De-escalating the Testing Arms Race

Authentic Assessment in the Montessori Elementary Classroom

By Mark Powell

It is necessary to adopt a scientific point of view in order to interpret the facts that reveal themselves in children when they are developed upon this system, and to divest oneself completely of the old scholastic conception according to which the progress of the child is assess.fssed according to his proficiency in the various subjects of study. Here, almost like the naturalist, it is essential to observe the development of certain phenomena of life. It is true that we prepare the special ‘external conditions’; but the psychical effects are directly bound up with the spontaneous development of the internal activity of the child…A series of formulae, such as the Binet-Simon tests, can neither measure anything, nor give even an approximate idea of intellectual levels of intelligence according to age; as to the children who respond, when is their response derived? How far is it due to the intrinsic activity of the individual, and how far to the action of environment?…To enable us to judge of individual differences, it would be necessary for the two children to have had the same means of development…Man is a fusion of personality and education, and education includes the series of experiences he undergoes during his life. The two things cannot be separated in the individual: intelligence without acquirement is an abstract

Maria Montessori, The Advanced Montessori Method, Volume 1

One of the most effective ways for Montessorians to resist the rapidly escalating “arms race” of standardized testing in the United States is to patiently and relentlessly model practical alternatives, while at the same time letting parents know what research shows about the effectiveness of more authentic, formative assessment methods.

In an increasingly testing-obsessed academic environment, it is no longer reassuring to many parents and administrators to be told that they need to “trust in the process,” that mastery will happen in the child’s own good time.

By becoming even more transparently accountable using authentic assessment methods that reveal and support students’ learning in positive ways, we can offer every constituent of a school community—parents, community, public officials and others—objective proof that we know our students and that our methods encourage observable advantages that are not offered by traditional pedagogy with its blunt assessment instruments.

What is Good Assessment?

Assessment has three purposes. It should help:

• Students, parents and teachers know whether students are remembering and understanding what they are learning

• Teachers decide if how they are arranging the environment and presenting lessons is working well, or whether they should do things differently for their current set of students

• The wider school community (including potential applicants) decide whether a particular program is serving their children well.

In the wider mainstream educational culture, a tenacious confusion persists between assessment (meaning simply getting feedback on students’ progress) and grading (applying an evaluative label to that progress based on external standards defined by the school or the state).

Teachers and their students in private Montessori schools have traditionally been immune to the harshest effects of this culturally narrowed definition of assessment. And yet for many private Montessori teachers, avoiding the negative effects of evaluative grading and standardized testing also brings with it a lack of understanding of the pros and cons of the wide variety of assessment tools available to them, as well as an over-reliance on trust or faith as a way of marketing the benefits of the Montessori method to the wider school community.

Good assessment allows our constituents to witness a child’s progress by providing accurate feedback about the whole child in a context that is “objective” in the eyes of that constituent. However, to be most useful to the child—the central focus of the learning community—assessment should also:

• Help students learn better by providing good feedback to individual students about how they learn. Feedback should be given to students in non-judgmental ways since judgments encourage dependence on the teacher. A teacher can ask questions or offer plausible contradictions instead of making statements. When a student asks for help, a teacher can ask for that student’s thinking to date. When confronted with anger or arguments over an assessment, a teacher can reflect back a student’s feelings to diffuse a confrontation.

• Help teachers teach better by providing feedback that teachers can use to improve their own teaching.

• Be easily integrated into curriculum and instruction by flowing naturally from students’ work (for example, when documentation of a science experiment becomes part of a student’s portfolio). Authentic assessments can be made in discussions with students during presentations, through teacher interactions with students, by observing student-student interactions, or by watching students work with materials and apply their knowledge to new situations.

• Be related to what goes on in the classroom. Most of assessment should be based on classroom work done over time, rather than on externally developed tests.

• Use a variety of measures such as classroom learning, participation in discussions, etc. and a variety of tools, including authentic assessments, informal tests and standardized tests.

• Involve teachers, parents and peers in each student’s assessment.

• Be flexible enough to not dominate the curriculum or put pressure on teachers to “teach to a test.”

Even though Montessori programs may not compare children by grading them against one another, the quality of any teacher’s craft depends on the quality of the feedback they are getting about each student’s progress.

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment includes all methods of showing real progress “in the flesh.”

Portfolios are actual samples of students’ work selected over time using certain criteria and kept together in a presentation binder of some sort.

Performance exams require students to perform a task such as writing an essay, doing a science experiment, or giving an oral presentation for a formal assessment.

Proficiency exit standards combine these first two methods as well as standardized tests to show more holistically whether students have met standards in certain areas.

Exhibitions or capstone projects include such events as science fair exhibits or oral research reports illustrated with Powerpoint presentations, and can be assessed by teacher or parent anecdotal observations.

All these types of authentic assessment allow children to demonstrate what they know in context by closely matching the setting they would be expected to show that learning in real life. They are often evaluated using rubrics—documents that provide specific criteria against which a particular project can be measured and precise gradations of quality for each criteria.

When rubrics are used to give feedback to students on their work during the learning process, they are called instructional rubrics. Authentic assessments allow a more accurate picture of a particular individual child by providing multiple sources of evaluation over a longer period of time than the snapshots provided by standardized testing. They provide common sense, non-technical feedback specific to each individual student that can be used to improve their learning. With authentic assessments there is more than one right answer, and plenty of room for reflection and revision—just as there is in real life.

