Moving on the Set 2 — Authentic Assessment requires flexibility.

Criteria for an authentic assessment is broken into two groups because they represent the inherent and the product criteria. This series has completed the inherent criteria. Flexibility represents the first component in the product criteria. To be clear, “product” criteria may refer to a tangible product OR activities, learning, communication, or other intangible results of the work that students do in the process of their assessment. The vagueness is an integrated component or a “necessary evil” when working in the realm of flexibility.

Keeping Rein of Flexibility

Clearly, teachers who need to cover standards, demonstrate accountability in lessons, and document student work in the gradebook with veracity don’t trade in vaguaries.

• Identify the Standard – For any lesson, there is a standard or objective which must be delivered at the end of the exploration. As with most descriptions of the “backward planning” model, beginning with the objective or having the end in mind is critical. For example, if students must be able to articulate learning in content-specific vocabulary, analyze results, and communicate their research to others, based on a specific content topic, these are a fine place to begin…or end, as it were. Once again, students could do this task by an artificial means within the classroom OR they could engage in an authentic task in the real world which uses the learning and demonstrates the actual value of their classroom skills when put to work.

• Consider the Likely Skills Set Needed – These skills will need to be addressed in preparatory lessons, if they have not already been part of the coursework in earlier lessons. Essentially, this step requires identifying areas in which there may be gaps. For example, in a special community service project for the IB Middle Years Program, some students needed to contact local agencies to learn their hours of operation or their needs or their restrictions on volunteer commitments from minors. While this was required, the students had never done this task for class. Therefore, they needed to get some instruction on documenting telephone calls, appropriate times of day to make business calls, what information to prepare ahead of time such as questions and specific requests, and communicating regarding follow-up such as sharing their phone number for a return call. While these may seem obvious to an adult, children who have never made professional phone inquiries would not automatically know that they should leave the name, return phone number, and the purpose in a message…or even that they should leave a message. Related skills may be necessary with email inquiries so that students present themselves professionally.
• Parameters For Real-World Tasks – While the assessment tasks occur in the scope of the real world, just any task is not sufficient to reflect an objective-fulfilling result. While learners may be permitted to construct the situation of their own assessment, they should not be afforded the latitude to engage in any random idea that they have. If the project specifications allow, the idea should be considered ahead of time with specific parameters in mind, and then approved by the teacher before beginning the process. Specificity in examples is a challenge, but it’s possible that a teacher might require students to interview a professional working in their intended field of study at their place of employment. The individual and the work location is flexible, but the objective is not. Examples of tasks are endless: developing a media post or video for a charity, creating information posters about volunteer opportunities, making architectural drawings of local buildings, engaging in a market research study for a local grocery store about traffic patterns. All of these could fulfill a common objective, but be operationalized very differently by students.
• Benchmarks For Student Activities – While the step-by-step activities of students for authentic assessment explorations may be largely defined by the student within the context of their activity, it is reasonable as a classroom expectation and an assessment for there to be specific benchmarks. For example, students may be required to record their interactions and their results in a class journal through the iterative engineering process or design cycle. They might create a daily post on a private, classroom blog site or in a shared document with the teacher which tracks their progress to the goal and details any obstacles faced and strategies for resolving them. Consider daily and weekly expectations, especially because teachers should be informed regularly to stay “in the loop” just in case there are administrative questions regarding any specific individual. Another reason for benchmarks is to assure that students don’t bask in the latitude of a less-structured assignment and fail to devote themselves effectively to their work until it’s too late.
• Timeline – It goes without saying that any assessment has a timeline in order to maintain the progress of the classroom environment, but that timeline can be uniquely applied on an individual basis. After the initial inquiry, a student might learn that they optimal time to conduct their research is during the Thanksgiving holiday, which happens after or shortly before the end of the project timeframe. While the bulk of the students in class follow the standard timeline, this student, who has special approval from the teacher, could conduct their research at the optimal time and accelerate the final steps to finish within an reasonable and approved alternate timeline…provided that it is for a purpose that is specific to a situation with the selected site. This represents flexibility in the timeline as needed.
• Deliverables – In the end, work must be gradable and assessment results must be justifiable by educators. In this case, deliverable components of an assessment may be described in very general terms. All students may have to submit a final product, but that project may be a news article, a poster, a research report, a video, or a descriptive letter from the business or agency. They might have a communication expectation, which could be on-site, virtual, phone, or written communications for different individuals. Other components that are reasonable to include, with flexible language for how they are delivered, are: planning and reflection.

So, rather oddly, this focus on flexibility seems to have addressed all of the places where specific things are required, which is hardly flexible. However, students in a classroom for an assessment cannot have unlimited flexibility. The list above is merely a focus on the components which should be limited for students so that they are like helium balloons which rise to great heights, but are on a string so they are not lost and they remain trackable. Anything else would not represent due diligence on the part of teachers. Once these components are addressed and accountability has been assured for both teacher and student, the rest is genuinely flexible.

Stimulating the Entire Class

The true beauty of flexible assessments is that students can pursue avenues which stimulate their interests and explore their passions, instead of being limited to the cookie-cutter selections, like elementary school menu homework allowing students to exercise choice, but only one of three choices in a row on the worksheet. When each student in class exercises a unique pathway, their time in class becomes a terrific venue for sharing successes and problem-solving when obstacles arise. Students may get solutions by working with the teacher, but they can also crowdsource ideas from peers who are empowered by the conversations. Further, peers benefit from exposure to the variety of experiences one another are having, which allows them to simultaneously learn the lessons of many experiences at once. Having a final day of project sharing can also become a great extension for class time.

Flexibility and Rubrics

Creating an organized structure for such divergent grades can be tricky. As mentioned in the “Deliverables” section above, organize rubric components very generally, using terms like product, communication record, plan, and reflection, without details of how those gradables look or making them all exactly the same. Consider using an AI rubric generator to help with these flexible terms. Magic School AI (click here) is a very successful, free, and user-friendly option for teachers. It’s worth a try. This is not the only rubric generator. Here is a video on rubric generation in Magic School AI (click here) to facilitate success. One thing that was especially noteworthy about this provider was the acknowledgement on their sign-up documentation that they focus on an 80-20 outlook. They do not expect to do everything for a teacher, but provide perhaps 80% of the structure of the rubric (or other resources) and depend on the teacher’s skills for effective customization of the other 20% to make it ideal for the specific classroom use. That sounds like an effective and efficient partnership.

Once upon a time, I managed the MYP Community Project which was a self-directed activity to create an informative, advocacy, service, or fundraising project for the entire eighth grade. That doesn’t mean one project for everyone; it meant 80 independent or partnership projects. Just like a classroom teacher in authentic assessment, it is possible to establish a wide variety of unique experiences, but the legwork to set up everything would be prohibitive. When students are allowed to pursue tasks like this on their own, they develop new skills, sometimes face failures or obstacles, but grow in magnificent ways to reach far more than they would achieve if each aspect of the project was provided for them and carefully structured by adults. The very idea of flexibility in authentic assessments means that they create opportunities which offer exponentially more growth and development for students than standard, in-class assessments. Allowing students flexibility to create their own assessment is, to some degree, a leap of faith, but well worth the risk.

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Teacher Takeaways

The very idea of flexibility in authentic assessments means that they create opportunities which offer exponentially more growth and development for students than standard, in-class assessments.

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MagicSchool AI. How to use MagicSchool AI’s tools – rubric generator. YouTube. 27 Dec 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEdJU-ZvNwU Accessed 8 Dec 2024.

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