Revamping a Unit Assessment: "Fill The Gaps"

A few years ago, I was looking to revamp my summative assessment for a sixth-grade unit. This unit focuses on the skill of interpersonal communication and uses the content area of anti-bullying/seeking support from adults. This unit was initially challenging to create a summative assessment for because there were so many sub-skills within the skill of communication that I wanted students to demonstrate. Communication skills were used in a conversation, including verbal and nonverbal. There was a specific method of seeking support from a trusted adult in there. Students learned I-Statements, too. I needed to fit all of those into a project where students actually demonstrated all of those skills. 

In today's episode, I walk through the history of a sixth-grade project and how it's changed over the years before sharing advice about how you can use this approach in your classroom.

Transcript

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A few years ago, I was looking to revamp my summative assessment for one of my sixth grade units. This unit focuses on the skill of interpersonal communication and uses the content area of anti-bullying and seeking support from adults. This unit was initially challenging to create a summative assessment for because there were so many sub-skills within the skill of communication that I wanted students to demonstrate, and these were based on the performance indicators from the national health education standards. Communication skills were used in a conversation, including verbal and nonverbal skills. There was a specific method of seeking support from a trusted adult in there too. Students learned how to use I statements, and I needed to fit all of those into a project where students actually demonstrated all of those skills. In today's episode, I want to walk you through the historical context of this summative assessment and trace the through line from how it started to where it ended up now. Welcome back or welcome to the Level Up Public Education podcast. My name is Jeff Bartlett, and I'm here to help you level up your health education teaching. This particular summative assessment or project for this unit has morphed a lot over the years. Way back when I started teaching, so this would have been the fall of 2008, and even before we shifted to skills-based health ed, for a unit on anti-bullying that I inherited, students completed a role play. Some people might call this a behavior rehearsal. And as written, this was an okay assessment, but it didn't let me assess every single student on the different things I needed to. As written, there was also too much focus on the bullying itself and too little focus on any skill of communication or seeking support or stopping the bullying at all. So after that first type of project, the role play, we experimented with a writing assessment called fact and fiction. So shifting from students performing in front of their peers to having students write. And students needed needed to show their understanding of different facts. In this case, that was identifying different types of bullying behavior and the benefits and barriers of standing up to bullying, as well as skills, in this case, using a four-part I statement. I'm not really sure where the initial idea for this assessment came from. We had already started to use the National Health Ed Standards, but I don't think we were fully skills-based yet. If I look back on this rubric and I pulled it up, it looks like we were assessing multiple skills. We were doing some self-management, some communication. We saw the standard one in there. I also think it was when our school was using the Oveus anti-bullying program. So we had a lot of stuff in there about different roles in bullying situation, which really lended itself more to this type of fact and fiction writing assignment where students needed to incorporate facts within their fictional. When we made the shift to skills-based self-ed, we decided to keep the role play or behavioral rehearsal element, but we really tightened up what we were looking for. We had the role play start after the bullying situation had happened. And students needed needed to demonstrate four different ways to deal with the bullying, and there's an acronym called SAFE. So we wanted students to show how they would appropriately stand up for themselves, how they could avoid the situation, how they might find support, and how they might express your feelings. This was initially a group project, but I had to shift this demonstration from a group group project to an individual demonstration in 2019 because my daughter was born. And at the time I was using my 10 whole days of paternity leave. It is now up to 60 in my district due to our contract. But I was using my 10 days and I had students record their demonstrations because I was not in class to watch them do it live. I'm explaining the evolution of this end of unit assessment to provide context and to help understand how I ended up on the current version of this project. I wanted something different enough to be new or to be novel to students. I know I knew that it couldn't be too similar to the skill practices we'd done throughout the unit, but it needed to be similar enough that students would know what to do. I wanted something that was a little more challenging, or dare I say, rigorous. And maybe if I say that word enough, rigorous, rigorous, these search engines will show administrators all over the world this podcast. I'm kidding. Kind of. Anyway, I wanted I wanted something that would allow students to demonstrate all of the skills from our unit, plus the functional content knowledge we went over, keeping in mind that these students