#360 – Assessment: Beyond Tests

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What are the benefits of assessing through tests?
• What are the disadvantages of assessing with tests?
• What are the advantages of nontraditional, performance-based assessments?
• What are the drawbacks of performance-based assessments?
• What are some of your favorite nontraditional assessment types?
• How can you assess your academic content in an active and authentic manner?
• How can you keep the workload manageable, even when using authentic assessments that are not paper-and-pencil tests?

• SchoolAI (official website)
• Meet the Single Point Rubric (Jennifer Gonzalez via Cult of Pedagogy)
• The Ultimate Guide to Performance-Based Assessments (Otus)
• Performance-Based Assessment: Reviewing the Basics (Patricia Hilliard via Edutopia)

#360 Assessment: Beyond Tests

AVID Open Access
35 min

Keywords
alternative assessments, student engagement, authentic experiences, feedback importance, active learning, choice boards, Socratic seminars, AI tools, personal connection, critical thinking, real-world applications, student success, intrinsic motivation, collaborative projects, knowledge construction

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Paul Beckermann 0:00 What’s the most authentic use of what we’re learning in the classroom today? Let’s have kids do that.

Winston Benjamin 0:06 What ways are you communicating the information that students gave you so that they can alter what they’re doing next?

Rena Clark 0:14 But if you’re doing that in the moment, you’re also giving them much needed feedback, giving them an alternative assessment, another way, and you’re making it easier for yourself.

Paul Beckermann 0:27 The topic of today’s podcast is Assessment: Beyond Tests. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that we can raise the bar for education. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:44 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:55 I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:57 And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators,

Paul Beckermann 1:00 and we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies. Education is our passport to the future. The AVID website states students would rather talk, move around, and ask questions than sit still and be quiet. Humans are wired to construct knowledge through action. All right, what do you think of that?

Rena Clark 1:25 It makes me think of the book Everything You Needed to Know You Learned in Kindergarten because we knew about how, if you have your own children, or you watch our youngest learners, how are they constructing knowledge? It’s not by sitting there; it’s through their doing, they’re moving around, and they constantly, why, why? How? How? Constantly asking questions.

I just think about we start out that way. That doesn’t go away, and that still is such a valuable way. It is through authentic experience we are going to construct knowledge, yeah. How about you, Winston?

Winston Benjamin 2:03 As a middle school dean of students, any teacher should know this. If you try to keep them sitting down for too long, you opened up the idle hands equals devil’s playground. This is so true. If you allow kids to burn off some of that energy and actually get into thinking brain—or thinking brain being the fun brain—they’ll remember a lot more than actually trying to force themselves to talk to their friends, because they want to talk anyway.

So I think this is a great way to control the classroom and model rational usage of time. This just reminds me of my classes that I’ve walked into: “All right, kids, let’s calm down.” It seems like a sensible quote. All right.

Paul Beckermann 2:51 Well, we’re going to talk about assessments today, and a lot of times, assessments are kind of sit-down-and-be-quiet moments in a lot of classrooms. We’re going to talk a little bit about different types of assessments and how we can assess students in ways that maybe don’t involve paper and pencil tests.

We’ll explore other, perhaps more authentic ways that we can assess students along the way and capture student progress, assess how much they’ve learned, things that that. But to start, let’s acknowledge that there probably are times when a traditional test makes sense. So before we dig into alternative forms of assessment, when might we use a test effectively, and why? Rena, do you want to go first?

Rena Clark 3:33 When we think about tests, lots of people, depending on your background and what you’ve done, you might think of that word differently. I think in the past, are we regurgitating information? But sometimes, a math assessment might be for me to assess student understanding of a math concept, where a paper and pencil—where they’re demonstrating and showing their understanding quickly at the end of the day—could be really helpful to gather some information.

So, it’s not a bad thing. It’s still a very good use. And using a paper and pencil, to me, especially with math, is often much better than even a digital tool.

Paul Beckermann 4:16 Yeah. Winston, how are you?

Winston Benjamin 4:18 For me, this is a personal statement. Tests, for example, the SAT. I did not go to the best school at all, at all. I went to a vocational school; we were supposed to go to work. So a lot of my teachers really focused on doing well on the SAT because that was my leveling stick with other kids from other places who might have had opportunities to do other things that I might not have had the chance to build a secondary extracurricular life or identity.

