English Studies: Authentic Assessment as Learning

The majority of this post originally appeared here. I have adapted it to include the PowerPoint presentation given on the 3rd of December, 2016 at the English Studies Day at Hunter River High School.

PPT - 'Authentic Assessment as Learning'; presented 3/12/16.

Complete Unit/Assessment Task - 'On the Road'

Associated Resources - here, here and here.
Special credit to my colleague Kira Bryant for the meta-language activities found in the above unit.

The idea of travelling for recreation has its own meaning, and sometimes it can be best expressed in imagery. This picture above was taken in a Ballarat alleyway.

So, picture this, it's Term 3 for Year 12 and I'm at the tail end of teaching English Studies. It's a point where I can now reflect on the subject with some hindsight. I would be lying if I said that I had gone into teaching this subject without some degree of trepidation, however, it turned out to be one of the most liberating, vocationally-affirming and positive experiences of my teaching career so far.

The way I see it; English Studies gives space to engage students with the role of language and texts in representing our authentic interaction with the world around us. For my class, this meant learning how to write letters and postcards, plan holidays, construct a resume that promotes their abilities, work collaboratively and effectively, make appropriate use of technology, and communicate in a meaningful manner. 

Something else to consider with English Studies in keeping students engaged is being strategic about the way assessment is used. I have found that the most effective way of using assessment with English Studies is through project-based (or authentic) assessment. In the terminology of the syllabus, this means Assessment as Learning. The last term of a 7 term slog with these students was always going to be a stretch in regards to mustering student-enthusiasm, so I knew I had to come up with a program for the travel-writing unit On the Road that:

• Integrated assessment into every lesson (therefore making the content meaningful and answerable to the audit process).
• Incorporated real life skills (IE. Planning their own holiday - something I'm sure that all of them will have to do at some point in the near future).
• Was fun (meaning that I could incorporate an excursion as a nice way to finish the topic with a class that had been such a pleasure to teach).

I had four weeks allocated for the assessable part of the topic at the beginning of this term, so I created a booklet of three sections. In order to complete the assessment 'task', students also had to work through a couple of lessons in the booklet designed to build their use of travel-related meta-language.

Section 1: Plan Your Overseas Trip

This is the nuts and bolts section and, at first glance, is mainly organisational in outlook. Students must select an international destination and then use the internet to research all the necessary components of a real holiday. This means:

1. Flights - time and price.
2. An itinerary that details where they will be going on each day of a 7 day trip.
3. Accommodation.
4. Distance and means of transport from airport to accommodation.
5. Safety precautions (vaccinations, travel insurance)

Students are also required to compose three 'Facebook' posts (in the assessment booklet) describing three of their hypothetical days on their holiday.

Section 2:The Excursion

What's more authentic than getting your students to co-plan their own excursion? We decided to go on a day trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains (about an hour's train ride from where we are). Students had to research the logistics of catching the train there, times of arrival and departure, and figure out an itinerary that would include lunch and a visit of some local sights. You might have to adapt it if you want to use the project and don't want to go to Katoomba.

While on the excursion, students were required to take at least five photographs that would represent their travels, categorise them with a class-specific hashtag (and four other hashtags of their own invention), and then analyse their photographs in terms of what they represent.

I can confidently say that this excursion (on which I took 14 students) was the most technically successful excursion I have ever taken students on. By that I mean every student was engaged with the task at hand - taking photographs of Katoomba - and the 14 students who attended accounted for about 70% of the entire class (the highest percentage of attendees I have ever gotten anywhere on excursion). On the train trip home, nearly every student spent the entire hour uploading their photographs to Instagram and hashtagging them. 

Section 3: Travel Writing

Students read an excerpt of travel writing (taken from this here blog) and answer some comprehension questions. I included this section to round off the booklet with a travel writing-focused activity, to illustrate to the students the way their excursion and planning links to reading and writing. 

Assessment

The rubric at the end of the unit makes use of analytical criteria, with students assessed in four ways. I'll just write a little on each one...

• Audience and Purpose: This refers to the student's ability to make use of language in a way that is audience-appropriate. In other words, writing with some degree of formality when required and understanding the purpose of language in certain contexts. (Links to Outcome H2.2) 
• Representation: The student's ability to annotate/analyse their own photographs in a way that insightfully represents their travel experience. (Links to Outcome H1.4) 
• Planning: How well (authentically) and in-depth did the student plan their overseas journey, and the excursion to Katoomba? (Links to Outcome H4.1) 
• Commitment: How thoroughly the student completes the assessment booklet and/or gets involved in the class throughout the four weeks. (Links to all three of the above outcomes, really).

Added Authenticity

As an additional piece of fun I organised with Blue Mountains City Council to have the five best photographs  re-posted on the Blue Mountains Visitor Information Centres Instagram feed. I think this was a great way to demonstrate to the students the authentic nature of the task, and the ways in which representation of experience (IE. Thoughtful photographs with a range of hashtags that show authorial intention) is both an English skill and a real world skill.

Teaching: The Demographic Approach

In the words of my city council, "Penrith is here"

English is all about context. We look at the context of authors, the context of their texts, the context of a text's intended audience, the context of our students in responding to said text, and the context of the teacher teaching the text and how it fits into the syllabus. But really, thinking outside of the KLA, isn't everything about context?

