I think I finally got all the typos in my last blog post, lol!

We were thinking about fourfold rubrics of criteria used to teach, assess/evaluate.  In the history of Metaphysics from Plato to Heidegger, you have the basic idea that the really real is not the “present” thing in front of you (me on – deficient being), but what it “re-presents” (alethos on – really real or true being).  And it makes sense to think according to this paradigm since the philosophers were teachers, and this is how teachers think.

In the writing assessment exemplars I discussed, they presuppose a holistic student approach involving teacher, student, parents, learning resource teacher, etc.  In my May postings for Secular Web Kids I outline some of my favorite teacher instructional strategies.

The irony though is that when we look at assessment and evaluation as classically performed by teachers the specific student/product/teacher aren’t involved in the process at all.  When we looked at the writing example, it was a matter of indifference with the exemplar who wrote it or what they wrote or who the instructor was.  The writing sample, and there were two examples at each achievement level, only mattered insofar as the particular piece re-presented a level of criteria in the rubric.  The classic instructional process is machinic in this regard:  Teachers establish where a student is on the developmental continuum (e.g., First Steps Writing Continuum), and then target what needs to be taught to move them along.  The actual piece of student writing (or a portfolio collection) is not the “really real,” but merely a symptom of what is really going on with the piece expressing a level of the rubric criteria.  When the Derridean Caputo quests against “Criteria,” this is an entirely different education model all together.

I hope you enjoyed my posts this year, and I’ll see you in the Fall.  Have a great summer!