Distance teaching is an important challenge for school. In thinking about verification tests and evaluation, let’s not be distracted by false problems
Distance teaching is now part of the Italian school which, even with all the difficulties of the case, suddenly had to adapt to doing something for which it was not at all prepared and on whose impossibility in a short time I think no one would have bet.
I am a teacher, and on these days charged with fatigue and uncertainty it seems to me that among the questions that most often overlook during our collegial meetings – always, I always gather, electronic – there is the important node of verification and evaluation tests. Can the activities carried out at a distance, outside the school environment, can be evaluated? The response of the Ministry of Education to this question was clear: it can be evaluated, indeed it must be. In note 388 of 17 March we read: “If it is true that distance teaching activities must be carried out, because otherwise the social reason of the school itself would be less, as constitutionally envisaged, it is equally necessary that constant evaluation activities are carried out, according to the principles of timeliness and transparency which, pursuant to current legislation, but even more than common educational sense, must inform any evaluation activity”.
But, in practice, how to be sure, working at a distance, that children and teenagers do not receive help, suggestions or that, even, do not deliver tasks carried out by others? How to be sure that the evaluation is not false by these elements? In the anxiety to find a solution, there are those who suggest to make the tests carry out with a rigid “video surveillance” via the webcam, as if there were a thousand ways to evade a control that can always be circumvented also at school, let alone at a distance. All this, then, would transform the school, which must promote values such as democracy and the formation of the citizen, in a kind of authoritarian nightmare from dystopian science fiction films. The feeling is that, in general, setting up the discussion in these terms to lose sight of what should be the real purpose and meaning of verification and evaluation.
A false problem
As a teacher, I find that one of the most demotivating aspects of the current management of my work is precisely the growing importance that is given to its purely bureaucratic aspects: with the increase of work made of “cards” (today mainly bits) the time that can be dedicated to that “doing school” that is above all reflection, research and experimentation (the real one, which does not need projects of dozens of pages) decreases. The problem is that in the long run this setting conditions the perception we have of our work. It is perhaps a secondary effect of what psychologists call “prejudice of salienza”, which leads us to overestimate the importance of something we are very exposed to: There are so many strictly bureaucratic aspects of school work, which sometimes seems to us to be reduced almost only to those. And here the evaluation ends up being mentally traced back to the simple act of writing a number in a box, after having controlled in a “police” way that the “accused” is only and without help when he is called to lay down. But setting the discussion in these terms is to look at the finger instead of the moon, because We should remind us that the evaluation, as well as school, is much more than this.
Why do we evaluate?
Let’s ask ourselves, first of all, because a part of the teachers’ work consists in evaluating their pupils. The evaluation has a profound training value: allows our students to understand what they learned and what to be reinforced instead; On which concepts it is necessary to return and which are already stopped on which you can build. Reducing the evaluation to an alleged value of value (moreover inevitably class) on which to place the students is a way to empty meaning what has tried to do at school. Thinking of eliminating the problem of those who “coffon” refusing to evaluate the distance activities is to try to remedy a bad one with one even worse, because an important phase of the training process would be ignored.
Provide tools to understand and improve
If you focus on the training aspect of the evaluation, the temptation to turn into referees with the whistle into hand passes immediately: this is not the point and this is not what we are called to do. We are called, however, to clarify with our class – in presence as at a distance – what are the elements on which our assessments are based and why. In particular, we must explain why some aspects are more important (for example, the ability to rework the concepts learned in an original and personal way) and others, on the contrary, negligible and secondary (the trivial distraction error when a complex procedure is clearly acquired). And since Our task is above all to strengthen the ability to think independently in students and to increase their critical senseany request for explanations on our assessments and on our criteria must be accepted with joy and certainly not with suspicion. In the practical management of distance teaching, in which a part of the communicative channel is disappeared through which this process is made, it is necessary to review our usual way of proceeding.
Some aspects to focus on
Wanting to give some general indications on the management of verification and evaluation, this could be a proposal:
- We re -disclose the parameters used so farcommunicating to students and families what aspects will be privileged in the evaluation of the activities carried out at a distance, for example the ability to personally rework the contents and to know how to use them in an original and creative way.
- Taking into account age and maturity, We work to enhance the self -assessment skills of studentsinviting them to express a judgment on their works, based on parameters discussed and agreed. As the psychology of the leadershipincrease the sense of “us”, of co -responsibility, will be an incentive to take on responsibilities and not to cheat, because you feel part of the decisions made. The ability to self -assess is among the most useful and important ones that the school can transmit.
- We take this opportunity to enhance the tests set on “Reality tasks”That is, anchoring to experiences of daily life accessible in the domestic environment, in order to facilitate contact with what surrounds us and maintain high design for the future, which, as psychologists and pedagogists point out, is one of the ways to download anxiety from isolation.
- If it is deemed appropriate, You can also think of proposing evidence that allow children and teenagers to put order among the thoughts of this particular momentwhich for many of them is full of unreal anxieties, of issues including in half, of concerns to which it is not always possible to give voice, of moments of boredom and demotivation. In this type of test, artistic and creative activities are also fully included.
- The distance teaching platforms allow easily to structure tests for verification. Better to have the foresight, however, to balance the rapid tests (comfortable to propose but rather arid and not very stimulating) with other tests that children can relate to more freedom and creativity.
- We experience the alternative verification methods that technology allows. For example, students can be allowed to deliver works in multimedia form, recording interventions, short debates, mounting or animating videos, within the limits of their skills, without imposing, but alongside these forms to the more traditional ones, according to the attitudes and skills of the individual.
- We use the electronic sharing tools to continue making children work workinviting them to make their contribution to collective works. These are tests that will have the dual value of tools for evaluation and methods to continue cultivating the sense of community at a time of forced distance.
- Flexibility in delivery times is very importantbecause not all families have PCs, tablets and smartphones in sufficient numbers for all small students. Better to plan work on long times, perhaps with differentiated deliveries according to the needs, and without excessively penalizing the delay, which may be due to factors that cannot be controlled directly by the student.
I hope it is useless to underline that Evaluate is much more than to make the mathematical average of the results of the individual checks. In this delicate phase, in which the practical difficulties are amplified and the typical fragility of the age of children and young people can make their effect feel, it is good to carefully calibrate the weight to be given to each test in the overall evaluation, favoring for each student the ways that most adequate to his skills. Nothing so different from what we are normally called to do, but with more attention, in a difficult period, in which children and teenagers need to support teachers particular.
The discussion can be extended to the question of the “safe promotion” for this school yearthe subject of a recent decree, probably motivated by the unprecedented situation that children and teenagers are experiencing, with an emotional load that can have strong repercussions on their performance. If you focus on the training value of the evaluation, which is not significantly affected, this aspect is also strongly reduced.
