RM Winter 2017 FINAL

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Reading Matters
Teaching Matters
| 46| Reading Matters | Volume 17 • Winter 2017 |
In South Carolina, as more pre-service and in-service teachers
seek to fulfill the Read to Succeed Literacy Teacher and Literacy
Requirement, literacy teacher educators must find new ways
to provide meaningful assessment experiences that explicitly
connect to our students’ past, present, and future classrooms.
Something They Can Use on Monday Morning
One of my goals for any professional development or class
session is to provide teachers and teacher candidates with at least
one tool, one idea, one activity, or one principle that they can use
on Monday morning. Of course, not every assessment in a pre-
service or in-service education course can or should be used on
Monday mornings. For instance, during class discussions about
the most important attributes of literacy leaders and coaches, my
students often mention one trait—resourcefulness. The traditional
research paper, which could ostensibly be held up as an example
of an “inauthentic” assessment, allows students to develop
essential skills in locating, evaluating, and adapting information.
Likewise, written reflections, which are generally created for
an audience of two (the student and the instructor), provide
powerful forums for critical thought and personal development.
However, one of the perennial complaints of both experienced
and novice teachers enrolled in teacher preparation programs is
that their coursework is too far removed from classroom realities—
in short, that there is too much theory, and too little practice
(Zeichner, 2012). In reimagining assessments as responsive to both
context and culture, I wanted to provide opportunities for teachers
and teacher candidates to wrestle with the ways in which evolving
policies, increasingly diverse student populations, and 21st century
digital tools continue to shape student and teacher learning. In
addition to scouring pedagogical articles, blogs, and syllabi from
literacy education courses across the country and in international
contexts, I surveyed students, visited classrooms, talked with school
administrators, held focus group discussions, and went through the
process of completing each potential assignment myself—all with
the goal of creating assessments that bridged theory and practice.
Grossman and McDonald (2008) suggest that a shift from
pedagogies of investigation to pedagogies of enactment, in
which teachers and teacher candidates engage in “deliberate
and systematic experimentation with a variety of approximations
of practice,” can connect “the everyday and the academic” (pp.
190-191). In my own course redesign, I envisioned assessment
not as an end in and of itself, but as a means of actively engaging
students in a recursive cycle of inquiry, application, reflection,
collaboration, and action. In shifting the focus to enactment
rather than investigation, students were able to make explicit
connections between practice, research, and theory, grapple
with the social and political aspects of education in the real
world, and understand the whys as well as the rubrics.
Six Ideas for Authentic Literacy Assessments
In the following sections, I describe six assessments
that attempt to bridge the everyday and the academic: a
multicultural book blog, literacy videos, literacy action plans,
coaching observation reports, professional development
presentations focusing on culturally and linguistically diverse
learners, and Teaching Tips. All assessments are aligned with
the 2010 International Literacy Association (ILA) Standards for
Literacy Professionals and can be used in a variety of commonly
offered literacy courses, including Foundations of Literacy,
Literacy Assessment, and Content Area Reading andWriting.
Multicultural Book Blog: Identifying
Mirrors andWindows
As more and more teacher education courses move to an
online or blended format, there is a growing need to think
beyond the text-based discussion board to the development
of innovative ways of sharing ideas and resources. Although
asynchronous discussions allow students time and space to
create thoughtful reflections on critical ideas, “discussions do
not automatically become interactive and collaborative simply
by virtue of being in an anytime/anywhere asynchronous
medium” (Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003, p. 138).
The goal of the Multicultural Book Blog blog was to build
a collaborative repertoire of texts, ideas, images, videos, and
resources related to multicultural children’s and adolescent
literature. In order to encourage students to collaborate, post,
and access resources long after the course had finished, we
used Google’s Blogger, a free blog-publishing site, rather than a
learning management system. For each post, students were asked
to focus on texts that honored the cultural, racial, and linguistic
backgrounds of their students—texts that served as both mirrors,
which reflect the cultural norms and values of the reader, and
windows , which juxtapose the familiar with the unfamiliar (Bishop,
1990). In their initial posts, students created four responses:
READER RESPONSE: As a reader, what was your aesthetic
response? Your efferent response?
EVALUATOR RESPONSE: Imagine that you are a
children’s/YA book editor. Critically evaluate distinct
elements of the text, such as the words, images, format,
structure, plot, and characters. What are its strengths?
Weaknesses?
TEACHER RESPONSE: Howmight you engage students in
reflecting on social and political issues present in the text
and the world? What texts might provide students with
an alternate perspective that challenges their thinking?
LITERACY COACH RESPONSE: What suggestions and
strategies would you provide for teachers using this text
in the classroom? What resources (websites, articles,
lessons, units, discussion prompts) would you share?
Initially, students were required to respond to two colleagues’
posts. However, in a class discussion after the first blog posts,
many students pointed out they were commenting to earn a
grade, rather than engaging with their colleagues’ ideas. So, we
collaboratively decided to make blog responses optional and
to instead dedicate time to in-class reflection. After making
this change, students actually began to post more detailed and
specific responses on the blog. We used a variety of formats for