Unpacking Education Podcast Transcript

Building Student Confidence and Hope Through Assessment, with Nicole Dimich

Nicole Dimich 0:00
Assessment as being information and not just evaluation—there are a thousand ways to do it. There's so much possibility in the way that we can really change how we use assessment and grading, not as something that causes more stress, but really as a catalyst for success.

Winston Benjamin 0:19
The topic for today's podcast is building student confidence and hope through assessment with Nicole Dimich.

Winston Benjamin 0:27
Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:40
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:51
I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:52
And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:56
And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 1:01
Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:05
Our quote for today is from the forward of our guest's book, Design in Five. In the foreword, Douglas Reeves writes, "The author transformed the purpose of assessment from simply reporting the score on a test to a collaborative process between students and teachers and a tool to improve learning in the future, not merely a report about what happened in the past." Ooh, that's a great quote. Paul, what are you thinking?

Paul Beckermann 1:37
Yeah, there's a lot in there. It comes down to motivation a little bit for me. There are two parts in there that stand out. One is that collaborative process. I think if it's collaborative, it's more motivating. There's some ownership in that, and when you have ownership, it motivates you to want to be part of that. And then the other piece is "improve learning in the future." If there's some future benefit to that, I think that's motivating too. We've got to be forward-thinking about how this is actually going to make something change. If the assessment, in this case, is done and gone, and there's nothing that can do for future performance, it doesn't have any further impact, then I don't care about it. I care if I think that it can shape my future. So there are some motivation pieces in there for me. What are you thinking, Winston?

Winston Benjamin 2:27
I love this because it reminds me of the idea of growth, right? If you're a coach and you're trying to get an athlete to be at their peak, the feedback for what they're doing has to be immediate because then they can alter. And also, they can think back on "I was this now, with this I'm doing here now." So I think there's a bit of growth and appreciation for where students were in order to actually help them get to where they need to be. So I love what you're saying, Paul. I just think sometimes connecting it to athletics helps.

We'd like to welcome Nicole Dimich to the Unpacking Education podcast. Nicole is an educator, author, innovator, and expert facilitator who has worked in K through 12. Hello and welcome to the show, Nicole. Thank you for being here.

Nicole Dimich 3:17
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Winston Benjamin 3:21
One of the things that we love doing is helping our guests ground themselves to our audience. Could you introduce yourself? Just give our listeners a little bit more about you.

Nicole Dimich 3:32
Absolutely. So yes, educator—I am a learner for sure, and I love to create spaces of possibility. For me, that has been a theme from the beginning. In fact, I was the little girl who grew up in northern Minnesota, and the only reason I got to school in kindergarten and first grade is because the bus driver got off the bus, grabbed my hand, got me on the bus. I was the last stop, and the bus driver walked me into school. It was literally a sixth-grade teacher who said, "Hey, Nicole, I think I see some possibility or some leadership in you." It's that moment when someone sees possibility in you before you even see it in yourself.

For me, it's always been about creating spaces of possibility. I was being seen in my possibility a lot because I was a pretty compliant child and all of that. And I noticed that not everybody—especially students who weren't necessarily compliant or who school didn't work for—weren't being seen in their possibility. They were getting relentlessly a ton of feedback about everything that they needed to change versus this idea of what could be strong. So as a teacher, that was really central to my building relationships with young people. And then when I got the opportunity to be working with educators, I loved creating spaces of possibility for educators so they could reflect on their own practice and also create spaces of possibility. So they had hope that what they were doing was making the impact that they wanted it to have and that kids were really being served so well.

I spent time out in New Jersey doing some work at the Princeton Center for Leadership Training, and that's where I really learned a lot more about how to create space. And then I spent a number of years in Minneapolis on high school transformation as we were trying to do some small learning communities and really dug into this idea of assessment. That's where I got to start to think about assessment, and people often don't think of assessment as a way to build relationships or a way to build hope. So my journey over the last number of years has been to really do that work as a teacher, as a coach, as a consultant, as an author, and really start to change the narrative around assessment.

I also have three children, and all of them are dramatically different in how they experience school. I'm humbled, and I have learned so much from all three of them. I have a daughter, Maya, who's 26, and she's in the theater community here in Minneapolis. She got a BFA in theater. She loved school, so she was the student who drove her teachers crazy with her questions. I lived in Georgia when she was in elementary school, and the minute she started to get graded, she got super stressed because anytime she thought she was going to get something wrong, it was the end of the world. So I know a lot of young people have that stress, and moving that—or rebranding that—has been huge.

