My Favorite Alternative Assessment

I have had a really hard time getting started with this favorite alternative assessment post because I've realized there are several phenomenal ideas to consider, many of which I have incorporated or used as inspiration in some way for my own curriculum development. In the meantime, I have begun this post three times, first about a Spanish news broadcast I did in high school, next about my sixth grade science fair project, and now describing a different project we did that same year, which was interdisciplinary.

Our middle school model lent itself easily to interdisciplinary projects because our teachers taught in teams. I fondly recall one project my team teachers designed that started in Language Arts and branched into all of our other subjects soon after. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember what it was called but, first, we read a story about children running a society of their own. We then wrote short descriptive essays about countries of our own, which were meant not only to reflect our likes and dislikes but also to address the themes of personal responsibility, government and society that had been conveyed in the literature. We built upon these essays in our social studies class where particular vocabulary pertaining to systems of government and cultural values were added to our next drafts. We also discussed emblems and studied the flags of the world before designing, drawing and explaining in paragraph form our own flags. We also applied prior geographical knowledge to mapping our countries. We were able to work on the artistic aspects of those project components in our art classes, too. Even in Spanish, we were able to continue working toward the creation of our countries. We had been studying some of the major festivals of Spanish and Latin American cultures, and for weeks we focused our frases (Spanish sentences) on planning and describing a festival or cultural celebration for our original nations. Though I have forgotten a lot of the details, I remember vividly some of the products I created for this project, including a flag checked with black and white hexagons like a soccer ball and pretty fantastic salt dough map. My cultural celebration was called “La Festividad de Diversion,” or “Festival of Fun,” and mainly consisted of parades, piñatas, and all-day soccer tournaments. I remember, too, that there was a project rubric broken down by subject area learning targets because I thought it was cool how each of my teachers wrote different comments and grade totals on the same page.

I think that the Create-Your-Own-Country project (I don’t remember if that is what it was called or not) is a great example of a long-term, individual performance assessment comprised of many smaller tasks, all of which were scored by rubrics that fit together into a coherent assessment framework. The creativity, self-discipline and initiative required of students during this process, among other important qualities and life skills, lent to the authenticity of the assessment as well. While after almost 15 years, I have forgotten a lot about this alternative assessment, that which has stuck with me has also become a major part of what I teach today. My senior curriculum is anchored to the concept of Utopia that was first introduced to me during this time. My approach to literature circles, both for these students who read works of Dystopian fiction including 1984 as well as my juniors whose literature selections are not thematically related, is one area of my teaching where some of my assessment ideas are similar to the project I did as a child.