My Two Cents Regarding Assessment in the PYP....

1) Conceptual Understanding in Early Years Children

Young children are different than us adults. They don’t celebrate their understandings like we do. It feels natural for them to find out and then, without the celebration, they connect and apply it further. Constantly. Naturally. Some at a slower/faster pace than others, but conceptual understanding is always present in children.

I like that we attempt to have prevailing concepts over our units and work hard to help children make concept connections in a transdisciplinary way, but this is impossible to force, in my opinion. A child does this naturally and I find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assess. However, I find it easy to observe experiences that enable connections. Why can assessment not be simply observing in order to reflect on what has been learned and then use that to develop further or new understandings? Documentation.

2) Summative Assessments in the Early Years 

I find summative assessments baffling! In a similar way, it feels right to hold ourselves in the formative form of assessment all throughout the units (and our units do extend beyond the timed borders, overlap and spiral, but not officially!) We don’t have a task, but on-going observation instead.

Our summative assessment comes in the form of a rubric, which really is a continuum of sorts. Each unit has a four-columned continuum in which we lay out general educational objectives, or hypotheses of what learning could happen on the basis of our knowledge of the children and of our previous experiences. Along with Reggio-styled documentation of the engagements throughout the unit, the rubric/continuum keeps us connected to the central idea and lines of inquiry, and to each other as separate classrooms with shared but somewhat varied expressions of the unit. We also have space at the bottom of the rubric/continuum for anecdotal documentation of learner profile traits, attitudes, and action that the children have displayed throughout the unit. Parental observations are included too.

Since observation and documentation of the groups’ learning is a clear way to record understanding, these documents naturally fit into each child’s portfolio. The unit rubric/continuum does too. We keep record of their growth of understanding of unit concepts by revisiting earlier units’ continuums, and hopefully, by the end of the year, the children have progressed through the columns.

3) Central Ideas and Reggio Projects

The PYP is already Reggio inspired. It was in conception, from what I understand.

As I see it, the units in early years are vehicles for understanding. It seems that in order to avoid restriction because of the planners, we open up our Central Ideas. We try to make them broad and meaningful to children. This has worked for us, developing units that hopefully help us to observe scientific method, while creating provocations in our environment with social-constructivism in mind. I am not opposed to having the Central Idea and Lines of Inquiry because these help keep a team of teachers, children and the big players that we often forget about, parents, connected. I also think that in international schools, we get a lot of movement of teachers in and out of the Early Years. Removing Central Ideas and developing topics or projects, as suggested above, puts a lot of responsibility on the educators who may not have the experience or the confidence needed to respectfully listen to the children and develop projects.

Freezing but sunny in Moscow,
Amber