And then my middle son, Reese, is a junior in college studying supply chain, and he is the kid who just didn't want to do anything unless it was really relevant. He loves to take things apart, put them together, be really independent. He was the child—I don't know if you've heard students say this—"Mom, it's only worth five points. I don't think I should do it. I don't need to do it." So he taught me a lot about different ways of engagement and motivation, and then as he had different experiences with teachers, what was the impact of assessment and grading on his motivation, his beliefs about his own learning, and what was relevant or not.

And then I'm an empty nester as of this year, so my son Chase just left.

Paul Beckermann 7:20
Awesome.

Nicole Dimich 7:23
I know, right? And so he was also a very different learner, very relational. He was the student who was always talking to all of his peers, just really happy but connected, and would have a hard time focusing. His brain worked in lots of different ways. So lots of stories. He's my child who failed so many times and learned how to pick himself back up and try again—not only in the classroom, but also he played tackle football since the time he was in third grade. And they did not win a game till their senior year. So a local TV station did a little interview with them, and I always think about how do you keep going? How do you keep persevering?

So anyway, that's probably a lot of background, but that was for me—my children as well as just this relentless pursuit of how do we build people up and see strengths and create culture in that way.

Paul Beckermann 8:24
You had your own little research lab at home with your kids.

Nicole Dimich 8:29
One hundred percent. I mean, we learned from all those experiences. I love that. And that's led you now to writing. You mentioned that you're an author, and your book is titled Design in Five. So I got to ask you, what is Design in Five, and how does that reshape the way that we think about assessment? Because I understand there's an assessment connection here.

Yes, yes. So Design in Five came from sitting down with teachers and teacher teams over time and thinking through how do we connect this idea of assessment not as evaluation but as information. In Design in Five, I talk about the shifts we need to make so that assessment isn't this thing that's so heavy and so evaluative and so stressful. So often we use assessment as it's right, it's wrong, and that equates to so many students thinking they're good, they're bad, and even teachers thinking they're bad, they're good based on a single quantity of a score.

So one of the shifts is from evaluation to information, and then assessment moving from just quantity to really thinking about the qualities. So how do we make young people—or help young people—make sense of their assessment evidence in terms of learning and not just a score where they're making decisions about if they should keep going or not as a result?

There are a couple of other phases. There's another shift that talks about just this idea that sometimes people feel so over-tested, and we're often using all of these data points—a lot of the external data points like the state exam or ACT or SAT—to define the worth of a school or a classroom, and students take that on. So how do we use assessment for the purposes in which it was intended?

And so then the five phases are actually for teachers and teacher teams to engage in as a process, as a framework—not as a script, but as a way to say, how do you make sure that your assessment is really tied to learning and there's a progression? So I use, how do we create a progression or a ladder so students can monitor their learning and see where they're going? And how do we create a plan? Some of it's very much what we've done before, just trying to make it really efficient and focused, and lots of examples so people can see how does this play out in my context. Because kindergarteners are way different than physics students, and so the big ideas are the same, but how do we engage in a process so we get really clear about what learning looks like, and then how does that translate to young people really understanding their own learning and developing their own reflection?

So the phases then move into almost a backwards design—knowing where you want to go before you start—and so a process of that. And then some of the technical parts of how do you write a good item or task or rubric so that you get good information and not so much that's getting in the way. And then the fifth piece is student investment. And really, how do we use students—or how do we engage students—as partners in their learning and not just involve them but help them invest? And I think you mentioned that at the very beginning, that it's this idea of partnership. And how do we use assessment to build students up, and how do we use assessment to help them really invest in their own learning? And that doesn't mean that they always love what they're doing, but they start to learn about who they are as a learner. So the five phases guide that planning process and that engagement process and then really try to capture the idea of assessment as a process.

Winston Benjamin 12:09
You mentioned something that I think is a valuable statement: how assessments impact people's belief of quality. "Am I good? Am I bad?" And it deeply engages with these feelings of self, right? So the thing I would like to even push on is how can deeply intentional, designed assessment build confidence and reduce anxiety in students? Why does that matter? And how do we do that? What ways can it help? Why should I even think about it as a teacher when I'm planning?

