“I love test days,” I say to a classroom full of bewildered eighth graders. On each desk is one copy of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and a 2 page, 2-sided test.
“What?” I hear scattered across my audience.
“I’m gonna fail,” Victor states firmly as he pulls his hood over his head and then quickly pulls the hood off.
“This is too hard,” cries Johnny as he slumps in his chair and folds his arms.
I continue with a big smile and hands on my heart determined to shift the mood toward my joy.“Let me tell you why I love test days and why you might, too.
“You see, this is a day of celebration. It is a day for you to read the ending of the book and discover what happens to the friendship between Rowdy and Junior, to Junior’s relationship with the rez, to the people at Reardan. It is a day for you to think about what the characters have taught us about poverty, racism, stereotypes, reservation life, hope, dreams, friendship, and family.”
I can feel the mood shifting but don’t feel the love.
“And let me tell you that this test and this testing experience is like no other you’ve known – unless you had me as a reading teacher last year,” I explain as I see my former-current students nodding knowingly and smiling to their neighbors.
“It’s going to be okay,” Lupe whispers to Victor.
“Right. Open the test, what do you notice?” I suggest.
“Lots of blank space – this is too long!” Victor shouts out.
“Where’s the multiple choice?” David asks me. “Ms. X has the best tests, just 5 multiple choice questions.”
“Right, lots of space for you to work through your thinking,” I reply. “And, David, you probably won’t see multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank questions on our tests unless we are doing some test prep.”
“What? Man, not cool, Dr. Donovan,” David mumbles followed by his signature psh, which I’ve come to love (and expect).
“Stay with me. This is actually a good thing because your thoughts won’t be restricted to a single answer. I am asking for your thinking. So as you work through this test, I will read your thoughts right alongside you. We will talk and process what you are thinking, and if you need a page number to cite evidence, I will guide you. If when I read your response, your ideas seem muddled to me, I will talk to you to be sure I understand your thinking as you write. And after you think and write brilliantly about Junior, the rez, the subjects, the symbols, the meaning of this book for our lives, we will chat. I may give you something more to think about, and I may just initial your response to indicate you meet the standard that question explores.” My lecture concludes. My audience is not listening to me. They’ve begun the test, except Victor.
“You mean you are going to grade it while we take the test,” Victor clarifies.
“Essentially, yes. A test creates such anxiety while you are taking it and maybe even more after because you don’t know how you did maybe for days, so this way you will know every day before you walk out of here how you are doing because a) we will talk, and b)I will initial each part you’ve completed with careful thinking and text evidence. See? I love tests because I get access to that brain of yours for a few days!”
“Did you say days?” David asks shaking his head. “Psh.”
A Loving Test
A test that takes a few days may not seem loving to you, I imagine, and students don’t really feel the love as they grapple with the process.
I don’t develop and give tests for every unit of study we do in our junior high reading class. Sometimes we do a portfolio, and sometimes it is a performance based project like a TED talk, but when I do give a test, for a few glorious days, students spend time with a book they’ve finished (or a collection of texts) and think about what the text is doing – how the craft moves us, teaches us, unveils truths, troubles our expectations of life.
The second day of the test this year, Jennifer asked, “Can I stay in for lunch? Will we have more time tomorrow?”
She was filled with anxiety about finishing this loving-but-rather-long test.
I said, “You will have as much time as you need. I just want to know what’s in your brain, and that process is different for everyone.”
And as I finished my sentence, Lupe, a student I had in class as a seventh grader, leaned in toward Jennifer and said, “See? I told you? She’s just like that. Don’t worry. You can’t fail.”
Exactly. A loving test gives space, support, and time for students to think about and write about, in this case, a novel in its entirety, to look back, to make connections, to notice. All this takes time, but this approach, for my students, is quite unfamiliar and so uncomfortable and even scary. The support I can offer students during this process is really when they (and I) start feeling the love.
Reading a Whole Class Novel After 9-Weeks of Independent Reading
For this core text unit, we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie after nine weeks of independent reading. The first week was rough because students were so used to reading at their own pace and reading books of their own choosing.
We read the first third together, starting each reading day with a journal and mini-discussion. Our shared reading was about noticing Alexie’s use of figurative language, quotes where Junior realized something or was making some discovery, and brief summary for each chapter. I had one student taking notes on the board while others stopped the reading to notice and note (Beers and Probst).
