How important is measurement?

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Last August I started incorporating regular visits to the local gym in my routine. Aware that I am not getting any younger and that my work has included substantial periods of time sitting at a screen I really needed to include more physical activity in my life. All was going great, then came lockdown. Fortunately I have an exercise bike and thanks to the lovely weather I have been able to set up a little home gym to keep things moving but I am aware that the balance has tipped somewhat as all my teaching, interaction with colleagues and social life is now screen based. My husband has started leaving the scales out in the bathroom to draw my attention to the need to review the effects of lockdown lasagne and increased home baking..I studiously avoid the hint as I know what is going on and don't need another cause of stress in my life right now. 

Last night's #LTHEchat  gave rise to a tangential conversation (as it often does) about the National Student Survey (NSS) and measuring student engagement/enjoyment of learning. Of course metrics have been the focus of much in education over recent years with many calling on empirical evidence as a basis for change. A suggestion that the NSS results could include emotional engagement information brought strong reactions;

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! #LTHEChat

— Chris Jobling (@cpjobling) May 13, 2020

and a call to discuss such surveys in a future chat. This prompted me to reflect a little on measurement in general. There is a tendency to assume that opposition to measurement comes from a desire to hide away from investigation. I do not believe this to be at all justified in education. Most practitioners want to understand how people find their teaching, we have in interest in knowing what works and what doesn't. There is little satisfaction in working away blindly without feedback. However let's not be naive, we need to know the purpose of such measurements. We need to understand the basis of the judgements and how they will be interpreted. For those working in education measurements and metrics have been used not to inform but to be interpreted selectively in order to advance certain agendas. Used to reduce the costs of teaching by removing experienced practitioners in favour of cheaper labour without a thought for how new practitioners will be supported. Used to pit head teachers and colleagues against each other through league tables. These are not in the interests of learners, they do not support the necessary interpersonal dynamics that create a great learning ethos, they do not help improve your teachers, they create a culture of fear and prevent true collaboration. 

Another area of measurement - summative assessments - which have been hugely changed due to the #pivotonline agenda have increased stress and anxiety to our learners this year. We really need to stand up for what is helpful to learning and look critically at what we're measuring and for whom. If we really to wish to serve the learning needs of our students and indeed ourselves we need to question the purpose of measurement - the intended audience, the nature of the interrogation and the awareness of how subsequent judgements impact on the stakeholders. If measurement matters, how and what we measure matter more. If the stakes are too high, I don't want to play. So the scales can go away for now!

Grades are the bureaucratic ouroboros of education. https://t.co/5Wp9DxptdA #ungrading

— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 6, 2020

Whatever next?

“Through the lens of critical digital pedagogy learning revolves around the idea of liberation. Liberation from oppression, but more specifically liberation from thought patterns (and educational practices) that limit human creativity and genius.” https://t.co/d9VfbAqBj1 #digped

— Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) April 17, 2020

As our teaching term ended and we returned home for the Easter break in the hope of finishing some outstanding tasks and maybe some well earned rest suddenly all our hopes were overturned. COVID19 was about to change everything as the UK government suddenly decided this was a risk which needed more extreme measures. To be honest their response was too little too late but as ever the impact of crisis measures was yet again to put ordinary folk into the position of being "the elastic resource". This is an expression coined to me by one of my previous Heads of Department, a very wise Germanist. She would say whatever needs changing always relies on the workers being an "elastic resource" - stretching ever further, even when we are already over stretched. So it was again. All our carefully planned and prepared exam papers would need to be shelved and we were asked to create new assessment methods to fit a world where no-one could share a physical space, a new reality of social distancing and online "delivery". Otherwise we would not be doing our job. 

For me this reality of working remotely has been a way of life for at least 10 years so it didn't hold any of the fear I saw elsewhere. We (the language teaching community) have had at least 30 years of academic research into computer-assisted language (CALL) learning which has informed what we do and helped us to avoid some of the basic errors and misunderstandings which result from random application of shiny tech to teaching scenarios. Surely all would be fine. 