Nicole Dimich 12:54
Yeah, love that. Absolutely. So a lot of times what I'll do is I'll show—sometimes people will use percentages to give kids feedback or to tell them how they did on any given assessment. So if a student gets 63% on an assessment, what are they thinking? "I didn't do well. Didn't do so well. I failed." Maybe some students are thinking, "Oh, that's not that bad," but the 63% is a quantity and doesn't tell you anything about what you know and what's next, or really what the child knows or doesn't know.

And so then I'll usually throw an image that has 63% broken down by three learning goals or learning descriptions, and students get a score in each of those goals, and two of them they actually show proficiency. They actually have 100%, and it's the one—interpreting data, potentially—that they really struggled with. So 63% now is, "Oh look, if we put a cover page on an assessment, and now students don't just get an overall score, they get it broken down by, 'Okay, I know two things. Here's the one thing I need to work on.'" That's super powerful for students to reframe an evaluative score that is, "Okay, this is not about you or your worth. This is about where you're at right now in your learning."

And then as a teacher or a teacher team, if they've broken that assessment down by those three learning goals, now the team can say, "Who are all of the students that need to work on this interpreting data, and what went wrong, and what are some different ways we can help them learn it?" And so it also becomes an efficiency tool for individual teachers or teacher teams to break it down and say, "Okay, this is the area we want to focus on." And then students learn some more. Our instruction is focused there. They learn a little more. They do a little reassessment, and that replaces the score. And now all of a sudden, it's so much more efficient for teachers in their planning process.

And students—some students who have lost hope—they're "What's it going to matter? Why should I learn this anymore?" Now suddenly we're using assessment as a way to help them build a sense of, "No, you got this, just this one part," and it feels more doable. And so whether it's a rubric or whether it's that kind of a thing, that's what the process is designed to do: to say, "Okay, how do we change how students engage in an assessment, or can they see their strengths?" I think that's the other thing. So much of when kids get assessments back or get feedback, how do they identify their strengths? Because that is the hook that gets them saying, "Oh, I can do this. I can keep doing this."

Paul Beckermann 15:17
So a related question: you mentioned at the beginning that you were one of those compliant students. I was probably in that same description. How do we make the shift from compliance to designing something that makes a student want to grow and gives them hope? How do we make that shift happen?

Nicole Dimich 15:36
One hundred percent. That's so important. I think there's so much now too about the connection between assessment and grading actually causing kids more stress, which is one aspect of increases in our mental health struggles that young people are having. There's some research and then there's some exploration now about what's the connection between assessment and grading and more anxiety and worse. There are a number of studies that are showing that.

So even our young people who know how to do school—some of our students who are doing really, really well in school—once they get out and have to make a decision on their own, their mental health is taking a dive because they've never had to make a decision about what they're going to do. It's always been really laid out for them. And so this work is so important for all of our students as they are trying to see it's not about just being compliant, it's about evidence of learning. So how do we chase kids not just to get work done but to really see where their learning is at?

So I think part of it is this: my son Reese, my middle son, during the pandemic, he was in high school, and he fell into that deep depression, and he stopped doing everything. And he wasn't all that excited to have me help him. It was met with a little resistance. He was taking American Sign Language class, and it was midterm, and he came running up the stairs. He said, "Mom, guess what?" See, the teacher had done an interview, and at the end of the interview, she said to Reese, "Reece, you know everything that's most essential, so I'm going to exempt you from all of those little assignments because I have evidence that you understand." And he looked at me, and he's "Mom, I think I'm going to take ASL 2," and he took ASL 2, he took ASL 3, he took ASL 4. And I didn't even know the power of it until a senior spotlight video.

So that's exactly it. That teacher moved from chasing compliance to evidence of learning, and that's easier on her too. So it was just a beautiful moment. Now some people will push back and say, "Well, what about his responsibility and accountability?" And I'll say, "Yes, yes." Was I not annoyed that he was—there were times, yes. And he didn't need to do any of it to show learning. And so what are we going to hold kids accountable to? He needed feedback on work habits but not on that learning. And so I think sometimes we try to make this thing with compliance be something, "Oh, this is going to prepare them for the future," or "This is going to prepare them," or "We have to teach them responsibility" or this sort of thing. That's where we get kids hyper-focused on how many points they're going to get and how much is it worth, "What am I going to do?" instead of "Do I have evidence that I understand?"

