Reimagining Assessment for Inquiry in ELA

When we shift from a traditional approach to an inquiry approach in our classrooms, we also must shift how we assess and grade our students. It doesn’t necessarily mean the tools and strategies we have used in the past will completely change, but we will have to make a paradigm shift to support student ownership of learning.  

The first ten years of my career, I would like to believe that I had really engaging lessons and a community of readers, writers, and thinkers in my classrooms. But if I am honest, I mostly had assignment completers, praise and point junkies, and a lot of apathetic bide-my-timers. We got along and we made some good memories, but I am not sure I can say students reached optimal growth in ELA. 

Fortunately, for my students and for me, I had the opportunity to venture on a journey alongside a group of other risk-taking ELA teachers who were interested in a different approach; one where students entered our discipline with questions, intrigue, curiosity, and grit. Through an inquiry approach, both in my learning journey and in the conditions I was aiming to create for my students, I experienced firsthand the shifts necessary for true engagement and growth. One of these shifts was in assessments.  We know that assessment needs to drive instruction and we need to do it well for student-centered learning. 

The table below shows examples of what assessment looked like before I moved toward inquiry. In the traditional approach, everything was graded and worth points. I made big projects and cumulative assessments worth more points than the ongoing daily work. In the end, all points went into one big bucket to determine a student’s grade at the end of the term. 

My assessment practices shifted drastically as I began to better understand inquiry and how assessment lets us see inside our students’ brains. When we can “see” their thinking, we can better instruct students toward our learning goals. I discovered that to be my students’ coach, I needed to better implement formative assessment and feedback–not for points, but for progress. Then when it came time to evaluate student learning, students could “go public,” as Daniels and Harvey suggest, with all that they have learned in a summative, often authentic performance assessment.  See the table below for examples.  

Shifting from traditional to inquiry isn’t easy and it is best accomplished by just diving in. If you need more ideas for how, visit my blog Inquiry in ELA: 10 Ways to Make it Work.