I now get to see a decent amount of teaching by pre-service students, as well as current teachers in the field—something every educator would benefit from, yet is almost never built into teaching schedules, sadly. One thing I overheard last fall was something like “after writing your conclusion, be sure to submit your lab; I’ll be reviewing these over the weekend,” and then the class began a brand new unit.

It occurred to me that the teacher wasn’t going to finish reviewing students’ work for days—outside of contractual hours, no less—which means the teacher wasn’t going to discover any struggling individuals (or groups) until long after anything could be done, like the two boys I saw in the back of the room who had fairly blank lab reports. In other words, this isn’t an example of timely feedback that would have otherwise improve learning, which affects both teacher and student.

In this particular case, when the teacher found out that a certain number of students didn’t understand Unit 1 content, what was the plan? Pause the current Unit 2, then go back?! Why did they go on to Unit 2 in the first place?! I found myself wondering: “what could be done with the lab report to avoid all this? How might we break up the assignment so that all the feedback is timely, and there’s no moving forward only to fall back?” Let’s take a cue from some graduate work…

Multi-day Assessment
Interestingly enough, ALL of my professors have assigned shorter assignments that lead to a much longer final product by the end of the semester. For example, one course assignment was to write an introduction to a topic of educational, interest and state a problem we might want to research. The next week, we developed purpose statements and research questions. We then described our method the following week, shared data samples after that, analyzed a category, and finally wrote up a discussion. The result was a massive paper written over the whole semester, with each assignment contributing parts to the whole. You know what was between all those segments? Feedback. The professor kept us from going astray, and at times even adjusted the syllabus to revisit key concepts the group needed more clarification on. Can you imagine if these assignments waited until the end of the semester?! That woulda been one hot mess of a research report. What I consider the best part is that the professors didn’t have to review each final product in its entirety—they had already done that for each smaller assignment! This practice is something that can render that screenshot timetable obsolete.

Same holds true for K-12.

For that lab example, I can envision collecting the hypothesis after one class, then giving feedback the next day—or better yet, MONITOR the room and provide feedback in real time (re: monitor assessment or highlight your confusion). After that, the teacher could take a look at some lab data that was collected, etc., and continue with feedback. Come time for that conclusion, it would be a simple check of whether the student connected all the pieces since the other parts were already reviewed! No need to block off a Sunday and do it all at once!

Besides, it’s rare that a lab report would appear in some kind of all-at-once state, seen by absolutely no one until the entire thing were completed. Even people who publish research have others review their work before the official journal reviewers do the same. That is, no one really works so independently that there aren’t eyes on projects. Educators often—though IMO erroneously—talk about “the real world” vs. the classroom. Multi-day assessing is an excellent example of bringing so-called “real world” experiences of revision into the classroom.

In sum , why on Earth would we expect an unseen final product of a fairly large scope from a student after weeks and weeks of interaction?! The solution is multi-day assessing, looking at segments and parts of a whole whenever possible so the teacher doesn’t redo anything they already did, or delay their entire evaluation until it’s too late (thus, turning into a summative reporting achievement rather than remaining a formative to improve learning).