In conversation with Stephanie Lacher: Assessment and PPS

When it comes to assessment in PPS, it's, it's important to be mindful of the context of your school, the context of your students, and the resources that you have available to you. So, it's important to make sure that you are consulting with your team Finding your collaborators; if you're the coordinator or the PPS teacher, hopefully, those are different people. So, you can have some collaboration happening there. But if it's only one person, that's fine, too. When thinking about assessment within PPS, because it is a pass fail component, [if we have opted to do a lot of portfolio work.

And being mindful of what is it that that they need? This is a personal and professional skills course. So what are we asking students to do in order to document their learning document? How do the skills that they're gaining, not only just within their school context, apply to a more professional context? [For example] when we were thinking about our students’ personal development, in one of our initial units, [they wrote about] … who am I as a person as a learner? What do I know about myself? What are what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? Who are the people that I can work with super easily? What are some of the things that I just don't do? I can't work with this type of person - how do I overcome that? We did a lot of personal journaling around that. Because it is a story of personal development. And so that's not necessarily something that every student is going to be comfortable with everybody else seeing.

Then when we get into bringing in how do I work with other people, then we do a bit more of some role playing. And we've done collaboration with our theatre teacher who's come in and done some theatre games with our students just about interacting with other people and uncomfortable situations; how do you react to those things?

And later on, when we got into … ethics and the professional side of things, we again, would collaborate with our theatre teacher, but also pulling in other personnel from human resources, our head of nursing to talk about some of those ethical dilemmas, what is it that they are looking for, we have created CVs with our students, and written professional emails and professional letters, and practice those types of communication skills.

We have also when introducing our applied ethics unit, and getting students ready for the reflective project, had them do a mini reflective project, often on a topic that the students get to choose, because that's something else that we value is making sure that students have some voice and some choice in how they want to be exploring these different themes presented in PPS. So students will often choose a topic of interest to them. And we go through a mini process of turning it into a bit more of an ethical question. And then we've brought in our speech and debate coach, and the students actually have a mini debate with each other where they're practising those research skills. So bringing in thinking skills and that theme, our librarians come in, and we'll discuss academic honesty and making sure they're citing their sources appropriately.

And then they actually have the debate. And after … we have them write a short, brief essay on one side, and again, so that they have that experience of the other options and the other formats available to them with a reflective project. For the other side of the debate, we have them choose one of the optional methods for the reflective project to present the other side. So they'll have the live debate, they go away, and they'll have a written component for one side. But then they have to choose one of the other options for the other side of their debate. So again, before they get to the real reflection of project, they've done a mini one, they've experimented with writing a short essay, as well as one of the alternative formats, so they have a better sense of what that would look like. Again, this is all done in collaboration and conjunction about the timing of the core components over the two years of the coursework, and trying to be mindful of what is it that they're actually going to be experiencing and using when they graduate from high school? What is it that they'll be doing in tertiary if they're going to university if they're going to be doing an internship or work-based placement, but we try to make the assessment that we do and that we look for as authentic and meaningful as possible.

This is about skill development and everything with the assessment is, is rooted in the approaches to teaching and learning skills areas. How do we report on PPS in a meaningful way? And how does this assessment gets shared?

Internally within the classroom, there's, of course going to be written feedback from the teacher, as well as conversations. We also allow, depending on the project, students can peer assess, and so they get peer feedback often.

And then in the more formal sense of reporting, we of course, have written report card comments that are sent home twice a year to families, for parents to see a full reporting of not just PPS, but how they're doing across all four components. So we officially as a school report on all four components to families twice a year. But internally, specifically within the PPS course, they'll receive teacher feedback verbally and written. We also do peer feedback as well. And students also will be given the opportunity to do self-assessment as well. I'm saying the self-assessment is so important because of course, we want students to really be able to chart how they're developing. And that's not we're not saying that it's a upward trajectory, we want them to be very honest about being able to say these are skills are found really difficult to develop. And these are the ones that are found easier. It's not I think we can sometimes think it's about them being a finished product by the end of the course. But it all comes back to sounding very IB - the lifelong learner. Really, we're all in progress!