The second third of the book was a bit better, students noticed and noted on their own.
And the final third part of the book, we practiced developing our own questions with depth of knowledge stems and having literary discussions using text evidence. Student discussion leaders facilitated the discussion by inviting peers to pose questions and add on or suggest alternative interpretations.
I saved the last two chapters for our loving test, which included a few basic comprehension questions alongside questions for considering the connotation of figurative language (e.g., Rowdy comparing Junior to a nomad). I also included questions which asked students to analyze how one subject (e.g., pain, loyalty, friendship) impacts characters differently and to notice how their analysis points to theme statements. I asked students to track a symbol from the beginning to the end of the book (e.g.,basketball, the rez, Reardan, money, water) and to notice how activities, objects, and places can represent different things to different people at different times. I asked students what they learned about history, racism, poverty, friendship, and I asked them how the book made them feel.
Assessment and Revision During the Test
As students took the test, I walked around with my orange Crayola marker and my student teacher walked around with her green one, and we conferred with students about their responses. We reminded our readers about the parentheses for page citation. We discovered new subjects and symbols we hadn’t recognized. We realized some of my questions were confusing, so we were glad we caught that while students took the test rather than afterward during some marathon grading session (which we don’t do).
My student teacher said, “I’ve never seen a teacher grade a test while it was going on. That’s so smart. And no papers to take home. They’re learning as they go, and you’re assessing in real time.”
Unlike summative portfolios, which serve as evidence of learning at the end of the learning term, a summative test offers evidence we can use mid-term to assess learning and to design the next learning experiences. A loving test also allows us to evaluate student learning of specific standards in the moment, to witness how they approach the work and intervene right then if needed. In the case of a loving test, everyone will learn because the students and the teacher revise.
Okay, so maybe this isn’t your idea of a test, but it is a “set of questions, problems, or the like, used as a means of evaluating the abilities, aptitudes, skills, or performances of an individual.”
Let me tell you that the loving comes in the form of great care; this sort of test experience makes space to care about a student’s personal reading experience. I learn a lot about our readers when I see what they write before I confer with them. I learn a lot about how they think and interpret based on the questions they ask me. I find out who has not been with us in mind or body for the three weeks prior and point to passages that will lead to some success . I find out who is just now, in that moment, ready to learn, ready to hear me, ready to finally join Junior in his story.
A loving test offers space for personalized instruction. Some students need to talk through the symbols before writing; some need a page number; some need my initials as validation that they are on the right track before too much time passes; some just need to hear me say “yes, that’s it,” and some have been waiting all their schooling lives to hear a teacher say, “Geez, I never thought of that in such a way, thank you.”
I walk over to Victor’s desk and kneel down beside him. “I see you are on the nomad question.”
Victor is on page 222, but that question is asking about the context of the conversation on page 230, so I point to the bolded page range indicated in the question. Victor picks up the book and turns to the proper page. I scoot over to whisper with another student while Victor writes, and then I return to read his response.
“Yeah, a nomad moves around in search of food and water. Is that what Rowdy means? That Junior will leave the rez in search of food and water.”
“Yeah, Junior is hungry. Remember the KFC part?”
“Right, yeah. I didn’t think of that. Thank you. See, this is why I love tests. I learn new ways of thinking about this book. Thanks. So, in what other ways is Junior a nomad?”I push a bit.
“He left the rez to go to Reardan?He’ll keep moving around the world,” Victor says, and I can see a glimmer of confidence shining in his eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I thought, too. Can you write what you just said and add the page number? You got this, Victor.”
Love? Loving? Psh. Yeah.
Thank you this was inspiring to read about!
I just love the process of seeing their thinking during a test. I’m hoping I will be able to do this. The important skill for me is not the memorization of what happens in the book but how they infer, notice certain literary devices, and explain themselves using proper grammar skills and language. This kind of testing ties in with that so much.
None of the teachers in our English department, including our librarian, believe in censoring books for our JH or HS. In fact, our librarian celebrates Banned Book Week by setting up a display in the front of our library with the banned books we have in stock. We are hoping to follow the same process you gave about setting parents up with the info of the book and the purpose in hopes that they understand. Since it’s been a few years since the complaints, we’re hoping we can reintroduce it.
