New Ways of Thinking about Assessment and Curriculum.

Abstract

Almost every first grade has at least one Peter, one youngster with thick glasses halfway down his nose who comes to school wearing shoes without socks. He is a likeable guy, but he's always a little lost. His pencil is broken and chewed so that it barely writes, and he can't find his book even though it is in the pile of papers and books he is rummaging through. Peter is the child who delivers the important note from his mother at the end of the day instead of in the morning and who misses his bus because he detoured through the gym. The most troubling thing about Peter is that he is not making much progress toward learning to read and write. He has all the characteristics that mark him as being one of those children who will struggle throughout his school career. The story that follows is Peter's story, but it is also a story about new visions of assessment embedded in collaborative teaching and multiple ways of knowing curriculum. This new view of assessment is predicated on an aesthetic view of literacy, a view that embraces the notion that literacy develops as individuals make sense of their lived experience using the full range of human meaning-making systems. From this perspective, print literacy is. not a separate strand of knowing but rather a communicative skill that develops simultaneously with other knowledge and skills. Reading is thought of as a larger process than just making meaning of print. It is a process that also goes on when an individual interprets a piece of art, watches a drama, or views a film (Berghoff, 1998). But I am getting ahead of the story. Let me back up and start again by saying that Peter's story comes from the most powerful experience I have had as an elementary teacher. Like many special educators, I was invited to collaborate with a general education classroom teacher, Susan Hamilton. Susan and I had met in a college class that challenged us to read and synthesize current research and to rethink some of our basic assumptions about literacy and curriculum. A few months after that experience, we decided to spend a year working together in Susan's urban first-grade classroom to develop curriculum that reflected the new ideas developing in the language education field and to experiment with new ways of thinking about assessment. It is that year that I am writing about.