Paul Beckermann 18:07
Right. And what does that grade mean? Is the grade supposed to evaluate how responsible you are? That's something else. I mean, I think back to—okay, date myself—but back in the early '90s, we were doing outcome-based education, OBE stuff, and we separated out the task skills. So now we were grading academics purely on the grade, and then we had other evaluations for how the student met deadlines, how they did all these other things. What does a grade mean?

Nicole Dimich 18:40
Yes, one hundred percent. And that's exactly what the next part of that is, and that's one of the things in the phases: separating achievement from work habits and then giving kids feedback and ways to explore, "Well, what stopped you from doing that work, and what does that look like?"

We actually co-constructed a school with 10th through 12th graders, so I hired student interns one summer to explore what was not working in school and then research an area and then provide ideas for how you would change it. And then we actually ended up doing some of it, which was super powerful. And the young people really talked a lot about assessment and grading and just this idea of why they would turn something in or why they wouldn't and their own motives and engagement on that. And when we really changed how we did it, it was uncomfortable for them initially because it's been something that "this is how we do school. You've got to turn in work." And it's not that it's not important to do that, but how do we shift the motives that kids have and how we frame it for students?

So you got me going.

Winston Benjamin 20:35
How dare you keep teaching these people that the value of students—how dare you.

Nicole Dimich 20:40
I'm super passionate about student voice.

Winston Benjamin 20:46
So see, you're starting to go into my next question, but there's something the transition that I want to do between is your son's assessment on that first ASL—he made it to ASL 4. He did a whole bunch of other assessments that held him accountable from that point forward. So again, three over here versus 55 on the other side—I'm willing to make that bet for a student, right?

So now the question is, what role does student voice and choice play in this idea of meaningful assessment? Because again, his voice mattered, and he heard it and then moved forward. So what does it really mean?

Nicole Dimich 21:31
Yes. So student voice and student investment—I see on a continuum—because at the beginning of student voice and choice, there are places where the teacher is really still directing a lot of the decisions that students can make. So they're making decisions. They have voice and they have choice, and the teacher is guiding what that looks like. So the teacher will say, "Okay, we're learning this concept. Here are three ways you can engage in this learning, and here are three ways you can show your evidence of learning." And that's beautiful, and that's a great way to begin giving kids opportunities.

And we just have to make sure it's grounded in learning because I've also seen student voice and choice where students are interested in something, but then it becomes really surface level—a surface level project or a surface level piece—because they're diving into something. It's not that teachers aren't involved in it. It's just the teachers changing their relationship with how they're instructing. So they're making sure that whatever students are choosing, they're getting feedback, and then they're continuing to revise and increase the quality of their work.

So on the beginning of student voice and choice, there's that. The other part of student voice and choice for me is getting feedback from students. So part of it is their learning piece, but then the other part is how are teachers asking for students' feedback? What worked about that activity? What got in the way? How would you change that activity? At the end of an assessment, asking students—I had a second-grade teacher say that she gave kids a blank sheet of paper at the end of every assessment and said, "Tell me everything you didn't know, or that I didn't ask you, that you know." And wasn't that brilliant? Because it's just about the learning. It's about the learning.

And then even when we were developing our lab school, our 10-12 lab school, we were constantly asking students, "What worked about this? When you didn't do it, what got in the way? And next time, what would you wish you would do differently?" So you're just fostering that sense of reflection and just helping kids understand, "Well, what happened when you decided not to do that? Or why did you study for six hours? And what did it get you?" All of that.

And then the middle part of this voice and choice is now we're giving students a little more choice in terms of how they might design. So we're engaging in, "Okay, so if we want kids to learn how to cite evidence, or we want them to learn to solve systems of equations, we're going to ask them to say, 'What are the different ways we could learn this, and what are the different ways you could show evidence of your learning?'" And so students are starting to be part of the design process and designing the choices that they have.

And at the most sophisticated voice and choice, now we're engaging students not as just giving feedback but as co-designers, and that investment—so listening to students and gathering their feedback builds trust. Co-designing something or constructing something together, that's where we have investment because now students are part of designing.

