I’m fortunate to share my educative space with teachers who are implementing progressive practices in their classroom. I met with Connor Podmorrow in March of 2024 to inquire about his progressive assessment practices. Connor and I share a passion for integrating project-based learning, self-directed learning, and e-portfolio’s. In this interview, I am most interested in how he applies formative and summative assessment practices in his classroom. Here are the questions and videos of our interview:
Question 1: Tell us a little bit more about how you use student directed self-assessments, and with students helping with creating assessment in your practice. I’ll get you to start by telling us a little bit it was teaching philosophy and how you use it in assessment.
Connor highlights many of the challenges we face as teachers, including being able to communicate effectively to the parents and guardians. Communicating home is one of the fundamental reasons I also use digital portfolio’s. I have my students email their parents their digital portfolio links, within in the first weeks of school, to practice writing professional emails and to learn to embed hyperlinks. My hope is that this facilitates parent and guardian involvement and that those at home can share in the students progress and success in the classroom.
Question 2:
How is assessment integrated with students? Would you do it at the beginning so that they can have an idea of what the formative process looks like or do you wait for at the end and then sit down with them and create a summative assessment rubric or like how does that look?
Connor responds by saying, “Again it’s very reflexive on the the kids that I’m working with so if I’m working with say like a group of grade 10, 11, 12s there will be I will usually have a group of curricular competencies based on that course whether it’s social 10 or social justice and I’ll have kids circle and take those curriculum pieces and place them into their own rubric and then from there.” He then goes on to describe that students will reflect directly on how their project highlights the strengths of that competency. He also has them address their growth in the project. He works collaboratively in a verbal conversation with each student in a conference setting. This is something I have been hearing more about in the classroom and I’m glad teachers are giving their 1-1 support to students in this way. In my opinion, this is much more comparable to how people get feedback in the workforce. They don’t get an “A+” on their work, they get feedback, suggestions, praise, or otherwise, and they have to digest that feedback and make changes accordingly.
Question #3
If someone is interested in the philosophies and the methodologies that you’re using could you suggest any books or resources?
Connor: “3 big ones that I lean on hard:
1 – Curse to Teach – Parker Palmer
2 – Seven Fixes – movement from summative assessment
3 – Ungrading (shown below)
https://studio.youtube.com/video/kXD7hzVlbIU/edit
Question #4
Okay, hypothetically, you’re sitting down with a student and you’re asking them about what they think their grade should be. What is some language that you use around that what’s the conversation piece if they feel like they got a certain grade, and you feel like it’s a different direction either better or worse?
Connor says he uses a visual representation of proficiency scale with, with engagement as the measurement. He says, “I lean more now to more of a visual representation of that great determination piece so I’ll have a piece of paper here and I would say like like an amber, a green, or a red and for proficiency scale that would be like extending, proficient, developing and emerging. Then, I’ll have an axel versus engagement, and then we’ll use that as a way to reference where they are.”
I appreciate that Connor has considered a visual component to the conferencing with his students. It’s important to have clarity around assessment and students are familiar with the proficiency scale, but often have difficulty understanding the association with their core or curricular competencies goals.
Overall, I appreciated sitting down with Connor and hearing his passion about assessment practices in his classroom. I gained some new insight into the practical application of conferencing with students, I myself have just started to do this in the last semester. I enjoy working one-on-one with students to talk about their perspective on their efforts and I value the formative approach that Connor has in his classroom practice.
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