Let’s Collaborate in Assessing Multilingual Learners!

The connection between learning and assessment is becoming much closer than ever before as educators and multilingual learners assume more active roles in teaching and learning while language and literacy development becomes more prominent within content learning (Gottlieb & Katz, 2020). Put another way, the stage has been set for collaborative assessment!

Multilingual learners can collaborate with peers during assessment, diving deeply into learning activities, gaining agency, and becoming autonomous learners. Teachers can co-create powerful lessons with embedded assessment incorporating multilingual learners’ resources and experiences. Together students and teachers can co-plan, selecting pathways for engaging in learning along with associated multimodal evidence. In this brief blog, we invite you to consider engaging in assessment AS, FOR, and OF learning with your multilingual learners.

Collaborative assessment is a powerful classroom routine that revolves around relationship building.

As educators, you should always start by deeply knowing and centering your students, accentuating multilingual learners’ linguistic prowess, cultural identities, and experiential bases. Next you should strategize how best to customize your students’ strengths and incorporate them into daily activities.

As you engage in a collaborative assessment journey, consider how you might gain and maintain trust along the way by giving your students voice and choice. You might help your students guide others in taking the lead and be reflective of their learning. In fact, we believe that students are so essential in this process, that they have a dedicated approach, assessment AS learning.

In a caring and welcoming classroom where assessment AS learning is infused into and invisible from instruction, you might:

• Invite students to select among a range of modalities (visual, graphic, gestural, technological) along with oral and written text to show their evidence for learning
• Encourage students to self- and peer assess, applying criteria of success in thoughtful ways
• Promote student-student interaction through dialogs, Socratic seminars, and paired tasks
• Observe and note students’ conversions, discussions, and exchange of information

Student-teacher collaboration is also central to classroom instruction and assessment as information is produced, shared, synthesized, and recreated based on productive feedback.

Students gain confidence and independence while exchanges between you and your students promote ongoing communication. In building assessment FOR learning, you support your students throughout their learning pathways, an approach devoted to:

• Establishing shared learning goals where together teachers and multilingual learners collaborate in setting clear, achievable, and challenging learning targets
• Giving descriptive, actionable, and timely feedback along with codevising next steps for learning with students
• Interpreting what the evidence means according to mutually established goals and individual student characteristics
• Co-planning activities using assessment results to ensure continued growth

Collaborative assessment among teachers, coaches, counselors, and other school leaders occurs throughout the instructional and assessment cycles, however, it is most noteworthy for curriculum planning and enactment. With dedicated and protected time to construct or enhance units of learning that optimize linguistically and culturally sustainable practices, you can readily include input from multilingual learners in deciding long-term products of learning. With authentic assessment OF learning you can capture students’ content, language, and social-emotional development over time. To do so, you might:

• Experiment with project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, or maker spaces that center students’ interests
• Co-prepare student-led conferences with input and feedback from family members
• Co-create cultural fairs, exhibitions, websites, newsletters, community events
• Systematically compile, interpret, and archive student samples in eportfolios

With three complementary approaches to assessment, you might ask, ‘Where do we begin this journey and what is our destination?’

We suggest you prepare for your collaborative assessment adventure by:

Making individual classroom and schoolwide commitments to collaboration

How to do it? By engaging in courageous, difficult conversations about collaboration and establishing clarity of expectations and norms

Building relational trust through the forging of professional partnerships

How to do it? By creating a culture of collaboration and entering into partnership agreements among leadership, teachers, students, and, to the extent feasible, families

Engaging in job-embedded professional learning experiences

How to do it? By participating in ongoing external and internal coaching, offering peer support, and engaging in teacher-to-teacher classroom observations.

We wish you an assessment journey of joyful collaboration!

This blog is based on the authors’ recent publication: Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers:  Pathways to Partnerships