So I had a dual math class, and the deans at the school—there was a lot of discipline things happening—so they presented the discipline data to the algebra class, and then they were in a statistics unit, so the students had to design surveys and then develop solutions to how they were going to fix this problem. Their culture changed in two weeks because students were part of making decisions about how they were going to change the culture of the school, and they were learning along the way.

So that most sophisticated way is this is part of the first phase of Design in Five: what do kids care about and what's relevant to them? Can they solve or contribute to solutions that are local and global, things that we can have them research or be using in scenarios of their work? And then sometimes students are designing what they want to learn, how they want to learn it. And that's where we were at with our competencies when we got to the lab school, and students were demonstrating high quality of work in places where they had some pretty big disparities in their literacy pieces.

So the student voice and choice I see as a continuum of gathering feedback and then decision-making that students do along the way.

Paul Beckermann 25:51
So you talk about feedback, and I'm curious, how can we structure feedback so that it feels encouraging and not just discouraging—another thing that I don't know how to do?

Nicole Dimich 26:02
Yes, one hundred percent. We actually in a high school in Delaware, I asked high school students what kind of feedback helps you the most, and we asked teachers and educators, what kind of feedback do you give the most? And of course, teachers named all the things that they do on Sunday afternoon or outside of class—scoring, grading, all of that, writing comments on papers. I mean, I was an English teacher. I used to write books on kids' papers, and I was so annoyed when my insightful comments were on the floor in the trash, and they're still making the same mistakes, right? But I was doing all the work.

And so feedback is this thing where—and the kids, what they said was it's the moment the teacher in the moment says, "Here's—have you thought about this? Or here, let me show you real fast. This is the process you might use. Now try it." It was in the moment.

So then I got to thinking about how do we set up structures? Because the action that's taken—when I'm writing all those comments on students' papers, I'm doing all the learning. And when I've done focus groups with students, kids will say, "Well, the teacher wrote all over my work, but I don't know how they went from my wrong answer to the right answer because I didn't see the process." So sometimes we feel kids aren't paying attention to the feedback when either they're overwhelmed with the amount or they haven't seen the process.

And so a lot of our work—and in part of an assessment collaborative as well, and we have a series of tenets, and one of them is how do we change our feedback practices so it's almost feedback as instruction, and so that students are able to make changes right in the moment, and then they see their growth as a result.

So I think this feedback as a process—I think sometimes we take it, "I have to mark everything so they know." And I mean, I did that for so long. I spent so much time, and it didn't lead to kids changing. When I pause and I'm "Okay, what are the most important things?" and then lead to action, that's when students start to develop a place of, "Okay, I can do this."

So I think two things to go back to your really original question: one is I think feedback can be strength-based, and so there's—and it has to be set in criteria. So especially if students are really struggling in terms of morale or self-concept, just providing strength-based feedback for a little bit creates a sense of confidence. And then the next piece—there's different levels of feedback, of course—but then it's the feedback that helps them lead to action. But sometimes we have to teach kids how to take action on our feedback.

Paul Beckermann 28:38
Exactly. I was an English teacher too for a long time, and I did the same thing, and the kids get those papers back, and they don't look at any of the feedback. And it's "What did I just waste all my time doing?" I had to reassess how I did my feedback as well.

Winston Benjamin 28:57
So there are a few things that I'm thinking about, and I'm trying to figure out a way to ask this question because you've highlighted several of my frustrations with some teachers at times—the low expectation of students. As you said in your example, the students' reading might not have been up to par, but what they were producing was beyond par, right?

So I think what I'm really trying to ask is how can schools maintain high expectations while still using assessment as a tool for encouraging and belonging? Because sometimes we see that when people hear "engagement and belonging," it's "oh, lovable" instead of high expectation of ability. So can you help us talk through how to maintain high expectations while still doing that "I care about my students. I'm providing them appropriate feedback"?

Nicole Dimich 30:08
Yeah, one hundred percent. Yes. So a couple things I lead with often because this is—the intentions are good. It's just we're missing often the theory and the idea of how it actually happens and what it signals to kids. And so that's part of the phases too, but it's we have to assess and instruct at grade level, and then we support and help kids come along with different levels of support given what students' needs are, how they learn, where they're at.

