The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

Assessment. It is a word that elicits strange emotions from within. One that causes that sinking feeling to build in the pit of one’s abdominal cavity. It has probably led to many a strong person’s ultimate demise, or at least a loss of their lunch. Some toil for hours upon hours to prepare. Others wish they had toiled hours upon hours to prepare. And yet, the fluttering nerves are the same the second you sit in that seat and know that you cannot escape until you are finished.

As you can tell, I am not a huge fan nor am I a huge proponent of assessments. That is to say, I WAS not a huge fan. Past tense. It is one of the things that I, perhaps, had struggled the most with when I first joined the ranks of Teach For America and YES Prep.

There is the academic part of me that values the experiences that I can provide my students with well over the time-honored skills of bubbling in scantrons correctly. I am a scientist. I would prefer that my students know how to use a scalpel properly or focus a microscope or run their own independent research project. Why would I want science to become a content class? It’s not. That’s only one-third of the story. It should be a series of processes and skills. A passion nurtured. A course of discovery.

Then, of course, there are the personal experiences I’ve had with assessments in the past. As a sufferer of extreme test anxiety, I used to hate finals and standardized testing. Anything else that required me to carry around sixteen, well-sharpened number two pencils (in case any accident should befall the other fifteen during the course of examination, naturally). In college, I used to dread them so much that I would have nightmares of not having enough blue books or enough time. I started carrying around a timer. A backup in case the other failed. I became a regular at the university bookstore every week, hoarding up blue books as if they were going out of style. In one rare instance, I fainted before my organic chemistry final. This made me a legend, but certainly not in the way I wanted to be remembered. It made me extremely bitter that due to my own ambitions, I found myself spending hours upon hours studying for LSATs and MCATs and GREs and GMATs, and sitting for all of them, hating every minute. Why would I want to impart the same experience to my students?

You can imagine my levels of extreme discomfort when I first started teaching. I have to turn in an excel spreadsheet of student scores? Exit tickets? Entrance tickets? Formative assessments? Unit assessments? Final exams? It was almost too much. What if I just wanted my students to live in this lovely, scientific world where we all just floated through the material and loved it and lived it?

That lasted all of three months. I’d been avoiding the snazzy tracker that was provided to me, on which I was supposed to track student achievement in a manner more obsessive than stock brokers following fluctuations on Wall Street. And then I got the results of my first system-wide assessment. Not first, not last, not good enough.

After reflecting upon the dilemma I was in, I came to the realization that, despite this extreme dislike of assessments, they had helped me to learn, pushed me to do better, refined me into the person I am today. Did I want my students to be as obsessive as I was in trying to hit the highest MCAT score possible? Did I want them to fill blue books as maniacally as I did? Of course. Why wouldn’t I want that for them? I needed to embrace assessments, or fail. And this time, it wouldn’t be my sinking ship, in the singular form. It would be a disaster for OUR sinking ship. All 120 of us.

I started assessing my students on everything. They took a quick assessment when they came into class. They took a quick assessment in the middle of class. They took a quick assessment as they left class. Lab days were carefully constructed checkpoints garnering bizarre documentation of my students’ progress, with annotations and feedback like, “Great usage of the scalpel. Your y-incision should have been a little deeper. Next time try to score through more of the fascia.” And I realized that my kids needed this feedback. Thrived on this feedback. Craved this feedback. And as I assessed more frequently in class, students started to become more relaxed about the whole thing. And more motivated. Motivated enough to hit and exceed our goal again and again and again.

Assessments have turned my teaching upside-down and around. And our focus on assessment is what I consider the most crucial factor in our students’ success. I currently employ no less than eleven different trackers on my students’ progress. I have become an excel goddess. I love clicker systems. I love rubrics, especially for lab reports. I love giving kids feedback on everything from lab safety to cleaning up afterwards. And when the YES announced that the focus of our craft this year would be none other than assessment, I almost cheered.

Yes, there are still things that I have yet to reconcile between assessments and myself. But as for now, I have become a strong supporter. A believer. A reformed person. And, well, at least I’ve also picked up some excel tricks in the process.