I think it is very important for teachers to work backwards and know what they expect their students to accomplish from a specific task. I do not however, agree with the fact that all teachers need to have the same assessments for their students. “Three different teachers may all be working toward the same content standard but if their assessments vary considerably, how are we to know which students have achieved what? Agreement on needed evidence of learning leads to greater curricular coherence and more reliable evaluation by teachers” (pg 20). I do not think that all teachers need to have the same assessments for each of their students in order to know if they learned the material or not. I think it is important to be flexible with your assessment in order to cater to the personalities in your class room. It is obviously important and necessary for teachers to teach to the standards but I think there can be different ways of showing it. Students are not always all on the same page even though they may have been taught the same content. I think it is very important for formal assessments to be the same such as trimester tests, but assessments given throughout the trimester can be different. At my school, all of the first grade teachers meet every Wednesday to discuss the plans for the coming week. In some cases a class may be ahead of another class and therefore the worksheets or informal assessments will vary. One class may need more instruction on a specific topic than another class. There are also different kinds of assessments that have been given such as verbal assessments, written assessments, or assessments that are shown through pictures. I think it is important to have some formal assessments that can be compared with the other classes but I also think it is important to add in your own assessments because ultimately you are the one that needs to know what your students can or can’t do. You are the one that needs to be able to correct the misconceptions that your students may have.
I see what you are saying about not all students being the same and therfore requiring different forms of assessments, but I also understand what the article was getting at in saying teachers of a grade level should be consistent across the board. I think the Cantlon article offered a unique way of handling this, which is on going assessments. I think there should be several methods of assessing students per learning objective, but those several methods should be used in each class.
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At first glance the idea of giving all students the same grade/curriculum wide assessment struck me as a horrible idea as well. Throughout most of our TE courses as well as my other FCE and LLT courses on assessment, differentiation has been drilled into our heads. It is definitely crucial in some situations to give assessments that are individualized to the specific students needs, but so far in our classrooms I have to admit that I have seen some benefits of the grade wide writing prompts, and DSA reading assessments. Because those assessments are grade wide we will be able to have reading groups made up of students from each grade that all have similar needs and therefore we will be able to help more students individually at their level. If the reading assessments werent grade wide and we couldnt all work and share students as a team I might have one student who is really high stuck in my class without others to be in a high level reading group with. "Standardized" assessments do have an awful stigma and I still dont agree with them completely, but I was surprised by how helpful they have been so far in some situations in our classrooms.
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