Assessment
Assessment in Kaleide International School exists to benefit children, to allow facilitators to reflect on and strengthen their abilities to meet the needs of our children for enquiry and expression, and to effectively communicate to families and the wider community what we do at the school.
Our educational approach is non-competitive, and eschews rewards and punishment in favour of encouraging the development in children of intrinsic motivation for learning. Activities are mainly open-ended, cooperative, encouraging exploration and creative thinking, and as such do not lend themselves to grading. For this reason, we place great value on formative assessments –which engender learning and are based on observation and documentation–, rather than summative assessment.
We understand assessment as an attitude which begins by first observing children, listening to them, talking with them and thinking about them. It is much more than gathering data: it is an ongoing collaborative process, a dialogue with the child, that seeks to uncover who learners are and what they know, and that leads to opportunities to build a shared language and create meaning together.
Assessment for us doesn't happen after learning but throughout the learning process.
Assessment is central to working with an emergent curriculum. As facilitator you will bring detailed observations and thinking about each child to project planning meetings. It is from these observations and the discussions they provoke that decisions are made about materials, spaces, time, ideas, and next stages in the school.
In order to encourage risk-taking, creativity and deep-level learning, assessment needs to emphasise that errors are part of learning, and it should minimise negative social comparison. Many of the tasks that our children will undertake can be seen as “authentic” and connected with real-world situations. By engaging the children in problem-finding and problem-solving, these tasks will encourage tackling and persisting with difficulty, and so provide their own assessment or reward. In early childhood, the materials themselves –including Montessori materials– often provide this feedback.
Assessment literally means to sit beside; one-on-one conversations with children can tell us far more about students' mathematical understanding than a test ever could –since all wrong answers aren't alike. When children are engaged in meaningful, active learning –for example, designing collaborative, interdisciplinary projects–, facilitators who watch and listen as those projects are being planned and carried out have access to, and actively interpret, a continuous stream of information about what each student is able to do and where he or she requires help.
We shall be resorting to different forms of assessment, depending on the child's age and the activities she is regularly involved in, in order to obtain the most complete perspective and embed assessment in the social and cultural life of the school:
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