I am fascinated with this idea! I would love to be able to implement this in my classroom. I have 2 questions: 1. How did you get this novel approved by your school? We’ve had teachers use this book in class before, but parents complained about the masturbation scene in the book so we had to drop it. We’ve been fighting to bring it back for a couple years now. 2. How do students feel about reading the end of the book during the test? It seems like it would interrupt the emotion of the ending.
Hi, Kylie. So glad to hear this idea interests you and that you are considering it. The students love the immediate, personal feedback, and I love that I can reteach or clarify something before students get too far into the assessment. I remember the days when I’d get home to “grade” and find that students had misinterpreted something or that I had written poor questions.
Now to your questions: 1) I was at NCTE last weekend and attended an author session where they talked about censorship. Laura Halse Anderson (I believe) said that the word “approval” is synonymous with censorship and that we should fight open access. That said, I am not aware of any “banned” or “unapproved” list at my school but certainly respect parents’ prerogative. Our approach was to send home a letter of our rationale for the book one month before we read it. I identified the standards and connected our purposes to the history department’s work with the trail of tears and genocide (implications of historic oppression) while also suggesting it to be developmentally appropriate given our eighth graders are becoming 9th graders (as is Junior, the book’s protagonist). I offered books to parents to check out and read. Not one parent responded to this letter, so we went forward.
2. I think students appreciated reading the ending of the book in a quiet, focused setting. The test also gave them a place to process the ending, and I walked around and conferred with students individually about their reactions/responses. I asked on the test about the “tribes” to which they belonged, and several students needed to talk through that one with me (thinking, I am not in a tribe because I am not Native — still needing support with connotative meaning). After a clarification, one boy said, “I am in the tribe of hoodie-wearers.” Another said, “I am in the tribe of Mexicans — and proud of it.”
And then, the rest of the test was processing the emotions of the book; they wrote about how the subject of pain comes up throughout the book and how each character dealt with the pain in different ways — Junior’s dad by drinking, Rowdy by fighting, Penelope by eating-vomiting, and Junior by drawing and making lists. I asked follow-up questions about how the way people handle pain might be related to hope and the ability to follow dreams. Our next unit is a research project about imagining what to do with our “one precious life.”
So, to finish the book on the day of the “test” was, for me, a loving gesture by a teacher to help readers process everything that had been interrupted by the whole-class novel experience — chunking the sections, reading aloud, controlling access to the book because of our limited number of copies, etc. I often finish a book at home by myself and sit with it for a bit, but then go to bed or pick up another book having never really processed the whole experience. Now, I don’t think we must process everything formally, but, essentially, this post is about how we can be ethical about our assessment practices. Literature is art; it is a reflection of humanity, so I wanted the “test” to be so, too.
Oh, and I was also at NCTE in Atlanta last weekend with several of our English teachers, our department head, and our librarian 🙂 I was so inspired by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle!! Wow!!
For the students who have not been with us, I summarize the plot and then point to passages for the student to read independently doing mini lessons as we go. It’s messy for certain. I’ll write more about this when we get through it. It is intense, but because we know the student and the text so well, we can be responsive to each student’s needs.
I LOVE this idea. It is similar to the way I conduct a major writing assignment: in class writing over several days, lots of talk, lots of love. I am thinking it will be helpful to have students use the rubric when they discuss with me, and then, like you have done here, I can sign off on the different parts of the writing piece. Brilliant. Other suggestions?
Also, I am left wondering about the kids “who has not been with us in mind or body for the three weeks prior.” What happens to those students? How can they “pass” this test?
Thank you!
This is intense. As is often the case, you save time on the mundane task (grading) by putting time in on the planning and thinking part (designing the test and working the entire time they test). There’s also the work you do teaching students how to get their thinking down on paper and the relationship building so they trust you through this process. A lot to think about here; thank you!
How many students do you have in your classroom? I’m trying to get this to make sense for my 30 students.
Between 25 and 30. I teach 6, 40 minutes classes. I don’t stop for the entire time. Our classes are quite diverse in culture and ability, so students write and think at different paces. Some conversations are really quick and others take longer.