Authentic Assessment Pie

I have been asked...What is authentic assessment? Or as Chelsea Cornejo and Phuong Palafox say, “show me what that looks like!” 

This pie is everything to my practice. This “authentic assessment” pie is how I went from, “I don’t have time for that,” to “I would have left this field if I hadn’t started doing story-driven authentic assessments.”

Our students have lived stories. The story of their home language, the story of their educational learning environment, the story of their bilingual language development, the story of families’ hopes, dreams and concerns, the story of students’ communication strengths and differences in the classroom and the stories they share, create and retell in their own words. 

One frigid, icy and snowy day, I was stuck in Chicago traffic carpooling with Mari Bliss. Our conversations ranged from…”uh oh I think I just peed a little,” to books, weekend stories, venting sessions, our fur babies, our travels, and of course...speech-language pathology.

I will never forget brainstorming this evaluation process out loud with Mari one day and she said something like, “when you are doing an evaluation, it’s easy to get stuck and focused on the standardized testing, but the thing about converging evidence, is that it’s the qualitative information that gives us a full picture of strengths and needs.”

OHHHHHHH.

It finally clicked for me. 

In order to fully understand the academic and social-emotional impact of students’ learning and communication differences, we paint a complete and loving picture of the whole student. Check out the difference between this traditional pie and authentic pie. Authentic pie takes into consideration the important people in the student’s life. Traditional pie, takes a biased, irrelevant snapshot in time with high variability, and little acknowledgement for the whole student’s strengths and differences. 

In the next few weeks, I'll take slices of authentic assessment pie, cut them up, and look at the ingredients and recipe with you!

Written by: Laura Renee Finkel

References:

Mari Bliss Carpool circa 2017

https://the-juvenileforensic-slp.myshopify.com/

The Seven Integral Factors: The critical pieces of assessment for English Learners (Hamayan et. al, 2013)