Today, I am here to talk about the scariest part of personalizing learning - allowing kids to create their own assessments. 

I say "scariest" because to give up control of how students how mastery is REALLY hard. For a long time, I told myself I was the best person to assess their work because I knew every facet of the test and standards, but let's face it: They're the expert on themselves. Not me. I had to let go of that little ego trip.

Now, I anticipate the argument that - as the teacher - you have the training and content knowledge to support the kids. That's fair. However, that same training and content knowledge can be used to guide them to the desired outcome. Guiding them to their own discovery is always going to produce more meaningful results. Period.

But it is scary. Terrifying, in fact, for a Type A person like myself. Before I jump into how I do this, I want to clearly something. In my previous series posts, I have talked about the many reinventions of personalization in my classroom. From ugly to bad to alright. It wasn't until my most recent iteration that I was courageous enough to attempt student designed assessment (and, as I mentioned in my last post, I am still assessing them on my terms in the "I Check").

As I've said. Personalization is a spectrum and a process. Start small (choice boards, options, reflection) and then jump into the really scary stuff.

So, if you're ready, let's jump in...
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For starters, simpler is better. The first step needs to be prioritizing standards. I have talked about this previously when writing about standards based grading, but I cannot express how essential it is for student designed assessment.

I say this because... I did it wrong. (#oops). As I mentioned in my primary post about personalization, I paired standards so that students needed to analyze and develop. In my head, they would use this as a way to analyze a mentor text and then compose their own. In reality, they ended up just creating two products for each unit. In hindsight, I'd narrow to one standard. Lesson leared.

So Step 1: Prioritize Standards and Content.

The next step is to facilitate the design process. I created a template for students which they fill in and submit for approval. I check them off - either approving the initial submission or adding feedback. 

As we've navigated this process, I feel that it is 100% more successful if I just sit and talk with the kids. Therefore, I plan to use an "elevator pitch" in the future where students give me a short proposal for their assessment and we have a discussion after. Without this discussion, I felt they were just choosing the first assessment that came to mind whereas when I talked with them, we were much more intentional about choosing something that interested them.

More fodder for the next go-around.

Step 3 is to consider assessment. This is something I have a lot of room to grow with. As you'll notice, the template has a place for students to create a rubric of their own - which was great in theory, but failed in practice. They needed more examples of proficiency levels to really do this step. Let's be honest: They needed a lot more everything to successful with this step.

Having dropped the ball in a very obvious way, I am brainstorming ideas for the next iteration. Here are some ideas bubbling around in my crazy mind:

1. At the beginning of the unit, have a class activity to create rubrics in a scaffolded way. First, have the students create their own. Then, have them compare and create consensus with a partner. Then a small group. And then as a class. 
2. Rubric Templates: Create fill in the blank versions of each rubric for them to use as a guide.
3. Exemplar Analysis: Again, at the start of the unit, looking at a range of samples (novice to mastery) to determine how the rubric should look.

I am excited about tackling this on the next time around. For now, we live with what we got. Ha ha.

I know people have their beef with College Board, particularly this year, but I'm not one of them. Instead, I am deeply grateful for the amount of materials they have created in that last few years as it makes assessment development hella easy. (If you haven't - check out AP Classroom immediately).

That is usually where I start when I sit down to design an "I Check." The ability to sort the question bank by skills is hugely helpful. Most of my "I Check" performance tasks are designed after the questions from this bank. However, the one below is something of my own design (from when I was making things harder for myself... as usual). 

The main image below is a screenshot from my Schoology page - the basic overview. Below that I have the prompt students use as well as the handout I created for the task itself.
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For our design, we require that students reach proficiency with their "I Check." That means they have to earn 91% on the work before they can move on. Because we use standards rubrics, they are just blank (otherwise I would share). That said, my biggest indicator of proficiency is that they can identify multiple reasons for why this essay would get the sophistication point and explain their annotation in the margins. 

Therefore, if they can achieve all of the bullet points, I consider it Mastery, or 100%. The sophistication point is elusive, so we reward "moments" and strive towards consistency.

​If that makes sense...

Now to talk grading - because if we are being honest, that is the first and sometimes only concern that English teachers have. 

