The Paul Simon song “Kodachrome” has the best opening lyric: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
And it’s true. We teach a lot of crap. But hidden among that crap are the skills and knowledge our students really need. Unfortunately, we’re often all so blinded by grades and other measures of achievement that we forget what the end goal really is: competent, compassionate, and critical adults.
Archaic Teaching Methods
When I taught 9th and 10th grade English, we used that lovely orange vocabulary workbook series that so many schools use. The lists are supposedly based on the most frequently ACT and SAT tested words. However, those tests have changed a lot. And the word lists in those vocab books haven’t.
Trust me. I once found a copy of the same vocab workbook from the 1970s in my classroom. The activities were different, but the word lists were exactly the same.
And sure, a solid vocabulary is nice to have. But is working through activities and archaic word lists in a workbook going to be the best way to learn new words?
Of course not. And we all know it.
I used the workbooks, essentially because I had to, and I tried to find ways to have some fun with vocabulary and make it important for students, but it wasn’t always easy.
I hosted a short segment in class that I called “Fun with Words.” This was when The Big Bang Theory was really popular, and so the students often compared it to Sheldon’s “Fun with Flags.” I tried to make it silly and enaging, but all I really did was talk about root words that were a part of that week’s unit. (Ex. One unit used the word beneficent, so we talked about how “ben” means “good” and what other words they know that use the same root.)
My Assessment Problem
The real problem, as I saw it, was assessing their learning. The easiest way to test vocabulary was a basic multiple choice quiz, but that always felt so inauthentic to me. And it certainly did nothing to promote long term retention of information.
In general in my classes, I didn’t give big multiple choice tests. When we finished reading a novel, there was no giant end of the unit test with questions about the minutae of the book we’d read.
Instead, I used essays, class discussions, projects, and presentations to assess student understanding of standards, concepts, and essential questions. This worked really well for me and for my students.
But what about when it came time for those cumulative assessments, like end of the semester or end of year exams? As a core subject, I was required to give an exam during the exam period, so I couldn’t use a project or final paper as the exam. And grades were due by the end of the week, so if I used the exam period to have students write essays, I’d have 1-3 days to grade them all. No small task.
So I thought about how I like to have students show their learning. I like to give them some choice and voice in assessments. I like to allow them to be creative and express their learning in ways that make sense to them and allow them to truly shine.
So I figured something out.
The One Question Exam
In my American Literature class, the entire course revolved around a single Essential Question: What does it mean to be an American?
Over the course of the school year, there were smaller essential questions tied to specific texts and time periods (“What do we do when confronted by fear?” for The Crucible, “How is place tied to identity?” for transcendentalism or Huck Finn), but we always tied the content back to this bigger question.
So this question became my entire exam.
Well, there’s a little more to it than that.
- Students were given some options as to how they could present the answer to that question.
- They are required to use the literature from the school year to support their answer to the question.
- They have to use (and highlight) vocabulary words from the school year and grammatical concepts we focused on.
- They then present whatever they have created at the end of the exam period.
This is a lot of work and a lot of thinking, which is why it’s a great final exam. They don’t have to memorize a lot of tiny facts because I gave them copies of all the books they might need (including the dreaded orange vocabulary book). They can work together with a group.
The best part? You can grade it while they present.
My exam periods were 90 minutes. So I would use about the first 5 minutes to explain the task and get the students all settled. Then they would have 70-75 minutes to work (I always put a timer on the board so that they knew how much time was left). We’d use the last 10-15 minutes to present their findings.
How do you grade this?
One thing I love about this as a final project is that it really does hit on all the major ELA standards: writing, reading literature and nonfiction, speaking & listening, and language.
Students were graded on
- Completion: including everything that was required
- Correctness: good grammar, correct use of vocab, the thesis made sense and was well-supported
- Collaboration & cooperation with the group
- Presentation skills
It’s a final exam, so students don’t need any written feedback, which makes this very easy to grade. I could check off a lot of it while the students were presenting their projects. Afterward, I might go back and double check some things, but that went very quickly because students usually worked in groups — I would have at most 6 or 7 to look at for each class period. (And I could do that while the next class period worked on their exams.)
How Can YOU Do This?
It’s simple!
Start with the big question. Even if you don’t already have an overarching Essential Question, you could find one that students could still apply to most of the literature you’ve read that year. Here are some examples:
- What does literature reveal about the past?
- What does it mean to be a good person?
- How do stories reflect the human experiences of love, loss, and redemption?
- What can literature teach us about resilience?
- How is the human experience the same (or different) across cultures and time periods?
- How do the choices characters make mirror the choices we make in our own lives?
- What moral or ethical questions raised in literature challenge our own beliefs and values?
- How can we grow as individuals from reading literature?
Then decide how students will demonstrate their answers to this question. I gave my students many options, with a couple offering bonus points because they seemed a little tougher and involved really thematically connecting the literature and explaining the connections.
That’s mostly it!
Or if you want to just use my exam and customize it, it’s right here!
Happy not-testing!
KatieMacTeach 