So with that test, it really gave a chance for me to be on the same playing ground. So I think tests are important in some ways. That keeps a level playing field—this is what everyone needs to go to move forward. Sometimes it allows for others to access opportunities. So I think sometimes tests can be valuable, as long as we don’t move the goal post for some kids when they’re trying to participate in things, yeah. And measuring…

Paul Beckermann 5:21 Measuring achievement is kind of what we want to do. We want to do it fairly. When I think of tests, I think a lot of times they’re done because of the efficiency of them. They’re quick, they’re easy to grade, and with teacher workloads the way they are, that’s a pretty brutal reality.

We need to try to keep things manageable, especially when you’re talking about an SAT or something that. You have to be able to scale it and measure across wide distances and times and spaces. It’s just hard if it’s not some kind of a test that we’re used to.

Rena Clark 5:58 Yeah, with those math tests, sometimes it’s nice, scalable. Can I use that data to quickly inform the instruction that I’m going to do? I don’t have time to do some elaborate, in-depth, listen-to-every-kid-explain-their-thinking, because that’s the reality of the job.

Winston Benjamin 6:14 Time. The time. It’s just time. Time is against us all.

Paul Beckermann 6:19 And the data that you mentioned, Rena. Tests give us really nicely packaged data. You have to admit it, yes, and it can be actionable if the test is written well.

I think back to my undergrad. I think we had maybe one class period on how to write test questions. Seriously, it was minimal. I think about how much importance we then put on those tests. If we are going to do those kinds of tests, we need to make sure that we know how to write them well, and we know how to use the data well that comes from them. And…

Winston Benjamin 6:52 That’s a really good point: that you can look at the student as the blame—they didn’t get it right—or, as a teacher, did I really write the question that was clear enough to help students really discern? Or even thinking about language learners: Are there ways that I provided opportunities for them to access the actual question that I’m putting out? How do I really make sure that the data is clean? Data is another part of thinking that you need to do as you’re thinking about the effectiveness of testing.

Rena Clark 7:23 Or even we’re analyzing where we may be getting our sources from. In a lot of districts, they might have a really well-developed curriculum that they’ve purchased, that they’ve piloted, that they’ve looked at, and you’re getting assessments from that. Knowing some of these companies, they do a lot of work into writing assessment questions.

But also, where are you pulling this from? Did you get it off Teachers Pay Teachers? Have you analyzed it? So we always say you put that human lens, that expert teacher lens, even on something from a curriculum. Is this appropriate? Is this correct?

And as Winston says, even with the use of some AI tools now, that can help us, if we give it some prompts around language. We can help maybe make those questions better or more accessible for students—same level of rigor and content, just even the way it’s being asked is more clear.

Paul Beckermann 8:16 And what level of understanding are we measuring with those test questions? Are we just testing the things that we can memorize—the lower level understanding and call-and-response kinds of things? Or are we really looking at measuring how kids can analyze and create—those higher level things? That takes some sophisticated test question writing to get to those. Absolutely.

Winston Benjamin 8:39 Absolutely.

Rena Clark 8:41 And again, I had some fun this summer with AVID teachers, and we even put in those CASAS level questions. Then we had AI help us move it up to Level 1, moving it up in levels. And then we had it say, “Take this question, actually bring it back levels.” There are some tools. Again, your human lens is always the last thing to look at that, but there are some really great resources out there now to help. So it’s not nearly as difficult as it was for me 20 years ago. You can have some support beyond just the people next door in your PLC.

Paul Beckermann 9:13 I love that. I love that taking the new opportunities to make ourselves better. That’s perfect. We all use tests at some point. I don’t know if I ever met a teacher who never used a test. There are places for that, and it’s a part of the educational system.

Rena Clark 9:32 I do secret tests for my husband all the time. He doesn’t even know I’m testing.

Winston Benjamin 9:38 Truth bomb.

Rena Clark 9:44 If I leave the garbage by the door, will you take it out without being asked? Have you passed the test?

Paul Beckermann 9:50 It’s an algorithm. It’s an if-then statement.

Rena Clark 9:56 I’m just saying, we all do tests, whether it’s right or wrong. You do tests all the time, all the time.

