Transforming My Assessments

I'm going to try to get my thoughts out more quickly right now, because somehow my laptop just erased everything I had written.  I had written a nice, long entry for this blog, then it disapparated.  Don't you hate that?

I've been changing my assessments every time this school year, meaning I've had three different units of study this year and each assessment looked a lot different from the previous one.  My first unit, on haiku poetry, had the kids do an on-demand haiku based on an artwork of the class' choosing, then answer several multiple choice questions about the process and their use of haiku with art.  My second unit, on watercolor painting, I used a close variation of an assessment a couple of my art colleagues devised, which included peer review.  My third unit, on Navajo sand painting, had an assessment page that included only reflective questions, on sand painting as an art form and the students' individual work with it, and also a revised peer review.  Next, when we embark on a clay unit, I'm not sure where I'll go, but I know it will continue to delve deep into reflective writing and deeper into the peer review process.

Since we lost the Arts & Humanities portion of CATS a couple of years ago, I think it's given me at least more poetic/artistic license to gamble and go crazy with my assessments.  I like it and believe it or not the kids do too.  I actually don't have much grumbling any more, especially since the assessments include a lot of dialogue and sharing, as opposed to the more traditional open response and multiple choice tests I used to administer for the first dozen or so years of my art teaching career.

I hope to keep tweaking, to follow my PGP goals (it's on there), to better serve our school from a program review persective, and even to better serve my own program from a national board recertification perspective.  Sometimes I feel like I'm a boob of a teacher because a lot of my new ideas or innovations seem wacky or silly, but on the other hand I hear a lot more of my students now who seem to understand art on a deeper level.  Something I'm doing must be working, at least with my schools' clientele.