Inquiry into assessment strategies: From kidwatching to responsive teaching

Mills, Heidi, & O’Keefe, Tim. (2011). Inquiry into assessment strategies: From kidwatching to responsive teaching. Talking Points, 22(2), 2-8.

Here, we get a quick look into a classroom where assessment is inquiry rather than the driver of instruction, where, as the authors write, teachers and students can “use tools and not be used by them” (p. 8). Mills, the first author, was a “university partner” who gathered extensive data in O’Keefe’s school, which seems to be a very special kind of magnet school serving as a sort of “lab school” for the University of South Carolina. Those working in more “typical” public schools may marvel at the amount of freedom that O’Keefe had to determine his own assessments and to even engage in the kinds of inquiry described in this article. This is clearly not an ordinary school; I’d like to know how it originated.

What is most interesting to me here is that in this case, it is the almost canonical assessments of the whole language orientation that are being questioned, when usually we hear more about teachers within this orientation questioning and resisting the more “traditional” assessments like standardized tests and mandated measures like the DIBELS. The assessment tool in question here is the well-known (in whole language circles) Burke Reading Interview by Carolyn Burke, which is a component of miscue analysis, the assessment tool that has been the heart and soul of whole language teaching. Probably the most central element of the Burke Reading Interview is this question: “When you are reading and come to something you do not know, what do you do?” Research has shown that when children are asked this question in an interview setting, they most often say “sound it out” or maybe “ask someone.” O’Keefe found that his second and third graders were saying those same things, but when he observed them as they read, wrote, and discussed texts in a more natural setting, he realized that they were doing more than just sounding out words, and that they probably knew that. O’Keefe decided to work the question from the Burke Reading Interview more naturally into instruction. The children were invited to write down strategies they used during reading on sticky notes while they were actually reading independently, and then engage in discussion of those strategies during a group circle time following the independent reading period. The snippets of these conversations that we get to see here clearly show more developed strategies than just sounding out words. Children talked about strategies like slowing down, thinking about what would make sense, reading on, rereading, covering word parts, looking at pictures, and more. As I read these responses, I found myself wondering how much teaching about strategies like this O’Keefe did, and how much his students’ responses reflect that. Although I do think good readers develop a repertoire of strategies fairly naturally, some explicit teaching of such strategies would be a good idea in any second and third grade classroom. O’Keefe’s more authentic approach to an already holistic but more formal tool helped reveal much more of how these children knew and lived the reading process. As the authors note, Carolyn Burke probably will not mind reading about how O’Keefe took her assessment tool and moved it forward a bit. As a person who has used the Burke Reading Interview for several years, I also have wondered whether children were simply answering “sound it out” because that was what they thought we as teachers wanted to hear. Asking the question more naturally “in-flight” may better get at what is really happening when we read.