Paul Beckermann 10:02 All right. Well, that’s a perfect segue, because that is not a paper-pencil test. So we’re going to talk a little about what are some other ways that we can measure where students are at in their progression of learning, besides tests. So let’s just have a little conversation about that and share some of our ideas. What are you thinking?

Winston Benjamin 10:22 What is the thing that I want to—as Rena pointed out earlier—what is the importance? People only learn by doing. Is it just a quick, “I need to know where the general sense of the classroom is,” or is it, “Did I not teach this well?” What is the purpose of your assessment as the teacher?

If it’s about student understanding, some of the things that I really love: one time I gave, instead of having students write a paper, I had them have the option of writing a song, or doing some sort of art form, and then doing a write-up of the art and explaining to me why their art piece made sense to the question that I asked.

It really allowed for expression, and some students really were better at expressing themselves, and could rhyme and could put things together in those ways. So I thought that was a really helpful way of assessing if students really understood the context of the material, instead of just having them write it down—being able to tell it in the way that they knew. So that’s one way: having an alternative to writing a paper, maybe having students use art form, create an art display, or maybe even create a song as a way of showing their knowledge.

Rena Clark 11:48 So kind of giving them a bit of a choice board or a choice opportunity: same expectations, but different options. I love that, and it all goes back, Winston, to what is it that I want students to know and be able to do? What is it, and how does this align to the standards? Depending on what that is, I can provide different opportunities for different types of assessments. I feel different areas lend themselves to different opportunities.

One that I always thought was fun, that kids like, are the Choose Your Own Adventure stories. We have the five-paragraph essay, and I’m going to be honest, working with high school ELA, with AI, how do we provide different options, but still aligning to those academic standards? One that I know kids really like is creating a Choose Your Own Adventure story. And it also, even in social studies, forces them to think of both perspectives. If you’re writing this, you choose this or choose this. They have to. You can do this in Slides. They can do this in Scratch or PowerPoint. There are templates that you can find very easily for Choose Your Own Adventure.

It’s great, especially if you’re doing something in history, say the American Revolution: “If you make this choice, this happens. If not, this happens.” And they actually have to write a response for both of those choices, both of those perspectives. From there, again, we’re doing conditionals here: if, then, if, then. It actually ties into computer science, too, so they can code this. It’s pretty fun because then they have to think of multiple perspectives, and they can do that in groups. In the end, the kids that did that—if you look at the standards—they were doing more writing and deeper thinking and knew more about the content than if they had just written. And then, can they let other kids play it? Because it’s Oregon Trail type—the kids love playing each other’s and learning from other kids. So it was great.

Paul Beckermann 13:47 I had a class where it was called business writing, or practical writing, but it was really technical writing, sort of. The kids all created games, then they had to write the directions for the games, and then they had to have other kids play the games without any input from them other than the directions. You knew right away if you were writing well or not. If they went off the rails on that game and did something totally wrong, you had authentic feedback on how your writing was. You had an authentic purpose. You had an authentic audience. You had authentic feedback. Keyword there: authentic. What’s the most authentic use of what we’re learning in the classroom today? Let’s have kids do that. But…

Winston Benjamin 14:29 I also think you said something that you are also saying: the feedback. Cool, take the test. Cool, take the whatever. Cool, whatever, however you want to assess. Fine.

What ways are you communicating the information that students gave you so that they can alter what they’re doing next? That is a bigger part of it. Yeah, cool. We could take the random test, but now that I take it, why? What’s the sense? It’s over. It’s gone. I don’t need to think about it ever again.

Sometimes that’s really where people are: “What’s the value of it? How does it help me with my life?” As you said, Paul, authentic feedback is where it’s, “Oh, this really matters to me.” I don’t want to look stupid. When teachers do small group presentations, the kids often say, “I just don’t want to look stupid. Whatever you tell me, however you need to help me not look stupid, is how I’m going to start.”

The teacher can help them go beyond the not looking stupid, but they have a baseline of pride where the feedback comes from. I think that’s a really important part that you’re also talking about, not just the authentic type of testing. And…

Paul Beckermann 15:46 And then, if you give choice in there, as Rena mentioned earlier, the student can find that path where they are going to preserve their dignity and be able to do it in a way that builds them up and not tears them down or makes them feel dumb or second-rate. We want kids to have success, because success builds success, and they can grow on that.

