Classrooms as PLCs: Aligning Assessment with Professional Standards to Transform the Classroom
By Jenessa Gerber, Social Studies
Being both a student and practitioner of history for the last six years has been the most formative professional development of my career, and the most impactful on my philosophy of assessment in the classroom. Throughout graduate school, my students’ learning experience has increasingly mirrored my own by focusing on engagement in the process of doing historical work, and by holding them to professional standards in the field. Since I began aligning my students’ assessments with the same professional standards to which I have been held, the classroom has become a place of process-oriented learning and product-oriented assessment. The goal of my course, as is the goal of professional historians, is to make students conscientious of process – including critical reading, synthesis, and collaboration – and empowered by the production of original work. Much like a professional learning community, students learn to be better young historians together. Assessment happens at the point where engagement in a process culminates in a product that has enduring meaning for the student, and using professional standards of assessment as a measure of authenticity makes that possible.
However, one of the most significant challenges I face in my role as a history teacher is that nearly all of my students have no idea what historians do professionally. Consequently, they have little idea how historical skills are professionally valuable and transferrable, or essential to healthy citizenship. Most immediately for their instruction, it means they enter my classroom lacking an accurate sense of learning outcomes, or for the types of tasks, processes, and assessments that ought to be expected of one who is practicing the craft. Generally, they expect to be assessed on their accumulation of content. Therefore, before I can teach and assess my students’ learning in history, I first need to reorient my students’ learning towards professionally aligned objectives. I recognize that few of my students will actually pursue history professionally, so there is also the work of demonstrating the enduring qualities to their new learning objectives, such the ability to recognize bias, synthesize information, and pursue meaningful inquiries about the past by gathering quality evidence. Essentially, this requires a cultural shift from asking students, “What do you know?” towards “What can you do?”
Taking the time to reorient our students’ learning objectives and assessments towards professional standards – albeit, modified and differentiated for their learning capacities and interests – not only authenticates their experiences, but is also the most transformative way to make a classroom active, collaborative, and inquiry-driven. If we assess our students on what they can do (or by what historians, doctors, lawyers, or analysts, etc., can do), then our classrooms become labs, courtrooms, or startup boardroom meetings. In my field, historians spend a bit of their professional time reading history books, mainly for the purpose of collaborating with their colleagues, and a vast majority of it making, or doing, history. So in the classroom, students do read a bit about the past, but spend most of their time engaged in the process of examining source evidence for meaning, context, and reliability. Likewise, historians are assessed by their colleagues and mentors on the accuracy, credibility, organization, and persuasion of their research-based claims. So in the classroom my students are assessed by the exact same standards. Of course, when we assess using professional standards the actual question we ask our students is, “What can you do with what you know?” Students, however, need only basic factual foundations to prepare for engagement in historical thinking and creating, which, in turn, deepens their content knowledge far beyond what more traditional assessment standards require. Surely as professionals must develop factual expertise in their field in order to create, students do need content foundations. While these content foundations also need assessing, those become assessments for the purpose of measuring preparedness for engagement and collaboration, rather than an assessment of growth towards, and achievement of, the course learning objectives. If I failed to propel them beyond an assessment of historical literacy (do you know your historical facts?), towards an assessment of what they can create with those facts (can you craft and refute a historical argument?) then I haven’t suggested much of a purpose for those facts, or provided a compelling purpose for their learning.
A realignment of history classrooms with professional skills is not free of controversy. After all, one goal of public education is to provide our citizens a common understanding of, and identity within, the world. But, when classrooms become spaces of doing rather than knowing, students, too, engage with issues of identity, civic responsibility, and values. Ultimately, as their professional mentor, I have to negotiate my dual roles as both a historian and public school teacher, and remain in control of quality, balanced resources to pursue meaningful, and sometimes controversial, inquiries. No matter what our field, authentic assessment transforms teachers into curators and mentors of the learning process, and makes us more conscientious of our own choices when it comes to curriculum. Our students, in turn, are transformed into mentees and members of a professional learning community, collaborating to produce evidence of enduring and valuable skills.
However, one of the most significant challenges I face in my role as a history teacher is that nearly all of my students have no idea what historians do professionally. Consequently, they have little idea how historical skills are professionally valuable and transferrable, or essential to healthy citizenship. Most immediately for their instruction, it means they enter my classroom lacking an accurate sense of learning outcomes, or for the types of tasks, processes, and assessments that ought to be expected of one who is practicing the craft. Generally, they expect to be assessed on their accumulation of content. Therefore, before I can teach and assess my students’ learning in history, I first need to reorient my students’ learning towards professionally aligned objectives. I recognize that few of my students will actually pursue history professionally, so there is also the work of demonstrating the enduring qualities to their new learning objectives, such the ability to recognize bias, synthesize information, and pursue meaningful inquiries about the past by gathering quality evidence. Essentially, this requires a cultural shift from asking students, “What do you know?” towards “What can you do?”
Taking the time to reorient our students’ learning objectives and assessments towards professional standards – albeit, modified and differentiated for their learning capacities and interests – not only authenticates their experiences, but is also the most transformative way to make a classroom active, collaborative, and inquiry-driven. If we assess our students on what they can do (or by what historians, doctors, lawyers, or analysts, etc., can do), then our classrooms become labs, courtrooms, or startup boardroom meetings. In my field, historians spend a bit of their professional time reading history books, mainly for the purpose of collaborating with their colleagues, and a vast majority of it making, or doing, history. So in the classroom, students do read a bit about the past, but spend most of their time engaged in the process of examining source evidence for meaning, context, and reliability. Likewise, historians are assessed by their colleagues and mentors on the accuracy, credibility, organization, and persuasion of their research-based claims. So in the classroom my students are assessed by the exact same standards. Of course, when we assess using professional standards the actual question we ask our students is, “What can you do with what you know?” Students, however, need only basic factual foundations to prepare for engagement in historical thinking and creating, which, in turn, deepens their content knowledge far beyond what more traditional assessment standards require. Surely as professionals must develop factual expertise in their field in order to create, students do need content foundations. While these content foundations also need assessing, those become assessments for the purpose of measuring preparedness for engagement and collaboration, rather than an assessment of growth towards, and achievement of, the course learning objectives. If I failed to propel them beyond an assessment of historical literacy (do you know your historical facts?), towards an assessment of what they can create with those facts (can you craft and refute a historical argument?) then I haven’t suggested much of a purpose for those facts, or provided a compelling purpose for their learning.
A realignment of history classrooms with professional skills is not free of controversy. After all, one goal of public education is to provide our citizens a common understanding of, and identity within, the world. But, when classrooms become spaces of doing rather than knowing, students, too, engage with issues of identity, civic responsibility, and values. Ultimately, as their professional mentor, I have to negotiate my dual roles as both a historian and public school teacher, and remain in control of quality, balanced resources to pursue meaningful, and sometimes controversial, inquiries. No matter what our field, authentic assessment transforms teachers into curators and mentors of the learning process, and makes us more conscientious of our own choices when it comes to curriculum. Our students, in turn, are transformed into mentees and members of a professional learning community, collaborating to produce evidence of enduring and valuable skills.