What does student learning look like to you?

I got this question in a job interview. The answer I gave was okay but I thought of a much better answer today.

The way I would try to explain what student learning looks like to my students is like this:

I would give them all a blank piece of printer paper and ask them to draw the best possible face they can draw in 10 minutes. Use the whole ten minutes. Keep drawing, adding detail. The best face you can draw.

Then I'd collect all the faces and say

One way of looking at what I just asked you to do is to say that I've just asked you to make an interpretation. You took the word 'face' and you turned it into a drawing of what you think a face looks like.

We do the same thing in English all the time. We make interpretations. If I ask you to tell me what a poem or story is about, you're making an interpretation. The same thing applies to a character's motivations or a theme or symbol or figurative language. It's all interpretations.

Writing is the same thing. If I ask you to write a persuasive essay, you're interpreting information a certain way to get me to agree with you. This is what English class should be--even if some classes and teachers seem to try their hardest to avoid this part.

But it kind of makes sense why teachers want to avoid having students generate all these interpretations. It was easy enough to have you make something. The problem is now I have to decide what to do with it. I have to give you information about "how well you did".

So I have all these faces and I have to decide what to do with them.

**At this point I would use a document camera and show the faces the students have made to the class**

Well, one thing I could do is decide that it's pretty easy to draw a face, and it's pretty easy to see a face in just about anything, so as long as I can see a face in what you drew, you get a 100.

But I could also just as easily do the opposite. No matter how well you draw, I could also come up with an infinite number of reasons you have failed. No one is perfect so everyone gets a C or F or whatever I decide.

Both of those measures are too absolute .We need to come up with some sort of common, agreed-upon standard to measure the merits of these interpretations.

We could lay out all the interpretations and arrange them in order based on their relative quality compared to each other. That's more fair. Someone always gets a 100 and someone always fails and its based on the standard of those around you. Just like a race.

Or, I, as the teacher and authority figure, could come up with a kind of face that I think looks good and teach you how to draw that face. Then there would be one face that would serve as the basis for all judgment. It would be fair because everyone would know the goal and everyone would understand how they met it or failed to meet it.

OR! We could combine those two ideas!

We could make it even more fair though if we had a larger sample size to judge the faces. What if we had huge data collection organizations that arranged hundreds of thousands of faces and determined what the 'average' face looked like. And then we could figure out those qualities and describe them and come up with models and samples and say, "Here, draw this face this way and you are a good enough face drawer."

Based on everyone's input, we come up with an agreed upon standard face and then we teach you how to draw that face.

Well, that sounds pretty fair and pretty reasonable. But I think it starts to make us wonder why I am even having you draw these faces in the first place. What is my goal as a teacher? What larger purpose am I steering my students toward? Based on this method of evaluation, one would think that the answer is 'competence'. I want as many students as possible to be judged competent at face making.

But I think that goal kind of misses the whole point of making faces. There's not much lasting satisfaction to be had in being given a 'competent' rating at a given point in time.

The goal I have for students is to continue making faces. I just want them to keep doing it for their whole lives. I think it's a basic, inherent, human need to make thoughtful interpretations. It's a skill like any other that can be continuously improved...indefinitely! It's a judgment that I am making that on an individual AND GLOBAL level, people's lives and the world is better off the more people we have making interpretations. Everyone and anyone should do it. As much as possible.

With that goal in mind--the goal of motivating students to continue to make faces/interpretations after they leave my class--then measuring competence doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Competence says, "You're good enough. Um, we don't really care what you do now." Once you're out of 'competences' to reach, it's game over.

I think the best way to get anyone to keep doing anything, is to show them progress. Show them how they have improved over time and how they can continue to improve. Improvement is addicting.

(I realize this has probably become too rambling to actually be an explanation to students anymore)

So, getting back to the drawings of the faces, the answer is: there isn't really a way to measure a student's progress based on one face. All I can do is describe it. Provide my own interpretation. And then ask them to make another later. And keeping making them. Finally, if, at the end, the student can tell me what is different about their latest and first face drawing, and why and how they made the changes they did and I can see that and agree--then I say learning has happened. I tell them to go forth and continue.

It's not a perfect system. And I think I have what I don't want to do more figured out than what I actually want to happen but that seems to be a common trend in everything I'm trying to do with teaching now so...you know, I'll keep at it.