Rena Clark 16:09 And it doesn’t always have to be writing. We’ve done some examples of writing, but I was even thinking of doing Socratic seminars, and thinking about how, if they’re doing a Socratic seminar, or if they’re making a video or something else, what is the rubric? We’re still having those same standards.

But then make it easy for yourself as a teacher. How can you be assessing in the moment? Get this: if you’re assessing in the moment, then you don’t have to take home 190 papers to grade, so you actually can be more efficient. If you’re doing that Socratic seminar, you have that. I used to walk around with a clipboard and I’m checking and making notes by each kid’s name. You can have your laptop out now and be doing that, and you’re doing it in the moment. Then you’re using that, maybe in conversation with them as feedback, or maybe you’re doing it in their portfolio, whatever system you have. But if you’re doing that in the moment, you’re also giving them much needed feedback, giving them an alternative assessment, another way, and you’re making it easier for yourself.

Winston Benjamin 17:11 Yeah, and even pushing it: sometimes we say that it’s easier for certain subject content areas to do alternative testing. Math teachers say, “I got math, numbers are numbers.” I say, “Okay, well, then let’s think about how the students utilize the number information that you have to then display and communicate that information.”

This is a food desert. How do we define what a food desert is? There’s a certain number of calories that people need to eat. How do you determine what a calorie breakdown is, and how do you determine the food intake, all those things? Now that you know that this is a food desert, what do you do? How do you then take that information? How do you change the world? How can you go and write a letter to a congressman? How could you bring business people in and try to have the students demonstrate, “This is how we would bring food in,” or a restaurant, or some sort of business that could turn into a life goal for a kid?

Still, all of that has numbers. All of it is the calculations. All of it is doing everything. But again, it’s how you choose to think about what you want the students to take away, and how you want to show that they have taken away something valuable from the lesson you just did.

Paul Beckermann 18:31 I love that use math as an example, Winston, because sometimes people say, “Well, you can’t do it in math.” I worked with a probability and statistics teacher. She was teaching AP Probability and Stats. All the kids made their own surveys. They all picked their own objective. They surveyed. They gathered authentic data. When they’re analyzing their own data, it matters way more than if you just give them a spreadsheet of numbers. It’s that personal, personal connection again.

Rena Clark 18:59 Okay, I think I’ve told you all this before: my dad taught me statistics and probability by playing craps. He taught me how to play craps, and I learned about all the different ratios and proportions and the statistics.

Paul Beckermann 19:11 I’m still waiting for you to win big, Rena. Come on. All right, Rena.

Rena Clark 19:16 Of all the games, it has some of the best odds. But that’s a very different way of learning statistics. Sometimes, I think, even Code.org—there’s a computer science and learning algebra through computer science course, so maybe there’s a school that can offer that type of assessment.

I was just working with a teacher, or working with some teachers, that are integrating those math standards within their courses. They’re designing food trucks and creating logos for the food truck. Then they’re creating menus, and they have a budget for those food trucks. They’re bringing in the costs, and you also have to think about the vendors and the cost, and what you are making in the money. What is the standard of living? Can you sustain life based on that? It was really deep and so applicable to life and career, and kids were just stoked.

Winston Benjamin 20:09 Yeah, and that’s the thing. Is it that we want our kids to be critical thinkers, to be able to process information in the future, or is it that we want them to adjust X + Y = Z? What is it that you really want? I want my kids to think. None of my teachers made me feel I knew everything in a textbook, but they made me feel that I can figure out the answer to the question. That’s a very different thing. How do you support student thinking rather than testing? Maybe it doesn’t…

Rena Clark 20:48 …have to be large scale projects, because some of these might be daunting, as we’re talking about. I worked a lot with math, so honestly, instead of a kid taking a math test, how about you have them teach another group of students? Or you split it up, and they become the expert on this particular conceptual understanding of this concept, and they’re going to teach this to another group? Because when you can teach it, we know then you should be able to really do it well. So they’re teaching it to another group. There are different, many ways you can do it. It doesn’t have to be a big project all the time, just having conversations. And…

Paul Beckermann 21:24 If you can reach out and find another audience in your school ecosystem, I would take my speech kids down to the second grade classroom, and we would read books to them. That’s some of the memories that those kids remember the most. I didn’t have to dangle a grade out in front of them to make them motivated to do well. They wanted to do well because these kids were looking up to them. I think if we look at what motivates people, it’s not always that grade. If we can find ways to bring in that intrinsic joy that kids have for things they’re passionate about, we can really transform assessments in a lot of different ways.

