The kind of assessment that does my heart good

I wish I'd had an assessment-themed Buzzword Bingo card today during the final Zoom session for my Colson Whitehead class because I kept hearing terms like critical thinking and synthesis and transfer of skills to other classes--from my students.

I didn't prompt them to use those terms--they came up with them on their own. Usually in upper-level literature classes, I require students to write a low-stakes essay at the end of the semester reflecting on what they've learned and how the course has affected them as students, but the one concession I made to the new demands of online learning was to cancel that essay and replace it with a final Zoom discussion covering the same ground. 

We had fun talking about Whitehead's significance as a novelist--how each new novel felt like the most original and important one until we got to the next one, how his early playfulness morphed into powerful prose that made students want to go out and change the world. Students talked about the demands Whitehead made on their attention, challenging them to fill in gaps and examine their own assumptions and expectations, and how their explorations of historical and cultural contexts enriched their understanding.

Several students said they were initially nervous about being in such a small class, scared to step out and speculate during class discussions, but they said the books opened up so many different avenues for discussion that they grew comfortable taking opportunities to direct the class to new insights. And best of all, they showed how the skills they'd honed in my class helped them excel in other classes as well, giving them confidence to speak up in discussions and examine texts with a more discerning eye.

Of course today's class discussion isn't going to produce any official data or written documents that could enrich an assessment portfolio, but it did my heart good to hear my students talking so passionately about their learning experiences. Sometimes we don't need data to prove that good work has been done here.