Do you know how we at be.Living perform the children’s evaluation process? At our school, we do not believe that traditional “tests” or “exams” alone can fully assess the children’s achievements in relation to school learning. Therefore, instead of the tests, we employ an Evaluation Process.
This is not just a new name, but a different understanding of how an evaluation should be – broader and more thorough. We believe that the evaluation should be procedural and formative, and, above all, that the child should perceive that this is a process that is for, and not against, him/her.
The Elementary School I coordinator, Gabriela Fernandes, explains that the evaluation of students at be.Living is “procedural” because the entire process of the child at school will be considered and analyzed. “Everything the child does here inside our school is part of the evaluation process. They are evaluated daily. We closely monitor the children’s entire range of conduct, from the moment they step into the school until the moment they leave, all the activities and experiences they participated in and how they participated. The child is always being evaluated, because it is precisely this process that leads the teachers to think about how activities should unfold and individual and group interventions should take place.”
She explains that, besides being procedural, the evaluation at be.Living is also formative, because the school constantly invites the child to understand and participate in this process. “Although the systematized Evaluations, which is the week of evaluations, only happen from Year 3 on – because the Year 1 and Year 2 children are in the literacy process, developing reading and writing skills, which are fundamental in executing a good evaluation – they already experience evaluation activities as of Year 1. They are activities in which we already start telling them: “in this activity, you are going to write the way you know how, all by yourselves, without help. This is what we call “polling”. As of Year 1, the children also perform self-evaluations, assessing their own stances and attitudes, called metacognitions, when we invite the children, through a graphic that systematizes everything for them, to think about who they are as students.”
As this evaluation process occurs, the children begin to understand why they do certain activities, what they are doing at school, and why they learn each of these things, thus building their trajectories as students within this strength. “During this process, we ask the children important questions, such as which area of knowledge they enjoy learning the most, which activities they liked doing the most, why they think they did better in a certain area and not in another… And we show the children how their preferences directly affect their production. We show them that, regardless of whether they are more skilled in one area of knowledge or not, and enjoy certain areas more or less, that the tools they are developing in Elementary School I enable them to achieve all the proposed objectives, in all areas” – explains Gabriela.
Since we work through the end of Elementary School I at be.Living, we are concerned that the children who leave our school in Year 5 are prepared to continue their studies at any other school that their family, or the children themselves, may choose to study. We also consider the moment and the educational context in the country. “In Brazil, we currently have the entrance exam to get into college. That means that the student is still governed by an evaluation that will decide whether or not they enter college. That is why we believe thatchildren need to exercise this from Elementary School I on. Some schools choose not to perform assessments in Elementary School I. We think that the younger they are when they are introduced to it, the more time we have to work with them. We understand the importance of the Tutoring model and we have been able to do this work very well with our multi-subject teachers, who have more time than the Elementary School II specialist teachers.”
Gabi explains that, in practice, the be.Living Evaluation process is systematic work that involves study guidelines, assessment activities, and the process of reviewing these activities. “The idea of doing poorly in the evaluation activity and that grade going on the report card is a thing of the past. That is not how we work. There is even the possibility that the child did not do well in that activity because he/she was not well that day. So, everything is going to be considered in the child’s evaluation construct: if he/she accomplished the study guidelines and competencies, if he/she respected the established dates and deadlines, and whether he/she executed a good evaluation activity. And if in the review we notice that the child has acquired the knowledge, but simply was unable to expose it on the day of the evaluation activity, the scenario changes completely. That is why we chose to work with a construct and not a grade. Grades are a very concrete thing. Five is five. But in the construct, we were able to create breadth of perspective.”
be.Living works with 4 constructs: “AP” (Fully achieved the proposed objectives); “AS” (Satisfactorily achieved); “APAR” (Partially achieved) and “NA” (Did not achieve). These four constructs give our school breadth of action. Gabi cites the example of a child who had a hard time in the study guidelines and didn’t do very well in the evaluation activity either, but had several insights in the review process, which the teachers were working with her. “This child is not going to receive a bad construct – she will receive the evaluation that she partially achieved the proposed objectives. From there, we start a recovery process to understand what the issues were, what was missing, and many times, at their age, it is not a concept that is missing, but approach, procedure, and understanding why they are doing that activity. So, together with the child, we build this evaluation process that makes it very clear to them how active they have to be. With respect to the study guidelines, the children receive these guidelines 20 days before an assessment, and the student is invited to reflect on them. Each teacher thinks of the best way to perform the revision, whether it is to redo the activity collectively, one student correcting the other’s evaluation, in short, we are thinking of several structures and strategies so that this process is always very procedural and the child’s construct reflects how he/she related to that area of knowledge during the quarter.”
Through this evaluation method, be.Living’s main goal is to show the child that assessing andbeing assessed is a process that is for, and not against, him/her. That the evaluation is not for the school or the family, but an individual process for the children themselves, through which they, as students, get to know themselves better, set goals, and put themselves at the center of their own evolutionary processes, and not in a process of competition with others. “It is a very interesting process and we understand that it generates a procedure in the child, which is knowing how to do. When we hand out the study guidelines and the teachers open their agendas and establish that they have 5 natural science activities to do, inviting them to think about how they are going to organize themselves during the week to accomplish them, the child, as of Year 3, learns how to organize his/her time. They face the process head on, from beginning to end. This is the translation of what we mean about being formative: the child performs this evaluation for self-improvement and not to prove anything to anyone” – concludes our coordinator.
