Joining a community... that I was already a part of?

Just as Sig Mutra said: “Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do”, teachers who are life-long learners, may be no different. Learning in collaboration with others, who you seek out, beyond your immediate staff, can provide great incentive to learn and discover more. I chose to pursue more knowledge about the Alberta Regional Assessment Consortium. In my attempt to gain access, I discovered that our school district has a membership! The value in this could be immeasurable. After seeking out our membership identity and password, I was in to the internal website where possibilities are exclusively given to membership. I selected the assessment context of professional practice because that is an area that I’m interested in knowing and learning more about. Assessment is such an important part of the teaching and learning cycle, and yet we have discovered that there is such an "illiteracy" that exists within our profession, that we owe it to ourselves to learn more and share the knowledge with our colleagues and students. I hope that by joining this community, I can connect planning/instruction/assessment in a way that is connected to research that is being developed/utilized on the website. My hope is that this community can assist me in sharing good assessment within our school community practice.

After examination of the website, they certainly take a stance that falls more toward re-constuctionism and progressivism. The Alberta Assessment Consortium is independent of Alberta Education and can therefore base it’s work on the philosophies that make sense to their vision. They focus on offering ideas and suggestions for project based, open ended assignments. They have a large footprint around formative assessment and tend to focus on where the learner is, as compared to where they want to be. They logically look at assessment as a transparent mechanism whereby students view it as a contract and know how to demonstrate what they know and are able to do. Student ownership seems crucial to the assessment suggestions within the website. There seems to be a focus on self-assessment with projects and tests being balanced in the partnership. Multiple ways of knowing and showing seems to come across strong in the website. That is not to say that there won’t be any undercurrents with idealism and realism but the overall feeling is that we are on the other side of the philosophical spectrum with the consortium’s work.

Check out this document that was part of the consortium’s work- very interesting! http://www.aac.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Public-Assurance-Doc_final_may31.pdf