Thursday, September 27, 2018

Grace-Full Assessment


As part of my role in CC team leadership, I had the opportunity to help host a workshop this past weekend on how we assess our students.

Going in to this, I have had to admit to myself that assessment in our house has become something that my children dread. One of my weaknesses as a finisher with a high standard is to focus on the things we haven't finished or what isn't complete rather than celebrating what has been accomplished and all the things that are improving.

The title of this seminar was so compelling to me especially in thinking about assessing with grace.

As we approach the HS years of homeschooling, I'd love to hear from those of you who have homeschooled through High School. Specifically, I'd love to hear how you assess work that may not be as black and white as Math let's say.

Math is relatively easy to grade, you look at how many problems there are and how many were correct and come up with a grade. But what about studying current events, looking at the heart and attitude and taking into account the ability of each child?

These are the kinds of questions I've been thinking about and we got a ton of great info at this workshop. Since I didn't come up with the information, I don't know if I can just type it all out and share it here but I took almost twelve pages of notes in my journal. The time together was refreshing and encouraging, it was challenging and opened up some new ideas of thinking. We spent time in the Word and looked at how Jesus taught and assessed even the disciples.

Have you ever thought about grace-full assessment? What would that look like to you?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have homeschooled both of my children from K-12. My daughter is now in college and my son is in his last year of high school.

The curriculum that they used was fairly difficult but they did not have to do every question or every lesson. Our schedule was fairly laid back and flexible. We took time off, traveled, read a lot, watched a lot of educational videos and spent beautiful days outside.

As you said, it is hard to assess subjects that are not either right or wrong as in math. I think though, that we know when our kids are putting in a good faith effort on something and when they are being lazy and half-hearted.

Of course we don't want to have low standards just because that is the standard - but sometimes I think, homeschool parents are too much the other way! Intense schedules with little free time and expecting too much. A parent I know told me that her son's schedule (not yet in high school) was about 7am-4pm (with some breaks in between).

Before submitting my daughter's transcript/GPA to colleges, I wished that I had asked myself "what would her grades have been if she had been in a traditional school classroom?"

After the fact, it felt a bit unfair to have based her grades on an intense curriculum thereby "penalizing" her by giving her a lower GPA than she most likely would have received had she been in a traditional classroom.