Reflection+Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia: This was the first project that I did and it was probably as much of a learning experience for me as it was for the kids. I knew I wanted to do authentic assessment and I knew I wanted the students creating projects, but I wasn’t sure yet what to expect and how exactly I wanted to assign them. What I did was I created a very open ended project. I did this for several reasons. One, this was a unit that didn’t have a large amount of material, so this was an attempt at reducing mass repetition. I had hoped students would create a large variety of projects, thus keeping things interesting. Second, students rarely get a chance to have a say in their education, especially their assessment, as a result they have lost a lot of their creativity. I wanted to get them to start thinking about all the different ways of displaying information. I wanted them to realize you can show me understanding without taking a test. This was their opportunity to start getting creative. Finally, I initially thought I was going to do all my projects as very open ended projects and just make the rule that you could not duplicate the style of project you have already used. I felt very good about all this when I was assigning it. As a class we discussed various styles of projects and the kids had a lot of good ideas. When I turned them loose to start working, it seemed they had no idea what to do. I think they were just so used to being told exactly what to do, now that they were able to be creative and do what they wanted they had no idea how to approach the situation. After the students started working I noticed that the vast majority were either doing a report or making a poster. This makes perfect sense. Probably the two most commonly used assessments outside of actually taking a test or quiz would be making a poster or writing a paper. This was not creative, this was not authentic. The correct information was being addressed, but the kids didn’t know how to be creative with it. After this project was finished I decided that for majority of the rest of the projects I am going to give a more defined task. Not because I don’t want authentic assessment and I don’t want student creativity, but instead because that is what I want. I needed to break the cycle of traditional assessment in my students’ minds and let them know that there are many other ways to display information and start allowing their creativity to work again. There were several students who did a fine job and had very creative projects, there were also some great posters and reports. But as a whole, I felt that for a project that was supposed to avoid repetition, that is primarily what we had. I don’t think that it was my fault or my students fault. I think it is the fault of the system that they have been in for eleven or twelve years.