"I want to give you $20".

If someone said that to me, then I would want to know why. What is the context? I would want to know who's giving me this money, why they are giving it to me, and what they expect me to either do for it or do with it. 

Then I would accept the $20. Most likely. Well, it depends on the context.

I teach in Western Sydney at Glenmore Park High School; a fantastic comprehensive government school full of great students who will no doubt grow into our proud future. Like all schools, it comes with its own context - both in terms of the immediate community and the wider demographic of Western Sydney - and these are things that bear some examination for a couple of reasons:

• If we know where the child is from, we'll have a better idea of where they're going.
• If we know what their parents expect and want, we'll be able to better cater to the needs of our community.
• If we know the sort of priorities and attitudes that have been passed on to the students from their community, we'll know how to better implement the kind of change that will have a generational effect and foster increased positivity towards education in our demographic.

In my case, Penrith City Council have a wonderful website with data on the city's demographics called Penrith Progression. There are some caveats that need minding when looking at statistics, such as not drawing direct conclusions when data could be correlating with certain observed trends. This simply means that if I see a percentage in the numbers then I should be careful not to say that this automatically proves a hypothesis I may hold. That would be an opinion, rather than a fact. 

I can, however, use the demographic data as a basis for assumptions. I can assume certain things as a means to explore pedagogy. This should be a design process rather than a solution. I can use the information gleaned from Penrith Progression (or any other set of figures related to demographics) to support ideas I want to test out. If these ideas work; hurray! If they don't; look at the data again and perhaps craft a new hypothesis - try something else. Perfection is impossible and pedagogy should therefore be flexible and fluid; constantly shifting and improving to make things better. In short: it's a design process.

For those who teach in Western Sydney, here are Penrith's demographics (as of 2015):

Housing

• 50% of families in Penrith have children, which is equal to the rest of Sydney, however, Penrith has a 25% higher proportion of single-parent families.
• The average personal income for an adult in Penrith is $632 per week - better than Blacktown or Liverpool, but less than Sydney and Camden.
• 10% of Western Sydney's population is concentrated in Penrith.
• 22% of Penrith residents own their house outright, with a further 42% paying off a mortgage. A further 26% rent. This compares as similar to Blacktown and Liverpool, however, it does constitute a drop compared to Penrith in 2005, where 32% of houses were owned outright. There has also been a shift towards increased renting in Penrith (something that has not occurred in Blacktown or Liverpool).

 Education

• In all of Western Sydney, Penrith has the highest proportion of adults who finished school at Year 10 (32%) and the least to complete Year 12 (38% - compared to 50% in both Blacktown and Liverpool). 
• Penrith is a 'leading skills city', with 22% of adults having vocational certificates (trades). In contrast, 10% go to university - which is less than other Western Sydney areas (Liverpool has 17% of their Year 12 students going on to university). 

Other

• People in Penrith are much more likely to go on to work in their hometown. 56% of workers in Penrith also live here, which contrasts with 38% in Liverpool and 44% in Blacktown.
• In the next 15 years, demographic models currently predict that the amount of Penrith citizens under the age of 15 will increase by a whooping 42%.

Some ideas I've assumed from this information were that:

1. Due to such a relatively high proportion of Penrith students staying on in Penrith to work, this may mean that attitudes towards work and education are more likely to be entrenched and generational. 
2. The increase in the number of Penrith-dwelling teenagers in the near future will mean that schools (particularly those in growth areas, like Glenmore Park High School) will continue expanding towards capacity.

You might be wondering what I do with this information. In my personal teaching context, the main idea is that it supports a Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) approach that favours the building of positive relationships through extrinsic recognition of desired attitudes and actions. If I want to affect generational change then it becomes important to teach students (especially those who might be at risk of long term disengagement) that school can be a positive experience and that, even if they leave with the sole purpose of picking up a trade, they may therefore pass on positive opinions of schooling to their own children. This may, in turn, then improve the percentage of students primed for university enrollment in the next generation.

It's a long game, but I've always preferred to play the long game. And, at the end of the day, I shouldn't really need an excuse for having a PBL focus in my pedagogy, but it certainly helps to reinforce it if I can see what the data says about my city. I can use this information in my design process for catering to my community better.   

Elysium: To Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores...

The theme of this year's English Teachers Association Conference was one of exploration and discovery. Coming off the back of the emergence of the completed English Textual Concepts framework and the oncoming new senior English syllabuses, presenters were encouraged to match the rhetoric of the Shakespeare quote "To unpathed waters, undreamed shores".

I had a few ideas for presentations but the one that fit this concept most readily was Elysium, the 2013 Neill Blomkamp science fiction film, which works rather well when paired with George Orwell's Animal Farm in a Preliminary HSC Comparative Study. 

The PowerPoint Presentation on Elysium can be found here:

Resource: ETA 2016 Elysium PPT.

The majority of the Elysium part of the Comparative Study has been included on this blog with explanations of the resources and programming. These can be found on the links below, with each resource attached at the bottom of each post:

Link: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Elysium and Animal Farm

Link: Elysium - Comprehension and Analysis

Link: The Language of Elysium - Connotation and Invented Lexicon

Link: Elysium - Characterisation and Representation

Link: Elysium - Allegory, Allusion, and Satire