And because if we teach kids exactly where they're at, assess them exactly where they're at the entire year, they're never going to catch up to grade level. If you teach them—and I'm sure Mike Mattos says this a lot—if we teach and assess students below grade level all year, where are they going to end up? Below grade level. And that's going to compound year after year. When you get to high school, now you have young people with wide disparities in their learning.

And I understand why people do it because the thought is kids have to learn this and then this and then this. And so I just try to help folks flip that script a bit and say, "Let's show students where they're going. Let's show them where they're going, and then let's provide a progression for them to get there." And so that's where phase two is creating a learning progression where we tease out, "If this is where we want kids to go, let's create the pathway there, but let's lead with what grade level is, and then we'll provide feedback along the way." And students can see, "Oh, I'm here. Here's my next step," not "the step," because sometimes we give kids feedback or we give them far ahead of where they actually are, but we want them to see where they're going.

So usually I'll help—and I've done this in lots of ways where sometimes it's not a progression—I use a ladder sometimes. Sometimes it's a wheel. I worked with a high school science group where they had all of the pieces as the wheel, and now students could see, "Okay, this is what it looks like," because young people who are far behind often are drilled to death on all of the little pieces and never see how it connects to a bigger idea. And so that's where this process is so important that we say, "Let's go there."

And then the other thing that comes to play with this is if we have a progression and we've decided this is what grade level is, then now we can say, "What are all of the supports we need to give kids along the way?" So we get to their thinking because their thinking is often—if they can't write about it yet, or if their reading is not quite there, we can do a lot to help background knowledge and do some of that.

So usually I'll say, "Let's figure this out. We can figure this out." And the other process I use—so the first is the planning, the design, "What does grade level look like?" And then I think we are caught in this needing to have kids know this to this to this. And the other thing that happens is sometimes kids are asked to memorize things and have to recall them instead of doing more critical thinking without having to memorize pieces. And so we talk a lot about what are all the ways you can do that differently.

The other process that has been really helpful is looking at student work, and that's the "pile, stack, and plan" that I talk a lot about, and I've implemented in so many different places. And so whether you're in a vertical team or a grade level team or a course team, teams of teachers come together, and they bring in an assessment and some samples of student work. And we do two things. One, we go, "Okay, where does this assessment fall in your grade level?" And I will never forget, it was a grade nine team. They brought in a science example, and the assessment was all about measurement, and we found it in third grade. We found the standards in third grade.

So the teacher—and he was not wrong that there were kids in that class who needed help with measurement—but the team then circled, the interdisciplinary team circled around and said, "Okay, how do we design an assessment at grade nine? And then how will you support kids who don't have measurement?" Because of course what's happening was kids were bored who already knew that, and some students would never get to that measurement without it being in a scenario or context.

So the process leads to, "Okay, we're going to commit to one another. We're going to assess and instruct at grade level no matter what, but we need each other to do that, and we're going to look at some student work together and then design instruction together when we know some students have wider disparities. So how do we differentiate in that way?" Because it's hard to do that as a teacher if you have 25 to 35, 37 students in class. So what does that look like in context?

So yeah, I don't think there's necessarily a simple solution, but I do really believe in the process of bringing people together and saying, "Well, let's design something different." Because people will then often push back and say, "Well, we don't have time." And I totally get that. And I sometimes will say, "Well, can we think about time now not as scarcity but time as capacity? And if we think about time as capacity—" I also say sometimes, "What would happen if we used all the time we spend talking about not having time designing something? What would happen if we did that?" But that's another conversation.

So I think time does get in the way for folks, and then also this feeling of "I don't want to do something wrong. I want to make them feel good." But I always say kids know when they're behind, so you've got to give them power. If you're going to give them power, then you're going to give them the progression. You tell them where they're at, and you give them the next step, and then you give them the next step, and then you build their confidence. And that's what the progression does, and then the assessment along the way.

So those are the three pieces that often I'll engage folks in as we're thinking about how to do that.

Paul Beckermann 36:07
So somebody's listening to this and they're "I need to change my assessment practices, but I don't know where to start, what to do." What advice would you give to a teacher who thinks they want to make this change but they're not really sure what to do?

Nicole Dimich 36:22
Yeah, there are a couple of first steps. One is just to take an assessment that you're currently using and look at what do you want kids to learn. So if you're using standards or competencies or whatnot, name within that timeframe or that unit what are the standards you wanted kids to learn. Look at that end-of-unit assessment and put a cover page on it. Or if you're using an electronic assessment, go through it and take a look and attach the items and make sure that it's really reflective of what you want kids to learn.

