Assessment

I must admit I really like assessing student’s skills, knowledge and understanding in an explicit manner and I enjoy that wonderful moment when students can fairly assess each other’s artwork.

I believe that there are fair and fun ways to assess student artwork here you will find some tips of what has worked well in my classrooms over the years.

Having recently completed a valuable 10 week online Assessment Essentials  course run by Evidence based Education EBE (https://evidencebased.education/assessment-essentials/) I am reminded to carefully and explicitly reflect on what it is exactly I am wanting my students to learn?

Who is the feedback from? (E.g. a teacher, a peer, self- reflection)

Verbal Feedback: The most effective feedback I give would have to be verbal feedback given in the moment, one to one with a student.

Students will tell you how unhelpful it is to be told at the end of a painting that they should have blended their colours more together! The students I teach are normally quite happy to tell their friend, what they did well but it is critical to show students explicitly what they need to do right now in order to improve the artwork they are making.

At other times I find the classic, Two Stars and a wish strategy effective. This can be given verbally too or in written form. This is where students or a teacher gives the artwork two positive comments and one piece of constructive feedback explaining how they think the artwork might be improved. Another example of good formative feedback would be WWW (what went well?) and EBI (Even Better If).

I am careful to model how to give feedback explicitly and often share with older students how I continually self-reflect on my lessons, changing them slightly from one class to another and why.

Step 1: What are you assessing?

Consider what you are assessing. In this phase I ask myself a LOT of questions. Am I checking to see if their fine motor control is improving? Do I want to see how well a student can draw? Am I assessing their thinking skills? Ability to compare two artworks? Am I checking in to see if they can work independently or with a team? Am I assessing their knowledge of mixing colours? Or whether they can develop an idea and record it in their sketchbook effectively? What is it and why is it so important?

Written Feedback:

I find that written feedback can be very effective when students require more complex steps that they will need to refer to on several occasions. As I teach over 530 students a week, written feedback for even a single year group of 120 students can be challenging to manage. This is where I would usually choose to use an app such as SEESAW, which allows me to give more complex feedback verbally and it also means students can listen to it multiple times. When I can I give students the option whether they want give feedback verbally or in a written form, after all some of us love to talk and some of us love to write or read.

Step 2: Why are you assessing it?

For art teachers and other specialist teachers there is a real catch between wanting to and needing to explicitly teach ‘a skill’, such as the elements of art or how to accurately sketch a 3D shape or mix primary colours, and needing to ask yourself HOW or WHY this skill or technique would help a student’s artistic learning. Sometimes I catch myself out here, for example, I might tell myself that I am assessing a student’s ability to mix colour paint to create a shade. Now this is a valuable art skill, but is it one I need to assess and is it one that parents would want to be informed about, why or why not? Is it a skill or the application of that skill? I often pause here and talk with colleagues before committing to an assessment piece.

Next Steps/ Targets:

I find ‘next step’ and ‘targets particularly helpful for students. As an adult I like knowing exactly what I am doing well and exactly what I need to do next, in order to improve, why would our students be different? Most of us innately want to do well, we want to get better at everything and anything, especially things we put value in, whether that be tennis, rugby, cooking or cycling or drawing.

For students who appear to be a little reluctant in art, I find that if I can make a connection between taking small steps when learning a sport, to taking small steps in art.