to the library setting.
Chapter 13
I found it interesting that districts put so much emphasis on quantitative data, obviously there is a need for it, but it isn't the only thing to look at. "Collections may meet an arbitrary numerical count but may be out of date, in poor condition, or of no value to the current curriculum" (204). I think it is important to have plenty of books and resources available, but they have to be able to meet the needs of students. "For instance, circulation statistics reveal only what materials have moved out of the media center. They do not tell the amount of use or, for that matter, whether it was any use at all" (202).
Obviously, we need to find an additional way to show our worth. "Assessing the contribution to the education of students is the key to the survival of the position of the school library media specialist" (211). While this data may be more difficult to collect, it is more important than just counting books or circulation. Yes, we need all the data, but we need to be able to look at it and determine how valuable it is to identify whether or not students are learning.
So, you really can see a difference in the move to PLCs? How does making the change in assessment correlate to the need for success on the MAP, for example?
ReplyDeleteDid the Harada and Yoshina article give you any ideas about how to "determine how valuable" library teaching is?
I definitely see a change in the collaboration between teachers of the same grade level. We have been looking at test data and evaluating what is being learned and actually matching it to what we are testing. I can't say that I have seen a huge change in MAP (yet). We did improve during our 2nd year, I guess we'll see when the 3rd year data comes out. We have also had a great change in culture due to a change in pricipals.
ReplyDeleteI think that as educators, we are constantly assessing students informally. From the article, I would say a key is to provide a rubric or checklist to assess learning. It allows the students to see what is being graded and what the expectations are.