are sixth graders. Sixth graders are still, and this is really for lack of a better word, needy. Despite my best intentions in all units with checklists, with rubrics, with individualized feedback, with whole class feedback. I've even done color-coded feedback back in the day. I find that they still need a lot of support for just about everything. I will say though, that the students I have in the second semester every year are different, much different than the students from semester one. They're way more prepared prepared after just a half year of middle school. So I came up with a new assessment. I think I might have brainstormed a little bit with ChatGPT, but I also think, and this is based on my perusal of my Google Drive, that the first year of this actual activity was before ChatGPT was a thing. So maybe that experimenting with AI was when I wanted to update it. I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, I decided to tell students that I needed their help. I needed their help to quote fill the gaps. I explained to them that I was writing a story about a student who was dealing with bullying and needed help. And then I also needed help with completing different chapters of this story. These chapters aren't long by the way, they're just a few sentences. But specifically, here's what I needed help with. I needed my students to craft a conversation between an upstander and a bully. And that conversation needed to include an I statement, how the bullying affects the victim, and why it should stop. I needed their help in writing an email that is sent to a trusted adult, in this case one at school, asking to set up a meeting with that adult and asking for help with the situation. I needed them to help me record a PSA style social media post to educate others about the negative effects that bullying can have on someone's social health and their emotional health. And I needed their help in creating a bullet journal style list that explains how communication can improve our social health and how it can improve their emotional health. I have students demonstrate their skills in a few different ways here. As you can tell, uh they are writing a dialogue, they're crafting an email, they're recording a PSA, and that's where I look for different verbal and nonverbal communication skills. They're also creating that mock bullet journal. So they aren't helping me finish a story in a traditional writing-only sense. This is very multimodal, there's a lot going on here, and this helps reduce the drudgery of just really doing only one thing. You also may have figured out by now that the things I needed help with are the main objectives of this unit. They're things that students have already practiced in class, though mostly in different contexts, and how I'm assessing them is different enough from what they've done before, except for the email, and that's kind of the same, but it is slightly different. But I need to I need to work on that. The students are not asking me like Mr. Barnett, we have to do this again. This really would be better to see visually, but if you subscribe to my email newsletter, I've shared in this week's newsletter that has this podcast episode linked in it. I've shared the planning sheet with everyone. But I want to explain what I'm looking for based on the above. The prompt that I give students is that for this project, you will step into a story where you demonstrate support for a friend in a bullying situation. Through a series of story slides, you will demonstrate your communication skills in creative and practical ways by quote, filling in the gaps that are included in the story and responding to each stage of your friend's experience by creating dialogues, writing emails, and demonstrating verbal and nonverbal communication skills. The scenario summary: your friend, Alex, is being teased and excluded by a group of classmates during lunch. One day, a particularly hurtful comment is made and you decide to take action. I explain some technical details, I share some of the objectives such as applying effective verbal and nonverbal communication skills to enhance health, demonstrating assertive communication strategies to stand up for oneself and others if bullied, to demonstrate how to ask for assistance when being bullied, and to analyze how practice and behavior support a variety of dimensions of wellness. These all come from our national health education standards, by the way. There's some other details about an order of events for the whole project and things like that. But here's each chapter. The beginning. In big red letters, it says check in with your teacher before you move on. As I mentioned, I check in with students multiple times. I may not have mentioned that. I check in with students multiple times. Do some students still not check in with me? Yes. Chapter 2. You've decided that the situation needs more than just a conversation. To ensure Alex feels safe and supported, you write an email to a trusted adult who can help address the bullying and create a safer environment for Alex. Your task. Write an email to a trusted adult at school seeking support. There it is. Self-check. Boom. Check in. Chapter 3. To show your commitment to supporting Alex, you take to social media to record a brief anti-bullying video. You practice using strong verbal and nonverbal communication skills to explain how bullying can affect social and emotional health. Your task. There's some self-checklists for the script, but also the video, including things like eye contact, volume, etc. Chapter 4. By standing up for Alex, you realize how much of a different how much of a difference effective communication can make in creating a safer, more inclusive environment. You