One of the biggest fears people have with personalizing learning is that students are going to be handing things in at all different times. While on the surface, this might seem frustrating or hard to organize, I feel it makes my feedback better. I score without the fatigue of reading 50 of a single assignment. Instead, I look at a variety of things all the time.

Also, and this is HUGE, I grade RIGHT. IN. CLASS. That means, I try to avoid grading outside of class. Why? Because if the student is in the room when I am scoring I can either A) score with them sitting beside me or B) pose questions to clarify meaning and help them correct. 

I promise you. Personalizing - though admittedly a lot of work upfront - is a dream once you get going. These conversations about feedback (instead of notes on a paper) have been so much more impactful in getting students moving in the right direction.

In fact... My goal next year is to grade EVERYthing in class, all the time. If it's worth doing, it's worth taking the time to sit with the kids and score. Fortunately, using a personalized flexible format, gives me the time to make that happen!

• Guiding Students Through Performance Task Design ("I Show")
• Teaching Reflection (...if I even figure it out).

(And if you are wondering, I did finish those mock exams... Until I got the makeup ones today).

Time to talk about learning... or more specifically, time to talk about student-driven learning.

What I call the "I Learn" phase is my best effort to achieve that self-directed learning experience. It is also... the most daunting part of the entire process, in my humble opinion.

I'll explain by showing an example of how students might learn a standard, such as Style and Sophistication in my class at the moment.
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, my students are currently working through units based around AP standards. This one (which covers 7A and 8A) asks students to analyze style and create style in their own writing.

​When they open their unit template, their learning options are laid out...

They can...
A) Read and take notes from a textbook.
B) Participate in a small group.
C) Watch videos.

Each of these are like designing a lesson on its own, so as you might imagine, creating options takes a lot of time and a lot of materials. This is what makes this - for me - the most daunting. That said, it helps that there are so many great resources out in the world. Here are the materials we are using for this unit.
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​A) TEXTBOOKS
I have two go-to textbooks which I have class sets of. For different units, I refer students to different books - depending on what is provided in each. I would highly recommend these two texts as a reference for students in their learning:

B) SMALL GROUP
This is as simple as students sitting down to talk about the content with me. Starting this portion of the year - where students are exploring 6 different units - my colleague and I created short PowerPoints that we could use to guide these discussions. 

Here is our Style & Sophistication one...

C) VIDEOS
Now, I don't wanna brag, but I have some good video content on my YouTube channel. That said, I don't have nearly enough to cover an entire year of AP Language. Fortunately for me, College Board started the incredible task of creating videos (and MULTIPLE videos) for every skill. #blessed

Because we used my videos for the first part of the year, now I am directing them to the College Board videos. My expectation is that students take notes during videos so they have something to prove they put in the time.

Here are a few of my more popular videos:

D) ACTIVITIES
Ok... So I didn't mention that there was an option D before. That's because I haven't implemented it yet! As I've mentioned, this is a process that I've been adapting and changing each time. In the next manifestation, I am focused on providing activities (worksheets, graphic organizers, projects) that students can also learn through. 

The good news is that after teaching the course for 6 years, I have tons of these activities already to go. I just need to search the catacombs of my many, many folders to find all the gems.
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Knowing that students will choose their own adventure (so to speak), I still need some evidence that they don't gloss over this step - even before their assessment in the "I Check." Therefore, I require them to hand in some evidence of their learning.

Most of the time, these are notes they took from reading or watching videos, but it might also be summaries, annotations, marked up PowerPoints, etc. Using Schoology, I set these up so they MUST submit their evidence before they can move on.



Personalizing the learning process is scary - even after seeing it be successful. As teachers, we away want to be in control of the information they are getting. That's why we preview videos before we assign them or make our own version of other people's PowerPoints. This need to construct the narrative is well-intentioned but exhausting. As someone who used to obsess about recreating everything myself - it was a big leap to point students in a direction and hope they land on the right information.

That said, the same is accomplished with the next step for students, the "I Check." At that point, I can redirect or provide feedback to clarify what I want. For me, the surprise was that I rarely had to do this. If kids watched videos or read, they seemed to catch on just the same to what I covered in small groups. In other words, I didn't need to dress anything up for them; they got it on their own!

Even so... the "I Check" is hugely important. Stay tuned for my post on designing these assessments and for sample material!