And just simply giving kids information about their score differently can start to make kids pay attention in a different way and also be thinking about what that looks like. So that's one step.

And I also tell folks not to think about doing this on every assessment tomorrow. Try one unit. Try doing some things differently in one unit, and then see what works. Because any strategy will work or not work given the context or culture of a classroom. And so I mean, I could do one strategy one hour, and the next hour the same strategy falls flat on its face. And so notice the impact on your workflow as well as what happens with students.

And I think the other—just even going back to—I think sometimes we think we have to grade everything or kids won't do it, or we have to score everything. And so sometimes I'll tell folks, just try not scoring something and just having kids look at the mistakes they were making or the learning they—it's amazing. If you don't score something but you use it in the instruction, kids will do it. And if they don't do it, then you just pull them aside and say, "Please do it." It sounds so much easier to say than to actually do because of course there are dynamics there, but I think there's also trying to get around this idea of coercing kids to do things by simply grading it. Because kids who have lost hope—they don't care. So what you need to have them do is focus on what the evidence is.

And so there are some strategies there to look at, but simply that would be one. I think just sharing learning goals. And I think we do this sometimes. I think we relentlessly post learning targets or those, and it's not just about that. That's the first step, but it's if kids don't know what they mean in terms of their learning—I say put learning targets or standards or descriptions of learning on assessments and ask kids to do some reflection with that.

So yeah, those would be a couple. I can slide you a few templates and examples, happy to do that.

Paul Beckermann 39:00
Hey, we can post them.

Nicole Dimich 39:02
Okay, great. I do have a Google folder where I have assessments by grade level and discipline, and I think that—and people have been super generous, and I think that just even looking at different ways that people have done that can sometimes help.

Paul Beckermann 39:17
Awesome.

Winston Benjamin 39:17
So that leads us to a really great question. You're providing a lot of tips, strategies, tools. So it leads us to the question: What's in your toolkit?

Transition Music with Rena's Children 39:29
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Winston Benjamin 39:40
What are you trying to walk away with? Something that somebody can use in the next couple of days, a week? What's in your toolkit? What are you recommending, Paul?

Paul Beckermann 39:49
Oh, Nicole has got me thinking about all my days as an English teacher when I over-gave feedback on their papers. Just put too much on there, and then I'm thinking about a change that I made. And this was in a creative writing class, and the kids had to write every day. They had a full page of writing they had to bring back every day, and it was some kind of creative writing they started in class, had to finish maybe at home.

But instead of collecting that writing every day, grading it with lots of copious notes in the margins, we started sharing in small groups orally with their peers. And then they had target pieces that they were looking for—maybe they were looking for sensory details one day, maybe they're looking for character traits one day. But what the students in the groups were tasked to do was write down evidence of how they did it right. That was all positive feedback from their peers. And the kids got really motivated to do it right because they wanted positive feedback from their peers.

And then they would choose one from the group that was the exemplar of the group, and then we'd share that with the larger class. And it was a celebration of the students who really hit the mark, and it wasn't the same kids all the time.

That's my tool. It's a personal example, but I think teachers can find applications in their own classrooms that maybe are similar.

Winston Benjamin 41:14
I love that. I love that. So I was thinking about—I just finished reading a book called Brilliant Teaching: Using Culture and Artful Thinking to Close Equity Gaps by Adesoji Adeyei-Stenbridge. First of all, brilliant. It's about—in one section, he's literally showing pictures, art pictures, and he's "Think about this. What does it make you think about? How does this—" And I think sometimes, as you said, Nicole, we sometimes forget that students can communicate deep knowledge if we allow them and listen to how they're communicating that deep knowledge. It may not fit on a piece of paper, but the intellectual skills and mastery that they're demonstrating in their communication and reflection goes beyond the standards or the little box that we could check in those numbers.

So as you were speaking, that made me think about that work, and so I really appreciate the conversation. So it's signed, Nicole. You've been dropping gems and tools in our toolkit, this toolbox, the whole show. You'd like to throw another one in there?

