Authentic Assessment

Widi Sumaryano
Lutheran Social Services,
West Springfield, MA

After graduating from Sanata Dharma Teacher Training College, I taught ESL in Indochinese refugee camps in Indonesia and Thailand. In the Indochinese refugee training programs, teachers from many cultural backgrounds teach classes of refugee students to promote the refugee’s initial resettlement and self-sufficiency in the United States. Teachers work with refugee students in the areas of English language, cultural orientation, work orientation and preparation for American secondary schools. There are intensive pre-service and on-going in-service teacher trainings to promote teacher independence, developing a teacher’s ability to make informed choices about teaching.

Six years later, upon coming to the U.S., I got a part-time teaching job with Lutheran Social Services. I was the only teacher and was assigned to revive the dormant ESL program for refugees from the former U.S.S.R. The director told me, “This is your class list and the address of the church where the classroom is.” I called my friends to ask if they knew anything about Russian culture. With a few hints from them I met my students the next day. It was quite challenging to have to work alone with minimal guidelines, no available pre-service nor in-service trainings at all.

I was able to manage the program, however, then we got a grant that incorporated employment services and ESL. The funder mandated that we put more emphasis on employment-oriented ESL. When we hired more teachers, I was assigned to be the ESL coordinator. At first, I did not feel comfortable doing it because I thought that every teacher must already “know” how to teach. I did not want to tell other teachers what to do. I did not even want to check what they were doing. I assumed all teachers could function without supports such as orientation, pre-service/in-service trainings as I had done in the U.S.

However there was a high turnover in my program. I felt really sorry for a few teachers who got burned-out and left my program. I felt terribly guilty for not being able to help them in dealing with their challenges. Since then I have been encouraging my colleagues to attend conferences and workshops through SABES, MATSOL and other professional affiliations. After attending workshops and conferences, we feel energized to apply some new teaching activities that we have learned. I became more enthusiastic and a little bit more creative in my planning and teaching, but it did not stay long. A few months later things got “mundane”. I became the “dead wood” teacher, the one that always did things that I was familiar with, easy preparation or no preparation at all, since I already had the materials and handouts I created last class. So I basically did things based on what I had, what I liked, and what I knew worked. Everything started from “I”. Nobody really supervised me, told me whether I did things effectively or not. The feedback that I got was only from my students. They did not say anything directly, but I occasionally could see from their facial expressions when they were not satisfied with the lesson for the day.

Unfortunately, that simple feedback did not give me enough clues of what they wanted or what to do next. Some students channeled their feedback indirectly through other staff members. Unfortunately often times other staff members used the feedback as an instrument to criticize the ESL teachers.

Then I attended a mini-course on Authentic Assessment facilitated by Lindy Whiton from SABES. This course gave me a broader view about evaluation, assessment, feedback, and program development. The group was small and participants were enthusiastic enough to share what they were doing and had developed. Guest speakers/facilitators came from various programs. Among the workshops I attended was one about “Learner’s Logs,” facilitated by Caroline Gear from International Language Institute of Massachusetts, Inc.. We explored all different kinds of assessment tools from intake and on-going to mid/post assessment. At the end of the mini-course, I was asked if I would be interested in a mentoring project. I was interested even though I did not have a clue what it was going to be.

I got involved mainly because I realized that I needed to broaden my understanding of assessment to develop my program. My knowledge and experience in assessment was limited to standardized assessment, such as the Basic English Skill Test (BEST), Michigan Test, etc. I liked the idea of using Authentic Assessment tools and I wanted to know more about them. I decided to sign up for the Authentic Assessment Partnership Project/AAPP and chose Caroline Gear as my mentor.

I think the expectation was that, through this project, more authentic assessment tools would be created/refined and disseminated to enhance program development, as an alternative to the existing commonly used standardized assessment. The goal of this project was building professional networks, and researching authentic assessment tools. My goal was to get expert coaching in adopting/adapting authentic assessment tools that were suitable for my program. My strong focus was to see to what extent, and in what ways, students themselves buy into the assessment process and make it their own.

