Week 5, Post 3: TDOC, Ch. 8: Magical Thinking in "Assessing Competence"

Briefly summarize your assigned jigsaw reading.

 It seems entirely justifiable that many of the misgivings voiced in class about the DOC program concern real-world implementation, especially when orchestrated by a single teacher, and particularly in the area of assessment.  If the planning and application of the DOC program seemed to demand super-human resources (or simply three full-time professionals, instead of one), the assessment aspect is similarly contextually-rich and, at least on initial perspective, impossibly arduous to pull off.

Assessment for most teachers means a) monitoring and motivating student progress, b) giving students appropriate feedback and c) translating student progress into grades for the student and the school.  Kutz, Groden and Zamel re-imagine the assessment process from a more student-centric point of view.  Critical to their program is that students and teachers are co-researchers.  Teachers are to help monitor and motivate student progress, however, at "no point is the teacher required to transform herself from helper into judge" (161).  Moreover, the authors disdain grading because "it interrupts rather than supports the learning process of most writers," giving a false impression of "completion" when the learning process is never really "finished" (157).  On the other hand, they recognize the importance of teaching students the process of wrapping up the writing process and the sense of closure.

The Kutz, Groden and Zamel method of assessment is really just an extension of the letter writing begun back in Chapter 6, "Discovering Competence," between Vivian Zamel and students in the writing program (this was, in fact, her sole function in the project: full-time correspondent/assessor).  For the student and the teacher, it sounds so simple, so organic and so idyllic, yet too good to be true.  Students are to write letters (or emails) to the instructor about class research and the instructor responds.  The student's sense of intellectual identity is honored and validated by the teacher's treatment of the student as a peer, since they're both in the same field: research.  In this form of assessment, the teacher must be careful to show students that she is learning from them as much as assisting their progress.  In this perfect world, students never require lessons on sentence building or mimicry of academic language because they learn it naturally, reading letters from the teacher, and automatically replying to the teacher with echoes of her own vocabulary and her grammar.  It's all organic and effortless. 

Anyway, it sure looks good on paper.