Happy New Year!
The ball has been dropped. A new calendar hangs on the wall. We have turned the page on 2023 and welcomed in 2024.
Out with the old, in with the new!
If you think about it, however, there’s not a whole lot new about the new year. Sure, the deductible on our health insurance resets to zero (nothing to celebrate there) as do the counters on my blog page (I hit my targets for 2023), but pretty much none of the things that really matter reset as the old year becomes new. My height, weight, age, overall level of physical fitness (or lack thereof), and assets (or lack thereof) were the same when I woke up on January 1st as they were on December 31st.
January 1 is nothing more than a single, somewhat arbitrary point on a continuous scale. The sets of twinsborn in different years is the perfect example of this.
Is that ball being dropped for the final time in 2023 or for the first time in 2024?
Does it matter?
To digress for just a moment, could there be anything else more emblematic of American culture, that “je ne sais quoi” that makes an American an American irrespective of race, creed, political party, language spoken, or other adopted identifier, that uniquely American spirit that distinguishes us from the rest of the world, than a million people packed liked sardines into Times Square to celebrate dropping the ball.
As Americans, we have been routinely dropping the ball throughout our 250-year (or 400-year) history. Our heroes are those who, seeing the ball on the ground, pick it up, and keep running – no matter how many times it’s dropped. We forgive those who drop the ball as long as they were making a good faith effort to advance it, whatever advancing it might have meant at the time – or at least we did until recently. I’m not sure who our heroes are now, other than Taylor, of course, and I guess, Travis (Taylor’s Version).
Anyway…
If not a new beginning, what does the new year represent?
New Year’s Resolutions
What the new year represents is a time to take stock, a time to evaluate status and progress. It is a time, based on that evaluation, to make needed adjustments, if any, to our routines and processes, and perhaps to adjust goals and targets – short-term, intermediate, and/or long-term. In this way, the new year is that perfect comingling of formative and summative that those of us in assessment struggle so mightily to understand and describe to others.
On New Year’s Day, we call this process of formative/summative evaluation and the adjustments, or mid-course corrections, that result from it, making resolutions.
Listen carefully as you read the Wikipedia description of New Year’s Resolutions:
A New Year’s resolution is a tradition, most common in the Western World[1] but also found in the Eastern World, in which a person resolves to continue good practices, change an undesired trait or behavior, accomplish a personal goal, or otherwise improve their behaviour at the beginning of a calendar year.
Can’t you hear in the background the strains of the FAST SCASS definition of formative assessment:
a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching to elicit
and use evidence of student learning to improve student understanding of intended disciplinary learning outcomes and support students to become self-directed learners. Effective use of the formative assessment process requires students and teachers to integrate and embed the following practices in a collaborative and respectful classroom environment:
-
- clarify learning goals and success criteria within a broader progression of learning;
- elicit and analyze evidence of student thinking;
- engage in self-assessment and peer feedback;
- provide actionable feedback; and
- use evidence and feedback to move learning forward by adjusting learning strategies, goals, or next instructional steps.
Annual state assessments, occurring at the transition between school years rather than calendar years, were our equivalent of the New Year’s Resolution formative/summative process. The types of questions we asked:
- What parts of the curriculum and instruction process are working well, and which needed to be adjusted?
- Which programs and approaches that we implemented last year (or the year before) bore fruit and which died in the weeds?
- What practices do we need to change in the next school year to have a better chance at accomplishing our goals?
We lost that formative, checkpoint mentality when state assessments were redesigned to support the reporting of individual student results and assessment results were fed immediately into the accountability sausage grinder before they could be reviewed and processed on their own.
As the new wave of assessment and education reform shifts the focus of individual student achievement to information collected throughout the year and expands school accountability to include consideration of factors well beyond simple test scores, there is a good chance that we can return to using end-of-year determinations of student proficiency, whether collected through traditional state tests or other means, to engage in that formative/summative process of evaluation and adjustment.
Wouldn’t that make for a happier new year.
A Checkpoint for Charlie
So, what does this evaluative process look like for me personally as we begin 2024 – my fifth year of this now not so new phase of my life. A quick review of the three areas which we have visited repeatedly over the years.
My aforementioned weight is less than it was at the beginning of 2023 and significantly less than it was at the beginning of 2020, but not where I hoped it would be by the start of 2024. Linking my weight loss in 2023 to being able to make the long, steep climb up to our seats at the Taylor Swift concert in May was an embarrassing rookie behavior modification mistake. After May 20, the incentive was gone, and the effects of my size are still cause for concern – adjustments need to be made.
Writing continues to occupy my time and entertain me – hopefully you as well, but at least me.
- My blog continued to expand nicely in 2023 – if I drop that one outlier, the combination NAEP-Taylor Swift post that went viral in the fall of 2022. (Personally, I preferred the follow-up post that had about 900 fewer views.) Overall, the blog was more efficient in 2023 – fewer posts viewed by more people. Reaching folks in 79 countries around the world in 2023, the 79th and final country thanks to a follower vacationing in Turks and Caicos in December. If you’re planning a trip to Bolivia in 2024…
- A draft of the first volume of my memoir trilogy is complete. Not sure what I’m going to do with it, but if you have any suggestions or you are interested in reading a longer form version of thoughts from my three decades in large-scale assessment, let me know.
- Perhaps 2024 is the year that the chapter on Assessment to Inform Teaching and Learning that I co-authored with Susan Brookhart in 2020 will finally be published as part of the fifth edition of Educational Measurement. (Using that chapter as a springboard for networking in this “retirement” phase is a perfect example of plans that had to be evaluated and adjusted multiple times.)
- And I’m working on a paper for NCME. Yup, planning to return to the scene of the crime for the first time since 2018.
Finally, the house is still much too cluttered, but I did manage in 2023 to donate more than 100 very gently used books that I had accumulated from memberships in ASCD, NCTM, NCTE, etc. to local schools. Perhaps my collection of psychometric books will find new homes this year.
My annual evaluation has been completed, and my adjustments have been made, so it’s on to 2024. We’ll check back in same time next year.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 