Winston Benjamin 22:04 Yeah, even with geometry: Are you allowing the students to build something? Will this hold? Will this fall? Will this swing? Will this move? What is the rotation on this? Let’s play some basketball, kids. How many can spin the basketball the most amount without inertia, or who can move somebody down the hallway without… All of those things are still part of the core content. What are the kids doing to maximize their interpretation of that content? What are they doing to allow kids to use their hands instead of just sitting there, as our quote said?

Rena Clark 22:43 I was reading some article where a PE teacher was collaborating with another classroom teacher. They went in the gym, and they were looking at where Steph Curry would shoot and the probability and the statistics, and his shot. I was so engaged watching it. I thought, this would be so engaging as a student, and you’re moving around, and you’re seeing it, and you’re connecting it to someone that maybe, as a young kid, watches on TV play basketball. It was pretty cool how they worked.

So that’s the other thing: maybe if you have the ability, work with another teacher. I know some people have the luxury of co-teaching. Maybe in elementary school, you can do cross-disciplinary and work with your specialist. We had a music teacher, a PE teacher, and the classroom teacher, and they were able to bring somebody in. They were able to work together on whatever they were studying in social studies, and then they were doing music with that. They were creating a dance based on what they were learning that they had to present to others.

I did that with my own kids in science. I forced my sixth graders to create an interpretive dance. They could do it in different ways, but they had to create either a song or a dance to show the four components of flight. It was—and now all of them—because it was basically a total physical response, and we did it all together in the gym. They all remembered the four different forces of flight. They had to dance.

Winston Benjamin 24:10 Even that. What if, can a student write a journal article or a newspaper article about a science thing? What would it be if a student wrote the next War of the Worlds about a disease that’s coming, and they did all the research about how it’s transmitted, but instead of taking a test about the DNA of the mitochondria?

How does that work? The student wrote that the mitochondria did this, and then it made the monster move this way. All of those things get a kid to show you that they really understand that mitochondria is the energy source of the cell, and that really pushes the cell forward, and that should create…

But again, why? Why did I remember that? The reason why I remember that is, if you are a Star Wars fan and you remember how they tried to explain how the Force came out with the Midi-chlorians, then you will understand what I’m saying. It’s all the different ways that people make connections to the information that they find valuable. I love Star Wars, and I did not understand that explanation. So again, Midi-chlorians, all those things in the world. What are the ways the kids are expressing that they know what is going on? To tell that story, to tell it differently, to show you that, “I get it.” That’s really the thing we’re asking.

Paul Beckermann 25:36 And go back to that quote at the beginning, too. People construct knowledge through action. Kids have to do stuff. So if you’re in science class, be a scientist. When you’re in math class, be a mathematician. If you’re in history class, be a historian. Write history about something. Write the history of your family.

I remember when I taught creative writing, the kids learned more about literature by writing than they ever did about just studying the literature. Artists, they draw, they create, they express. Musicians, they play music, they compose. What are those real things that are actionable, that our kids can do, and then we can assess those?

We need to find tools that are not overwhelming. Maybe it’s a single point rubric instead of a four-point rubric, which I love. Single point rubrics make way more sense to me, and they’re easier and faster, and kids get them too. So, and…

Winston Benjamin 26:36 That point about the structural things—now we get into the structural things of how to assess. One, as Rena says, Can you do it in time to be able to not take things home with you? That’s one piece of advice. Can you use AI to help you create the rubrics, to simplify the rubrics? Can you use AI to help you increase the lexicon level, or decrease the level?

What are the ways that you can think through? What is it that you’re really giving students so that you’re able to really say, “This is what knowledge looks like?” I know we’re asking you to do things differently, but it’s really, what makes you say that this kid got it? What will say they got it? If you walked around and you looked at a kid and they talked and answered another kid, and you thought, “Oh, they got it.” That’s what we need you to think about. What is it that you need from the child to show, “Yeah?” Simply think about that. That’s the work.

But again, I’m going to get off my high horse, and as the kid who didn’t do well on tests, ask all of you to care about the kid who didn’t do well on tests.

