Recent­ly I have been think­ing a lot about assess­ment. My teach­able is art and from a stu­den­t’s per­spec­tive it is tricky to under­stand how. I always ques­tioned how do you mark art.

I was hav­ing a valu­able con­ver­sa­tion with the art teacher at my sem­i­nar school. They were talk­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of not sep­a­rat­ing the stu­dents by age, but skill instead. In their art class there is a huge range of abil­i­ty and under­stand­ably so. They cater to the needs of the stu­dents by design­ing projects based on the skill lev­els of the stu­dents. Even with­in the projects, there is room to for the stu­dents’ capa­bil­i­ties. They are more flex­i­ble with their expec­ta­tions then poten­tial­ly oth­er sub­jects. This is how I want to be. I want to cater to the expec­ta­tions of the individual.The assess­ments will be more on an indi­vid­ual basis.

In my art spe­cif­ic class we are try­ing to keep our les­son plans adapt­able to a mul­ti­tude of lev­els. We were try­ing to make it poten­tial­ly stretch all the grade lev­els, nev­er­mind just with­in one class­room. I think that will be impor­tant when I wit­nessed in a real class­room how much of a dif­fer­ent in skill lev­el the stu­dents have.

I found some­thing real­ly mon­u­men­tal in one of my class­es where we are build­ing a unit plan. It was think of you les­son first and then fig­ure out how you can inter­twine it with the cur­ricu­lum. One of the oth­er stu­dents men­tioned they had tried to do it the oth­er way before and it felt pret­ty floun­dery (yes, I know this is a made up word) and vague. I see it as a con­nec­tion to con­tent then cur­ricu­lum and then assess­ment based off of that. This youtube video, while it might not be of the high­est cal­iber, I real­ly like the con­cept behind it.

As time goes on, I’m attempt­ing to have more and more dis­cus­sions about how you can assess the arts. It is a dif­fi­cult ques­tion I seem to keep get­ting dif­fer­ent answers to. I guess this is some­thing that I will just have to keep dig­ging into. There will be a day soon I actu­al­ly have to do this.