Lucy H. Griesbach

Inventive Teacher Academy: Classroom Assessment

Utilizing: Techniques 14 and 16

Class: Web Design

Purpose: My purpose was to help students formulate their ideas for their final projects in an instructive and provoking way. The book presents lessons 14 and 16 as especially helpful for gauging students' comprehension of complex ideas. I used the lessons to help students take their own ideas for their final projects and reduce them to a single goal (lesson 14) with multiple creative offshoots (lesson 16).

The Exercise:

Because I regularly have students chart their ideas to help them determine the direction of their multimedia projects, I naturally chose lesson 16 (p 197) — the "Concept map." To stretch the exercise, I chose to merge the concept map with lesson 14 (p 188) — the "Word Journal." Rather than assigning one general idea as the basis of the concept map, I instructed students to distill their final project into a single word. This exercise stems from the "Word Journal." Instead of summarizing a lengthy text in a word, students summarized their project ideas in a word. Next, students drew their "brainstorm," or concept map stemming from their single word. Finally, students reviewed their concept maps for potential imagery for their projects.

The Results:

Students were initially reluctant to let their minds wander as they created their concept maps. They began with rather logical groupings of words (ex.: car: tire, steering wheel, speed…). A few students were uninhibited and created expansive concept maps. One such student's word, "family," led to "cobweb" and "dust." The students who immediately caught on to the assignment were generally also the ones who employed complex visual metaphors in their first projects. I had to sit with the other students individually and encourage them to extend their ideas by free association (The student with car added driving, sitting, boredom, music, etc.).

For the most part, no matter how enthusiastic I may be about the assignment or how many times I reinforce my expectations, many students require an activity to help them begin. If I do not provide that activity, many students choose a simple idea, like a site about cars with a matching visual motif of cars, simply because they thought of it first. In many ways I feel like a creative writing teacher, because it is simply not enough to teach grammar (technical lessons); I must also help students learn to express themselves visually.