Shakespeare is hard.
Shakespeare is especially hard when you’re a multilingual 8th grader.
For two years due to teaching shortages I got the opportunity to teach 7/8th Literacy alongside my 7/8th Social Studies class. This was a sweet stretching opportunity. I loved connecting students to books that excited them and got them interested in reading. I loved working one-on-one with students to hone their writing craft. I love the dialogue journals I had with my students where we wrote letters back to one another. I hated teaching Shakespeare.
Well, maybe hate is too strong of a word. Shakespeare was a challenge.
It was difficult for me, a Social Studies teacher, to see how to best support my students in decoding and comprehending the text. Especially when I had so many students in my class who were multilingual learners struggling hard to decode and comprehend grade level texts in modern English.
With a curriculum designed by a coworker I was required to follow, we mustered our way through. We got creative. Students and I often collaborated in figuring certain passages out together. I got to model not understanding and what tools I would use to help me understand really difficult passages.
This all context for the worst assessment I have ever given in my entire teaching career.
This test was the same test all three of the other Literacy/Social Studies teachers were giving. It was required that we all give the same test.
This test was written 4 or 5 years prior by a high school teacher trying to prepare our 8th graders for the kinds of tests they would encounter in high school.
This test was entirely different from the study guide/practice questions given to me.
This test was a beast to grade. Not only were the short written response key answers vague and subjective - I was really struggling to comprehend how students were meant to arrive at the correct answer.
This test was long. It took students ages to complete and it didn’t seem to need to be.
I disliked this assessment so much. It didn’t give me a good idea of what students had learned. It was really an assessment of how good students would have done had this been a high school English class tackling Shakespeare. Almost like a high school Shakespeare pretest than an assessment of what they had learned in Shakespeare during 8th grade.
Hardly any students did well on this assessment. It was a mistake to give this to all students. It reminds me of the Three Musketeer fallacy where we feel that in order for an assessment to be fair, we need to give the same test to all students - “All for one, and one for all.” (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017)
I would never give this assessment again.
Instead:
I would opt to give students choice in how they would demonstrate what they had learned.
I would redesign a multi-choice and short answer test to better align with the activities and learning objectives from the course as an option.
I would also include options that were opportunities to verbally process what they had learned or creatively create something that reflected the knowledge they had acquired and were ready to apply.
Resource
Montenegro, E., & Jankowski, N. A. (2017). Equity and assessment: Moving towards culturally responsive assessment. (Occasional Paper No. 29). University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA).
Comments