I had neglected to consider that assessment is still akin to a lesser known martial art in higher education. Often mediated solely through 3 hour writing sessions filling large halls with hoards of nervous students surveilled by a team of invigilators. It was, in retrospect, unsurprising that many were just looking to replicate such conditions online and move on. Of course that wouldn't work for language assessment, but it took a while before a plan was centrally agreed and meanwhile the elastic resource (ER) stretched further to plan, design and refine replacement activities which could be used to arrive at a magic number for those students who were hoping to graduate this year. Yes Jesse, aloting numbers remains a real issue in our competitive system which pits students against one another in order to identify those who are the most worthy of the best jobs. That's how capitalism views the world, on the basic of "merit". A fact we need to address more critically.

Social media was full of the fall out resulting from the call to #pivotonline.  Hurriedly deployed Microsoft teams reflected the urgency not of teachers but of managers to focus their ER to rise to the challenge before the Easter break despite the failure over past years to ensure that they were at least armed with the essential tool of assessment literacy! Fortunately some of us had undertaken some assessment training off our own bat, wanting to better understand what we do and why. I completed a PGCert in Assessment in 2014 which really opened my eyes but I still felt ill prepared to make this sudden shift and grew increasingly nervous when some colleagues started suggesting lengthy oral presentations to be prepared by students under conditions of which we were blissfully ignorant. It became clear over a few days that some of us would become ill, many would have to return to their home countries in different timezones, many would have to adjust to strict lockdown, caring responsibilities and even the possibilities of huge and painful loss. This would be nothing like business as usual. 

I found Dave Cormier's podcast really helpful and shared it with all those who were tasked with creating tools to measure performance under these new and bewildering conditions. 




Armed also with the learning shared at #OER20 on the theme of care in education I set about advocacy for a humane approach to assessment in every forum I could. I hope to have made a difference. Measurement may be important to some but it is not life and death. Supporting and facilitating lifelong learning matters.Yes Sean, we must first liberate ourselves to speak out and stand up for those to whom we are responsible. Otherwise we really are not doing our job. 

Authenticity in language learning

What does authentic mean in language learning terms? Back in the 1980s when I was newly qualified, authentic was one of our buzz words. The rise in importance of communicative language teaching included a focus on incorporating "real" language sources taken from French newspapers and the like. These would be more recent than our ageing course books with their carefully chosen screened language, selected to highlight the grammar we had to teach. All very worthy really, and it meant frequent trips to France to bring back useful authentc resources - Carrefour fliers, tickets, fiches. Probably seems crazy now that "autheticity" lies a mouseclick or finger swipe away!

Jump forward 30 years and the notion of authenticity needs to come under scrutiny again. For two reasons:

• how we deal with/expose learners to "authentic" language use on social media
• how we devise activities for learning and assessment for learners use of language

Here's an example of the first:

J'ai ça dans le manuel, mais mes trucs font 2 broches et là ils en indiquent qu'une :o pic.twitter.com/X2Pc81Zyha
— Monsieur Le Prof (@MsieurLeProf) May 15, 2014

A French teacher uses twitter for advice. He demonstrates in a very real, conversational way (unknown to him) how useful the French word "truc" (thingy) can be whilst using some fairly complex constructions (en, ne..que). This is the kind of authentic language use that my students can learn from, alongside a discussion  about register (appropriate language in different situations). Yet students are rarely using twitter to see how the language they are learning is used by native speakers. If they were they would see that, just like in English, it is full of typos too!

On the second point, authenticity (by which I mean real world) in language teaching offers an opportunity to engage learners in real experiences. Far more real thanks to new technologies than I could manage in the 80's. We use shopping websites to compare and choose provisions for a picnic, the ANPE site to find out about skills necessary for jobs in France, connect directly with French students to find out more about their hobbies and interests. (We could connect with those even further afield without difficulty too). So this tweet jumped out at me:

Embed authentic digital experiences into curricula and in assessment and feedback activities #digitalstudent
— sarahknight (@sarahknight) June 10, 2014

Given just how much more authentic - lifelike - we can be in 2014, why are our tasks and our assessments still paper based versions of those we used in the 1980's? The current generation of young people have found us out, they want real world skills and preparation for a future we don't even understand. I feel an authenticity crisis is at large, we are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Language study becoming the preserve of a small elite who wish to work amongst the privileged few.

Here is my last hope.