About Assessment - Reshan Richards at TEDxNYED

I'm going to share with you some thoughts I have about assessment and I'm going to start up quick disclaimer I'm going to start by Framing a problem that I see a misguided effort of people trying to control learning control how learning is defined control how learning happens and worst of all control how learning is measured I think people try to see it as this very linear isolated singularly causal process when in fact it's this giant mess of stuff that happens and this is myself drawn diagram it's not nearly as sophisticated as Truong Lee's earlier with the paint that stuff this is my closest thing to it but I guess you know my perspective on learning is that from the moment you're born to the moment you end your learning it's just always happening it's just that the settings change and the types of learning that take place might vary so that leads really to a problem with how we understand assessment and really how we use the word assessment and I think the biggest mistake is to confuse grades and assessment and I think they're completely different things I the only you know one of the best uses of grades around here or when you see them on restaurant windows I think they're useful there but if learning is this incredibly complex thing how is it possible to reduce all of these magical things that happen to a single letter or a single set of numbers I mean it just it mystifies me you know I've been trying to position myself at an intersection of formative assessment and emerging technology and even when I hear formative assessment being thrown around you know I see it as feedback and guidance and learning about where people are in their learning development and you know as I look at this intersection I see clickers and graphs and longitudinal data and heat maps and crazy heat maps and like are we trying to get to the point where teachers have to be able to look at something like this and be able to see where a kid is in their learning I mean if you're going to try to capture all of the points in somebody's learning journey you have to have tons and tons of data points to really measure it and you're really just kind of depersonalized the whole learning process and I'm glad that Audrey referenced a terminator in that kindergarten the cop shot before maybe there you didn't catch the red-eye but it seems like the cyborg or the robot teacher is the only person who can look at a kid see where they are you know oh hi kids how are you doing I know where you are and you know like then maybe that's how they kind of assess learning and I just don't that's not where I'm interested in focusing my energy now when I was a math teacher I always used to get this question you know when is our next test when is our next assessment is this going to be on the next test that's me they're the crazy hair and I used to say and they would roll their eyes well I'm assessing you right now every moment that we're together is an assessment even moments when we're not together it's part of my assessing where you are as a student and as a learner and you know they don't really like that but but it's true I'll be like I'm watching you right now I've just assessed you and so I've been trying to figure out a way to define these types of interactions all of the informal things that you know might unintentionally or intentionally happen and these are the things that really paint the picture of where people are and they're in their learning journey and I see the role of educational technology not for trying to depersonalized and create these data points but rather to strengthen relationships between teachers and learners and just all sorts of people so I'm going to shift here hold these thoughts I'm going to talk about things that I think are awesome does everybody know what that block is yeah so the other day I was talking to some middle school students and they were showing me like these crazy like lava things and chain reactions there's really amazing stuff and I was like alright I'll be really impressed if one of you can build a functional fire station to deal with all of this chaos that you're brewing in your Minecraft world and in ten minutes student built me a working fire station I was like that's awesome and then a few weeks later I found out on the internet that a whole worldwide group of people have recreated the entire world of Game of Thrones to scale in Minecraft like that's awesome and then yesterday a store on today Saturday yeah yesterday a student emailed me a picture of a tree he made awesome where somebody took grand theft auto and turned it into Back to the Future that's awesome and this this to me is really awesome it's a toaster it's awesome it was on fire it was awesome err the reason it was on fire was because of a couple of kids at the school where I worked before when they got the toaster in the building were like let's make grilled cheeses and you know I don't know if you are familiar with conveyor belt toasters like in hotels they're not made or designed to handle grilled cheese sandwiches but yet you know how would they know that of course you can make a grilled cheese brilliant you know it wasn't foolish they they saw the parameters and the environment around them and they tested it and they tried to do something with it so you know those examples that I was just showing to mean are examples of tools and environments that have been created and the people who made them of course they have their own intent of what those things are going to be used for but the beauty and the design is that they're open enough for people to try to really push the boundaries of what might be possible so I made a kind of a quest to try to find out tools that I could use to support my teaching that I thought you know kind of had that or support that same type of experience you know and those experiences they can't be measured you know they can't be graded they just kind of happen and you look at them and they can't be graded and you know you can only guide and support them and so I started a blog trying to like find apps and tools that were out there and it's not a popular blog nobody goes there so I wrote this post zero comments nobody liked it one tweet by me and the amazing thing that happened it's just an incredible series of events that from this post the next day because of that tweet the developers wrote me back and we're like oh we're interested in some of the things you're doing and over the next two years we formed a partnership it's my two partners who are in Poland and I've never met them in person yet we've been working together for two years and you know my daughter was born and then about ten days later I gave birth to this app and you know I'm not going to talk about the app really but I'll talk a little bit quickly about the intent that you know I have ideas of how I'm trying to capture these informal conversations and dialogue and support relationships between actual people and I know people look at some of the technology and say oh there's this use where's that use and you know maybe that's not so good maybe it's perpetuating problems but I try to think of it as being neutral you put it out there and you let people do with it do with it what they want and see what kind of good things happen so I'm going to I'm going to use some of my precious time here just to share just just one video that came up in my like a narcissistic googling of myself over the summer today you have come into our journey across the solar system with a pilot Bruce we are currently approaching the Sun is the center of the solar system it is a big ball of the huge versions called fishing it provides light the earth is really really really really really big but really really really hard so I'll show the rest of it in a second so the reason that this made me happy was I never made an instruction manual on how to build something like this and I have no idea what purpose or what reason this young man decided to put this thing together but he somehow stumbled upon something that I created and made something else out of it that I didn't you know I don't know how he did some of the things in here and I just thought that was really neat he goes through all of the planets in the solar system and he hears here's how it continues this is the asteroid belt it divides the solar system into terrestrial planets and the gas giants is also a way higher to ability and Falcon but you're being chased thank you for coming on this year's trip I want in the next two months so please I join way home over at captain Bruce so my final thing that I'll show on the screen up here is a just this simple idea that don't try to control the learning experience just let things happen and you guide and support people thank you

Channel: Reshan Richards

Views: 46,447

Rating: 4.685864 out of 5

Keywords: TED, TEDx, TEDxNYED

Id: O_n97rQzKgQ

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2013