Sometimes you need the lyrics sheet.
Why Assessment shouldn’t be about memorizing.
The last 8 months or so have been a wild time to be an educator…
Now that I’ve written that down it seems like the understatement of a lifetime or a taunt to the world to see what it still has to throw at us. So if you’ve got wood near you somewhere, please knock with me.
To be honest, this time has really allowed me to reflect as an educator and look at what I think is important in my classroom (first virtually and then in-person). One of the many educator things I’ve been able to mess with and refine and really get to what I think is a much better format is formal assessment.
When students are remote and they have google, Alexa, Siri, or any number of resources at their disposal the old way of testing really goes out the window. I remember a wave of folks putting in our campus group chats and in other forums questions about locking down browsers or insuring students aren’t “cheating” in some fashion or another. One at a time we realized there really is no way to do that. So we have two choices, pretend it isn’t happening and keep asking the same multiple choice questions we asked kids to memorize from a study guide of topics every couple weeks, or we throw that all out and do assessments differently. That second option is of course the better one but man is it more difficult.
Personally, I’ve been trying throwing it all out and doing it differently, and I think I’m getting a much better look at what my students are learning and not what are they memorizing. So I’ve given up multiple choice questions and have moved to short answers. I let students use their resources (our notes, their work, our readings) to really give me solid answers. I try to ask them to give me real life examples of the things we learned or to solve a problem and explain to me how and why they would do it a certain way.
In reality we all use our resources every day. None of us are flying blindly through life with everything we do memorized and perfect. Which, brings me to titular lyric sheet of this blog. I watched NOFX (seminal punk band) do a live stream recently from one of their backyards. They played all the hits. Songs I am sure they have played in venues across the country more times than they can count. But guess what? Fat Mike (the singer) needed lyrics sheets. They were taped all over his monitor speaker. He couldn’t remember all the lyrics to the songs they have been rehearsing and playing for years. And guess what, it didn’t matter. The songs were still great. They still put on an awesome show.
So in a world where we can increasingly look up every nugget of information in mere moments, why are we asking kids to memorize the “lyrics” and recite them. Its about what they can do with the information that matters the most. So embrace it. Don’t deny it. We all need the lyrics sheets every once in a while. Its the song we play with them that matters.
Check out NOFX Live from Weekend at Fatty’s and look for those lyric sheets.
