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Assessing TPSR-related objectives

This is an excerpt from Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility through Physical Activity 4th Edition With HKPropel Access by Don R. Hellison,Paul M. Wright,Thomas J. Martinek & David S. Walsh.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT

Student assessment ought to reflect the presence of TPSR in two ways:

1. By giving students feedback on the program leader’s perceptions of the extent to which they are taking personal and social responsibility in class
2. By empowering students to share in the assessment process

Both approaches are built into the TPSR daily program format as opportunities for reflection and discussion regarding individual and group responsibility. Informal strategies such as program leader observations, verbal checks for understanding, and debriefing sessions are important to help the program leader and students stay focused on what is important in the program and how they are doing.

Some program leaders may want (or need) to complement ongoing informal student assessment with more formal and systematic approaches. Although these strategies require additional time and planning, many of us find they are worth it because they help us document student performance, establish goals for improvement, assess change over time, and share student work. The next two sections provide specific examples of informal and formal assessment strategies we have found useful and easy to align with TPSR.

Informal Student Assessments

Informal assessment and feedback on student responsibility should be continual and integrated with TPSR instruction. In this section, we highlight how this can be accomplished during the group meeting and reflection time. These parts of the TPSR daily program format involve students in the assessment process.

The group meeting enables students to evaluate the class as a whole and comment on how specific individuals acted in class that day. Sometimes in the group meeting, students criticize other students—for example, for not cooperating or losing their temper. These incidents must be handled carefully, but if the student or students being criticized have a chance to respond and the process is done respectfully, everyone involved receives feedback. Program leaders also have an opportunity to share their feedback with students, not only about the process but also about whether the criticism was justified. In addition, student leaders and coaches need to be encouraged to tell everyone how their assignment—their mini lesson or their team coaching performance—went and what positive contributions the students they worked with made to the group or team.

Again, this approach provides feedback for everyone involved (along with the benefit of pointing out student role models of Level IV), and it gives program leaders an opportunity to share their feedback. They must, however, share their feedback last! The program leader is only one voice in this process, and students’ authority to share their views may be usurped if the program leader talks first. Of course, the program leader can take over—this isn’t a full-fledged democracy, although it should be heading in that direction. But taking control is only necessary if kids need guidance—for example, on how to talk to each other or how to focus or listen more. Too much guidance can set back the empowerment process. A balance needs to be achieved so that kids’ voices are respected.

Reflection time more directly addresses student assessment, because the point is to have kids assess themselves on how well they put the levels into practice that day. If they use the thumbmometer introduced in chapter 6, raise their hands, hold up a number of fingers, or tap in and out, the program leader receives feedback about their perceptions and can make occasional comments—“Yes, I saw that.” “You’re being hard on yourself.” “I thought that needed some work.” “Should that be a goal for you?”

Formal Student Assessments

Sometimes very little is required to make the shift from informal to formal assessments. The type of reflection and processing that occurs during the group meeting and reflection time described in the previous section can be formalized by having students simply write it down. Diane Coleman, an elementary PE teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, made use of a journaling strategy to work around the time constraints placed on her—that is, seeing the kids twice a week for only 25 minutes in which she had to address personal and social responsibility as well as all the other content mandated in the national standards. Ideally, strategies such as daily logs and journals would be used in addition to group processing. With that said, an added benefit of these strategies is that they provide documentation of student performance and give the program leader another mode of providing feedback (i.e., written responses to the students’ work).

Of course, nowadays, there are numerous ways to use technology to get quick feedback from students in real time (e.g., Kahoot! or Plickers). Our friend Sylvie Beaudoin passed on an example of this from Rémi Bureau, an elementary school PE and health teacher in Sherbrooke, Québec. Rémi uses the Plickers application (app) to gather his students’ voices during reflection time and compares their responses to the goal they wanted to work on during the lesson. He uses Plickers by having his students hold up a card and orient it a certain way to indicate the highest responsibility goal or level they reached that day (I, II, III, or IV). He can then quickly scan the cards with his iPad, and it gives him general feedback on the students’ self-evaluation. The app will give him full class stats (e.g., the percentage reaching Level III) and individual results. He can even track a certain student’s responses over time because each student uses the same numbered card every time. Rémi says it’s a nice tool if you want to have a quick look at the group and engage them in a discussion afterward. It’s not meant to deal with individual voices live, but it’s a great way to quickly collect some data from the students and give the class some feedback on their progress afterward. One student of Sylvie’s, William Lemieux, used this assessment strategy in his internship with Rémi. He said one disadvantage is that kids must choose between only four options, which limits the depth of their voices. He said the teacher needs to go beyond the quantitative results and ask some students to share their voices a little more by giving examples, for instance.

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