Because authentic assessment does not have to be separate from classroom learning, it takes less time away from learning than standardized testing, and can more easily promote collaboration between teachers and students in deciding what are appropriate criteria for assessment. When students have input into rubrics (for example, in terms of the number of gradations or the specific assessment criteria), expectations become clearer and appear fairer to students. Self-assessment by students with rubrics also cuts down the time spent on assessment by teachers.

Among the possible drawbacks of authentic assessment are that these methods are often more difficult for inexperienced teachers to implement, at least while these methods are new and unfamiliar. They also open the door to more subjective evaluations by teachers and parents since the standards for evaluative comparison are more limited. And it can still be tempting for teachers to “teach to the test” even with authentic assessments by modeling their expectations too strongly and encouraging students to perform through mimicry rather than by discovering knowledge and reaching deeper understanding for themselves.

Authentic Assessment in Montessori

Portfolios are a form of assessment well-suited to Montessori classrooms as they showcase progress over time in the process of discovery, not just the product. They allow for many forms of representation of student work, including written reports, art work, poetry or plays, photographs or voice recordings burned to a CD via an iPod (where there is no lasting product or where the product is too large to be included in a portfolio), charts and maps, samples taken from exercise books, pre-writing notes or preliminary drafts, write-ups of experiments or field trips, written feedback from peers or teachers, or journal entries, to name a few of the possibilities. They encourage independence and student responsibility for their own learning and assessment. Portfolios can be sent home to involve parents in the assessment of their child’s work. And they are child-centered in reflecting the interests, abilities, attitudes, habits and growth of each individual child.

Thomas Armstrong offers “Five C’s of Portfolio Development:”

• Celebration: To acknowledge and validate students’ accomplishments.

• Cognition: To encourage students to reflect on their own work.

• Communication: To let those constituents not involved in the day-to-day life of the classroom see students’ progress.

• Cooperation: To provide a means for groups of students to collectively evaluate their own work.

• Competency: To establish criteria by which students’ work can be compared to that of other students or to a standard or benchmark.

Portfolios can be introduced to students by inviting a parent to visit the classroom to share his or her own portfolio. Children can then see that this is a way that adults in many fields today (such as architecture, graphic design, even business consulting) demonstrate their work to one another.

Students will need a place to store their finished work, such as a filing cabinet with a hanging file for each child and manila folders for each subject area within each child’s hanging file. Students may need help initially learning how to file their finished work accurately. No work can be sent home until the collection of finished work is sorted through at regular intervals during the year and carefully selected additions made to the accumulating portfolio.

Teachers may also need to model the process of selection and self-assessment of samples using rubrics or reflection logs, as many children find it difficult to step back and view their own work objectively and to select pieces that reveal their own development. The form that portfolios can take may vary, although the emphasis should be on an orderly and attractively selected presentation of work. Three-ring binders or eight-pocket portfolios are two of the most common and convenient formats.

Each student’s portfolio can be added to selectively at least two or three times a year over the course of their three (or four) years in a Montessori classroom. The portfolio then goes home to become a permanent and objective record of their progress for all constituents of the child’s community to witness.

The act of preparing detailed student progress reports is a crucial feedback ritual in and of itself for every classroom teacher. But the act of communicating the results of classroom assessment to other constituents in the child’s community is equally important. Committing judgments to paper in a form that will be shared with the wider school community affords teachers the opportunity to clear their thinking about each individual student, and to celebrate good learning or rethink record-keeping and teaching strategies if progress is less than expected. Thorough progress reports might include a record of curriculum covered, summary results of a variety of classroom testing tools, as well as descriptive or anecdotal observations of student progress over time.

Written progress reports are the beginning of a conversation that cannot be authentic without the parent-teacher conference. Formal, face-to-face discussions (which might even include older students themselves) allow those with most interest in a child’s progress to ask questions, air concerns and share strategies based on the written progress report sent to the child’s family in anticipation of the conference.

An assessment delivery system is truly accountable when it allows parents to witness their child’s progress objectively “in the flesh,” when it demonstrates that teachers know and appreciate their students, and when it offers opportunities for parents and teachers to provide one another with concrete feedback on a child. An efficient system might include a combination of two face-to-face conferences per year and two formal written reports sent home accompanied by student portfolios. These three forms of assessment can be staggered to provide three points of contact throughout the year:

• An initial planning conference early in the fall lets parents and teachers discuss their own goals for the student and share family news and events of the summer. Older students might present their own learning goals and receive feedback.

• An evaluative progress report sent home around the middle of the year, accompanied by an updated student portfolio, sets the stage for a mid-year conference in which parents, teachers (and perhaps an older student) discuss areas of concern and share strategies or changes of direction where indicated.

• An end-of-year progress report, accompanied by a newly updated student portfolio, informs parents of progress during the second half of the year. Face-to-face contact is less important at this time since any feedback cannot be implemented until the fall, and can be addressed in the planning conference.

Professionals in many fields, from architects to corporate consultants, now use portfolios and other authentic assessment methods where the authentic quality of their work is important for clients to see “in the flesh,” and where there are no abstract standards by which it is possible to compare products that differ in so many subtle ways. Isn’t this the case with our most important product—the individual child?

Mark Powell is director of an upper elementary classroom at Berkeley Montessori School in Berkeley, CA. He has been in the classroom for thirteen years, eight of those with lower elementary children at Lexington Montessori School in Lexington, MA. Mark is also a faculty member of the Center for Montessori Teacher Education, New York. He holds a Master of Education degree with a specialty in Conflict Resolution and Peaceable Schools from Lesley University, Cambridge MA.