Paul Beckermann 27:49 This isn’t a test, but it is a toolkit.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 27:53 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 28:04 All right. Toolkit time. We’ve kind of been dropping tools right and left here anyway, but we got a chance for another one. What do you got?

Rena Clark 28:10 All right, I’ll start off. I think I have one we haven’t talked about. So go for it. Something I’ve seen now be used with several teachers I’ve been working with is using AI chatbots. So actually creating a custom chatbot. You do have to be pretty good at prompting, and you should test it out, but rather than giving them a test, instead, have them interact with a chatbot.

If you use School AI, you can use that. It’s called Sidekick. It is one that I really use. You get 76 free ones a day. Then you get a summary of everything the students say, and it also flags things, any topic you can. So instead of them taking a test, it’s more they’re having a conversation about a topic. I saw it used in the classroom because we were talking about career and future, “What do you want to do after high school? What are you interested in?” Rather than just another survey or assessment, it was in the chatbot, and then it flagged things. It was fascinating. It’s just another way that you could gather information. I…

Paul Beckermann 29:20 …love that. There was a teacher in our local district here who just did that with history. He created a bunch of chatbots from different perspectives that would have experienced a historical event, and then the kids got to ask them questions and talk to them and ask them about the event and hear about it from different perspectives. Really cool. And he said, “For the most part, it was pretty spot on with how it responded to the kids.” I…

Winston Benjamin 29:47 …love it. One thing that I would do: I saw this strategy years ago, and I think the tool is reshaping what the test means. That way, the feedback sounds different.

This was a math class, and the teacher’s favorite thing was “No.” So they gave an assessment. Whoever got the question, quote unquote, wrong, got their favorite thing they wanted. So the students, instead of having anxiety about getting things right or wrong, are like, “Yo, I got it wrong. I’m still a cheese nizzle, bang, this old.” I think it allows the students to feel pride, as Paul said, which is another driver for student success. Success equals success. So I think that reshaping is a tool that I want to throw to the people.

Paul Beckermann 30:43 My tool is one word that means lots of things, and that’s authenticity: authentic interest, authentic audience, authentic product, authentic process, authentic feedback. If we can build those things into our assessments, we will get an authentic assessment and a really powerfully motivating one on top of it.

Rena Clark 31:08 Rather than, “Why do I not understand? What am I ever going to use this?” If it’s authentic, they’re begging to do it.

Paul Beckermann 31:15 What if the kids, yeah? What if the kids came back and said, “Can we do it again?” It’s not a one-and-done. I want to do it again, and I love it, and I want to get better at it, and I see success, and I get feedback from real people, and that drives me to want to be better again. I’ll maybe never get there, but it’s motivating.

Winston Benjamin 31:39 Absolutely.

Rena Clark 31:40 I love that.

Transition Music 31:41 It’s time for that one thing. Time for that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Rena Clark 31:53 Well, we’ve had a lot of things, so I’m curious what our “one things” are going to be today.

Winston Benjamin 32:01 I’m going to throw my one thing in: People only learn by doing. Let them do.

Paul Beckermann 32:09 Let’s go back to the quote, “Humans are wired to construct knowledge through action.” I think that has driven a lot of our conversation. There’s still a place for tests, but we can’t only do traditional tests. What are other ways that we can authentically assess?

Rena Clark 32:27 And just to reiterate, learning should be active. So how do we create opportunities for active learning? Even if you are in an environment—I just was researching—if you’re lecturing beyond 15 minutes, no one’s listening anymore. They’ve lost their attention span. They can’t retain. As Winston said at the beginning, then I get antsy. I’m not listening. So you have to create those active learning opportunities.

It really should be every 10 minutes, or even less, for students. It doesn’t always have to be a big project. I might assess because I’m doing informative assessment. I’m walking around and they’re talking to another, they’re doing a 1-2-3, Think-Pair-Share, a turn and talk. All of those are also opportunities for assessments, but active learning is going to be key. If you’re with AVID, there are lots of opportunities for active learning. That’s something that we’re constantly trying to support.

Paul Beckermann 33:22 For sure, because the one who’s doing the talking and the doing is doing the learning.

Rena Clark 33:30 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 33:33 We invite you to visit us at AvidOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 33:48 We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 33:52 And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 33:56 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 33:57 You make a difference.