reflect on the importance of interpersonal communication and how it can improve social and emotional health for Alex, for you, and for others involved. Your task is to write three bullet points for your bullet journal about how interpersonal communication improves social and emotional health. And there they go. Self-check. And that is that. So students plan this in a Google Doc, but the final version is a Google Slides deck. It's not a presentation. It's just much easier to break tasks down visually. I can clearly label each chapter and put specific directions that they can delete on top of the slides. So it's not an actual presentation. I know I've written about in past newsletters before and even in a podcast episode about um remixing enough of the skills that you're teaching that your skill practice and assessments are fresh enough, yet similar enough for students to understand what to do. And that's what I've tried to do here. I found that this style of assessment has a few benefits. I've done some of the work up front for the students, so their focus is solely on the specific skills I'm assessing. As a result, they can't get lost in writing a rambling long and unnecessary narrative that takes away from the goal of the assignment. Had I asked students to write everything from scratch, I can imagine in past experience has shown me that many would give me awesome, really creative stories that took a lot of time. But despite taking multiple classes to write, really miss the whole point of the assignment and include few or none of the success criteria. This is also why I check in with students at multiple points throughout the project. So I should mention that, and I did a little bit earlier, but after every part of the planning assignment, students are supposed to check in with me. So theoretically, I am having four or five conversations with every student throughout the course of this project. I'm helping guide them towards what I'm looking for on the assignment. Don't get me wrong, I know I don't live in the theoretical perfect teaching vacuum, so I'm still chasing kids down to check in with me. Some students forget they have to uh check in with me and they show me a slide deck. Some students forget they have to do the slide deck or to record a video, despite my directions explicitly saying so. Ah, middle school. As with everything, this project isn't perfect, and there were some technical barriers that I had to figure out in the last couple times and years that I've done this, but I did solve them. Shout out to Screencastify, thank you for your submit feature now that I can't get on Flipgrid. At the end of the day, this assignment does what I need it to do, and I know there are things I could change. That's part of teaching. The fill the gaps idea could be used for skill practice or end-of-unit assessments for other skills too. You control exactly what you're looking for by writing prompts with specific outcomes. As you heard above, I communicated the success criteria for every part of this assignment to students. Yes, in that theoretical perfect teaching vacuum, students would be able just to do it without needing a checklist, but even with that checklist, they still need to know what each item is or what it means to do. Conferencing with students is a key part of this assignment. How can you make this type of assessment a reality in your classroom? Here are a few ideas. First, everything starts out with clear objectives. Make sure you identify exactly what students are demonstrating for this project. Make sure students have had plenty of time to practice a skill and to get feedback from you too. Then just get creative. Write on your own. I guess you could prompt ChatGPT or your preferred AI, bot, uh, but figure out the story. Maybe you imagine a story where students need to add in the different steps of a decision-making model, or you write a story for a unit on analyzing influences where students model the main character's internal thinking, or they add to a chapter where they have to demonstrate their understanding of how an influence affects a specific dimension of wellness. Really, anything goes here. Make sure you figure out the medium or method by which students will work through this assignment as well. And this is also something you could work on throughout an entire unit. You could share the chapters with students throughout the unit and have them continue crafting their story at different points. Maybe you can give them all your words ahead of time and tell them that by the end of the unit, you'll have worked together to create a story. You could have part of a story and then numbered spaces where students add specific information. I'm thinking in this case of something like Mad Libs here. So maybe you have a line that says refusal skill or potential consequence or external influence, depending on what you're doing. And then students could compare their final results to their peers. It's really whatever works for you. I know I can still tighten up this project. There are some technical things that I do want to change. The biggest benefit of this format for me is that students only need to focus on showing me exactly what I'm looking for. Nothing gets lost as students focus so much on being funny or being creative or adding cool fonts or animations or colors or whatever that they don't include anything from the actual project requirements and the rubric. And that's been really important. So the fill the gaps idea is something you could utilize in your own classroom if you choose to roll with it. Let me know. I'd love to hear about what you're doing. And if you have any suggestions, please let me know. As always, thank you for listening and thank you for your support.