All About the ‘FOR’ Learning

            Assessment FOR Learning is used to enhance the student’s learning, which is truly the goal of education. School should not just be about the grades we get, and the paper that says we have graduated at the end; school should be about learning, inside and outside the classroom, learning about different cultures, societal models and routines, along with the universal necessities of reading, writing and arithmetic. When you take summative evaluations and grading away, you are left with the verbal feedback students receive – from their teachers, peers and their self-assessments. This is why Assessment FOR Learning and Assessment AS Learning go hand-in-hand. Assessment AS Learning allows students the ability to develop self-assessment and metacognition skills including, the ever so important in today’s curriculum, the 21^st Century skills. The main focus of feedback without grades is about the individual student’s progress. This form of feedback puts focus on the student’s strengths, allows them time to understand an area of confusion, and allows the student to learn new steps to improve and grow. So why is there still this huge focus on the grades students need to get in their courses? Evaluation should not be mainly Assessment OF Learning, where numbers, marks and grades are used in the summative evaluations. Students need to be given the opportunity to not only learn the content and skills, but also understand the information, and learn how to further enhance their learning.

            In the world of Physical Education, it is key for a teacher to know when formative verses summative evaluations should occur. Is marking a student’s skill performance on a basketball layout, or a cricket throw the ‘right thing to do’? Or is allowing the time for your students to not only learn the skills needed for a movement task, but also understand and comprehend the task at hand, to the point where they are able to articulate it to their peers, and able to transfer the skill to other similar movement tasks? Well, if you ask me, of course the second option is the way to go. During my time in Brock’s Concurrent Education program, I have been able to learn overlapping skills, and information about teaching, whether it is in the physical education classroom, or in any other classroom. All other subjects believe they are higher in the education totem pole, with Health and Physical Education at the bottom. But, how can this be true, when the main goal of Health and Physical Education is for the students to gain the knowledge to be physically literate? Students need to be able to have the knowledge, competency and confidence to perform a number of skills, and tasks, that are transferable. Teachers need to take a piece of information from the HPE handbook, and realize that the students deserve the feedback, and time to assess their knowledge of skill and learn how to further improve, in order to further enhance their learning. Teaching methods like Inquiry-Based Learning, where the students act as the problem solver in order to learn the content, and Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), where the students are provided opportunities to ‘construct’, not only ‘receive’ the information for learning, which will increase their procedural and declarative knowledge should be used more in the classroom - not just in the gymnasium! When teachers begin to put numbers and grades onto learning, students stop caring about the learning process, they just want to do the task that will get them the best number possible. This is why students finish a course or even a test, and forget everything they just studied – the students never understood the information in the first place, they just memorized information for the short-term goal of passing the class! Constant grades put onto learning not only decreases the students’ care for learning, but also will decrease the motivation of the majority of the students. Decrease in motivation, equals decrease in student learning, engagement, and thus explains the still high level of high school dropout rate. Teachers need to stop saying ‘No’ to their students (time to watch another video right below!).  

            It is time for educators and citizens around the world to stop putting grades onto learning, and take note from the physical educators’ model for education. The students’ learning is the main goal in education! Teachers need to start getting to know their students, learn what motivates them, and how to use this information to further enhance their learning. Directive teaching cannot possibly address all the content a teacher needs to teach within their subject of learning. Incorporating different ways for the students to not only learn, but also have the opportunity to assess their knowledge with their fellow peers (Peer Teaching), as well as with their own self, through checklists, journal logs, rubrics, etc. is required in order to enrich the Assessment FOR Learning aspects of a teacher’s curriculum and teachings. After all, when teaching the curriculum, a teacher’s main objective should be ways to enhance student learning – not focus on the grade given at the end.