At first Caroline and I talked about the project itself, then discussed trying the Learner Log in my class. The next day, I tried an assessment tool where students made a list of the activities that we had done and assigned a value to them. It was difficult for my students to name the activities. I shared this problem with my mentor, and she encouraged me to try oral feedback a few minutes before class ended, where learners are invited to voice their opinions about the class. To get a better understanding of how to facilitate this assessment, I observed classes at ILI. I invited my mentor to visit my class and we had a follow-up discussion. At the discussion, we realized that there was a need to assist the students in articulating their opinions so they would not just try to please the teacher by saying that all activities were good and everything was fine. My mentor assured me that by doing this assessment consistently it would eventually help the students to be more clear. I came back to ILI a month later to visit the class I observed before. I wanted to see the students’ progress in their ability to participate in oral feedback assessment. After the observation, my mentor and I discussed the class I had just observed, and she gave me a nicely typed feedback as a follow-up from the observation she did the week before.

Over the course of the project we met with other Partnership teams several times, updated our activities and discussed the next steps. In a meeting at the DOE office in Malden, we shared the tools that were adapted or newly created by participants. In one of these meetings, Bob Binkerton, the state Director of Adult Basic Education, joined us to converse about authentic assessment in contrast with standardized assessment in regard to accountability. Since then I have been thinking about it. I have questioned myself:

• What is accountability?
• Who should be accountable?
• To whom should I be accountable?
• Why should I or the students be accountable?
• When should we be accountable?
• How do I measure how well students have acquired English and are able to function?

I am still searching for the answers, and somehow I feel that I will find them through my experimentation with authentic assessment.

I have tried to facilitate oral feedback consistently a few minutes before class ends. I have tried the various forms of weekly assessment as well as mid-cycle and end-of-cycle assessment. I found it interesting that some students highly valued some activities that I thought nobody would like, because I did not value them myself. One week I neglected listening activities and ultimately concluded that particular skill was no longer needed since I assumed that my students had always understood me with ease. I was wrong, as some students pointed out at the oral feedback; they needed listening practice.

Oral feedback gives a sense of closure to the session or day. Before I tried oral feedback, whenever I finished my class, I felt like there was a big question “What’s next?” I had to think hard for the answer. Now, after the class I feel energized. I know what my students’ needs are for the next day and can plan activities that help them learn. Oral feedback also gives the students the chance to ask for more explanation about things that were not quite clear to them. This ritual of doing the oral feedback improves the ability of students to do the written weekly learning log.

I was surprised to see how much more articulate some of the students became, compared with the previous month. They were able to individually value each activity according to their learning styles, and to mention the things that they would like to learn more about.

From this Authentic Assessment Partnership Project, I learned a lot not only about assessment tools. The unexpected outcome in the process of trying these new assessment tools was that I learned valuable peer coaching training and giving feedback; how to observe, compliment and provide suggestions. We expanded our discussion into a larger scope. For example we discussed Jazz Chants and the various ways to use them as classroom activities. I learned about empowering students by encouraging them to participate more actively in oral feedback. From observing other classes, I recalled about classroom management, such as being relaxed, full of laughter, delegating simple tasks to students, cooperative learning and also about other teaching techniques, different teaching materials, such as posters, index cards, books, etc. Most of the things I saw, I might have been familiar with before, but somehow, the fact that I saw them again refreshed me. Even the time we spent in the car on the round trip to Malden, MA provided me with lots of learning; we had three hours to discuss workplace policy, program development, even personal matters.

I felt so lucky that Caroline went beyond assessment in this partnership. We expanded our discussion into a larger arena. Looking back at the goals I set initially, I think I have accomplished most of them. Thanks to Caroline Gear, Paul Trunnel and Bob Binkerton for a job well done.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.