When thinking about assessing, I often think about how I wish to create engaging formative assessments that include strategies that include the students and their talents. I also, as I most often do, can connect my personal choice for assessment strategy directly to my personal experience with theatre. Hot seating is a strategy I have been aware of for a long time, given its use in theatre, ensuring actors are aware of different aspects of their character. Translating this same idea, I could create an immense amount of roleplay and character understanding with my students. When reading a book, whether it be a chapter book or a one-off story, students can be put into roles to answer a variety of questions about the character they are embodying. For instance, in the book Charlotte’s Web, it is imperative to know that Wilbur is a pig. A student could be given this character and asked about what kind of activities they (the character) would engage in on a day-to-day basis (Could be as simple as rolling in the mud or eating slop) and this gives the instructor the knowledge that the students understood that Wilbur was a pig. This is a very bare-bones example, but it represents how you can test your class retention of literacy and express the importance of character traits.
In my classroom, I would love to engage with students in a way that shows off their creativity and passion for a story. I hope that when selecting a story, I can select something with a wide berth of characters that students could have fun answering for. Not only does this strengthen a student’s ability to retain the information in the book, but it has cross-curricular value as well. Thinking back to the book Melissa by Alex Gino, I think about how they read the novel Charlotte’s Web and then transitioned the story into a drama work that the students would eventually perform for peers and parents. What a fantastic idea! Charlotte’s Web is such a rich story with a diverse cast of characters that could be represented by students with different skill sets. I love this.
Discussing how to engage with this concept through the K-12 Student Reporting Policy we could use the concept of the proficiency scale to pinpoint where students are in their retention of narrative and character. An extending student might give an incredibly detailed look at their character with included visual representation, whereas a proficient student should be able to answer any questions about their character. A developing student might be able to give a few examples, and an emerging may struggle to produce any. Using this information, it would be easy to see which students may need more assistance in literacy and which students are taking the unit or lesson in question in stride. While summative assessment only occurs intermittently, formative assessment should take place consistently and should include a variety of different strategies to ensure student engagement. This strategy should be used closer to the end of a unit just to gauge what pieces of instruction worked well and what areas need to be revisited before concluding.
A report card of a student who engaged in this fictional unit of Charlotte’s Web might have a comment that would appear like this
Stanley: Proficient
Stanley was able to create meaningful connections to our novel study of Charlotte’s Web and did a fantastic job when asked to discuss the character traits of Templeton the rat. Stanley worked well in his assigned group for our recreation of specific scenes and was able to relay the information in the book quite well. Keep up the good work, Stanley!