The notion of “wide walls”,  “low floor – high ceiling”, “multiple entry points”, and “personalized learning” have me in a bit of a tiff this morning. Yup, a TIFF.

All great ideas and proven to provide confidence in learners when all can be successful but how can we truly provide multiple entry points, “rich” math tasks and “higher order” problems without redefining assessment and evaluation. I am not confident we can truly provide unique learning spaces until we make assessment and evaluation personal.

My point is simple. Personalized learning, multiple entry points, rich tasks with more than one way to solve a problem -> standardized assessment and evaluation. Bad rubrics limit creativity and good ones set the course for learning which deny multiple entry points.

Until we truly redefine the notion of assessment and evaluation, I expect to continue to see the one size fits all model of education. For so long time has been a constant at school. We place kids in isolated settings and evaluate them on the product they can produce. There isn’t an educator out there who doesn’t believe all kids can achieve. With this mindset and providing the appropriate tools, technologies and time, shouldn’t “grades” become a constant and time a floating variable?

Without changing assessment and evaluation first, I think we are going about this “ed-reform” backwards.