Nicole Dimich 42:26
Yeah. Well, I mean, I just do think that assessment can be a conversation. So what are all the ways that we get kids talking and get them thinking about their learning? So whether it's cutting apart a rubric and having kids put the rubric together so that they can start to see different levels of quality or proficiency, and then you give them anonymous samples of problems that have been solved, and they have to score it on the rubric. And so you're getting students talking about their learning, and then that builds their idea of how to self-reflect because oftentimes students don't know how to do that, and that's such a powerful thing.

So I think using assessment as conversation as a way to—that at the end of the day, whatever the instructional activity is, whatever the reflection is, however students are—that they can identify their strengths and their next steps.

Paul Beckermann 43:18
Love it. All right. Well, our next step is our one thing.

Transition Music 43:23
It's time for that one thing. It's that one thing.

Paul Beckermann 43:36
All right, it's time for final takeaways today. Winston, we'll have you go first, and then I'll share something, and Nicole, you get the cleanup at the end.

Winston Benjamin 43:45
She's batting cleanup, right?

Winston Benjamin 43:49
The thing that's so impactful for me is stop throwing anxiety at a kid for no reason, and stop doing work yourself for no reason. If you're grading and they're not reading whatever you're writing, maybe change it up a little bit. So I'm just going with purposeful action leading to purposeful outcomes.

Paul Beckermann 44:15
Wow. I don't even know if I need to say much more after that, Winston.

Nicole Dimich 44:19
I know. That was great. Beautiful.

Paul Beckermann 44:23
Really summed it up. Drop the mic, Winston. Drop the mic. Seriously. Now I don't know what to say. I think that assessment as evaluation of self-worth—to think about—I used to teach speech class, and that just weighed on me all the time. Kids thought that the grade they got on a speech was the quality of them as a person. And it's "No, no, please don't." And we had to work on the conversation. Again, assessment as conversation. And we had to talk about it, and we had to come to a good way of communicating, how they can get better. But what are you doing well? And you are a quality person. This is a skill that we're developing. And how do you separate that? So I'm just dwelling on that maybe based on my past experiences.

Paul Beckermann 45:17
Nicole, batting cleanup.

Nicole Dimich 45:19
Right? Well, beautiful things that you both have shared, and I always learn so much just from hearing folks reflect and share your insight. So thank you for that on a thousand levels.

I think my last thinking is circling back to this idea of hope and hope and efficacy—this idea of how do we use assessment to build kids' confidence so that that leads to them persevering, so that they will continue to find that success and achieve. And again, we want educators to have that sense of hope, efficacy, and achievement.

So I would hope that we could just change the narrative around assessment and these practices just to notice the impact that our assessment and our grading practices have on students' achievement, their confidence, and our workflow. So assessment as a relational process, as being a place of evidence of learning and not just compliance, and assessment as being information and not just evaluation. There are a thousand ways to do it, and as we work together, I think there's so much possibility in the way that we can really change how we use assessment and grading—not as a way that or not as something that causes more stress, but really as a catalyst for success.

Winston Benjamin 46:39
I appreciate that last bit, and one of the things I really like about you in this conversation is you didn't drop a shameless plug in the toolkit, so I'm going to do the shameless plug for you.

Nicole Dimich 46:59
Thank you.

Paul Beckermann 46:59
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, Winston not only did a mic drop before, but he is off. His internet cut out, so he's gone. So we'd like to end up today by having you, Nicole, share a little bit. What's your book? Where can people get it? What are some resources you have for folks?

Nicole Dimich 47:18
Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much. So yes, I have written Design in Five, which is engaging assessment practices. And then also there's a handbook that's coming out with my colleague and co-author, the amazing Dr. Anissa Baker Busby, and that will be released in March, March 6. You can get it at solutiontree.com, or you can also get it at Amazon. And we are opening a YouTube channel in the next couple of months where there'll be videos as well, and you can find us at Design in Five. So yes, fantastic. Our two resources—you'll see a few other resources if you look into my work, but those two are out there.

Paul Beckermann 48:00
Hey, Winston's back. Winston, you're back just in time to say thanks, everybody.

Winston Benjamin 48:05
Bye, everybody. We appreciate you. Check out the book.

Paul Beckermann 48:08
Hey, thanks for being with us, Nicole.

Nicole Dimich 48:10
Thank you. Thank you both so much.

Rena Clark 48:15
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 48:18
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 48:31
We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 48:36
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 48:39
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 48:42
You make a difference.