Like many trades instructors in BC, Buddy Wolfe, Culinary Arts and Hospitality Instructor at VIU, has recently found himself searching for alternatives to the traditional assessment methods used in face2face teaching & learning settings, such as multiple-choice questions.
In this post, Buddy shares his thoughts and ideas on how he plans to incorporate authentic assessments in to his teaching practices, and how he will take student learning beyond what is measured in standardized tests.
A penny for your thoughts, Buddy!
“I’ve been doing lots of online reading on this topic and I keep coming back to the same thought. The idea of authentic assessment is easy and sensible, but the implementation of it, the “assessment” part, is where the struggle is going to be.
So why is summative assessment so popular?
Summative assessment has been so popular because it allows us to test a wide range of students in large numbers. Moving away from this will be difficult because the two most positive attributes of summative assessments are as follows:
- summative assessments are loved by administrators and controllers in school boards and post secondary institutions the world round because it is efficient and cost effective
- Instructors like feeding a scantron into a machine and “grading” 30 exams in 3 minutes. That’s a lot easier and cheaper than devoting hours to develop and grade open ended questions and essays which computers are yet unable to do for us.
Are Rubrics the way forward?
So, with these thoughts in mind, I keep coming back to the idea of creating rubrics. The following article really stuck out to me and I think it would be helpful in developing future rubrics for trades and vocational programs.
Amazingly this article is almost 25 years old! So this notion is not a new one.
Beyond the hard technical skills
One thing that I have always struggled with is that I believe my job is to create entry level cooks, that are prepared and qualified to enter the workforce and to succeed. We are a trade school after all.
However, I really appreciate the development of a rubric to try and quantify soft skills.
“Success” is the hard part. We can turn out cooks but will they succeed? We know that success has often very little to do with the hard technical skills that we teach in the trades.
What does success look like in the 21st Century?
Success is more often built on the ability to think creatively and critically, to solve problems and be self directed, to show care for fellow citizens and to work well in groups and to communicate. These are the attributes that will lead to success.
Let’s talk about soft skills
I’ve seen plenty of “chefs” that can make good food but can’t run a kitchen. As a person who’s hired and fired more cooks than I’d care to remember I always believed that we hire for attitude and train for skill.
Maybe more emphasis needs to be put on the development of these skills in tandem with our curriculum and to develop authentic assessments that not only cover the technical competencies of our courses, but that will also challenge our students to achieve on a parallel set of competencies that are based on soft skills and that are developed to encourage their success”.
In closing, I would like to say a big thanks to Buddy Wolfe for sharing his thoughts and ideas on authentic assessments with the VIU T&AT community, and beyond. Buddy is currently an active member of an eight person team at VIU, who are working together to develop Authentic Assessment for a Digital World. We look forward to hearing Buddy’s next update.
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