On assessing process-oriented creative work in education

This is an account of how my strategies to grade students in higher education situations became quoted in research on educational assessment in the performing arts as an example of good practice

The Workshop

In March 2001, I was asked to teach a three-week workshop in Contact Improvisation for performing arts students at Salford University, Manchester. The course was one of a number of special projects that students could choose from. These courses ran simultaneously and took up the whole school day offering the students an immersive “full-time” experience in whatever subject opted for.

I had a group of 15 students, mostly aged 18-24. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds and possessed a wide variety of skills and physical abilities. My first impression was that this was a group of people deep in the transition from home-based teenagehood into independent adulthood.

My teaching style with it emphasis on body-listening was an immediate challenge: on the first day a couple of students complained of being asked to lie down as it would get their clothes dirty! Touch and bodies, both central to my practice, where highly-charged subjects within the group. For the first couple of days I felt like I was in the wrong place and I think the students thought the same. If there was an eject button I would have happily have pushed it!

However, as the workshop developed, I abandoned my original plan of working solely with contact improvisation and balanced this with (related) group improvisational skills and release technique which were less challenging although still highly relevent to the core proposal of contact improvisation.

I also guided the students in reflective writing practices focusing on their experience of themselves (body and mind) in the exercises that I proposed. In doing so, the focus that we were exploring shifted for us all from, “how do we learn contact improvisation?” to, “what can we learn about ourselves in trying to learn contact improvisation?”. As the workshop continued and the students came to trust me and my methods, I saw them make wonderful achievements, both as individuals and as a group.

The workshop culminated in two open showings. I devised a score in which they could first show their work with contact improvisation and then with group improvisation. As a group, I think it would be fair to sum up the collective mood leading up to their first showing as “terrified” — what terrified them was the idea of improvising, having no idea of what they would do beforehand, and that what they were doing wouldn’t be interesting to others.

Once they did it, however, they were elated since they felt good about what they had done themslves and had also received great feedback from their contemporaries. In fact, after their experience of the success of this first showing then they got a bit complacent in approaching the second one, which in comparison fell a bit flat.

Finding a form for assessing the students

When briefed on arrival that at the end of the project I would be required to give grades to individual students, my initial reaction was that it would be totally impossible to do this, this was a minor distraction from my teaching task and a easy solution might be to simply offer a pass/fail structure based on assessment since grades had never been very important to me in my own movement studies.

However, from the first few uncomfortable days of the workshop, it became clear through talking with the group that they were very invested in the whole idea of assessment and that this pass/fail solution wouldn’t satisfy them. Indeed, as I began to present my work, one of the sources of their discomfort was anxiety about how this work could be assessed.

My immediate response was to try to reassure them, saying not to worry about final marks, that what was most important to me was that they showed up on time every day, and that I would figure something out that reflected their commitment to and investment in their individual processes throughout the workshop.

Specifically, I said that it was important not to compare themselves against each other in terms of their level of skill acquired but in how much progress they had made for themselves as a result of engaging with the process. I stated that, in principle, someone who had a “natural talent’ for this work but who didn’t commit to the process and didn’t learn anything through it would score lower than someone for whom it was a big challenge, maybe didn’t achieve such a high skill level but did invest in the process and did learn something. In lieu of a plan I suggested that they keep workshop diaries.

They were not completely satisfied with this answer and the issue stayed remained very much in the air. The question of how they would be eventually be assessed continued to crop up daily in group discussions. I kept saying that what they learned was surely more important than the grades they got, but I could feel their dilemma — that for all my idealistic words, in the world in which they were embedded (both the institution and the wider world) grades counted.

Sometime towards the end of the first week, I cannot say exactly when or how, the solution presented itself. I suspect that it emerged as a response to one of their many assessment related questions in the group discussions. My proposal was that they would grade themselves and that in order to get a passing grade there would be a non-negotiable minimum attendance level of 80 per cent. I said that I would offer guidance and more practical details on how they could do this for themselves in the final week, but that right now we needed to put the issue aside and focus on the work. This satisfied them sufficiently that we could do that.

During the weekend break between first and second weeks, I devised a plan in which I would have individual interviews to negotiate their grades on the final day of the course, the day after the showings. In addition I would give the students the task of choosing three from a list of eight reflective questions and ask them to submit a single side of writing (around 500 words) using the questions as a reference, answering any combination that spoke to them.

The questions were: 1) how do I learn? 2) what helps me relax? 3) what does being 4) to what extent do I feel comfortable in my own body? 5) how does this affect my ability to work with someone elses’ body? 6) to what extent can I bring the answers to these questions into my movement? 7) how do I imagine applying what I am learning to my university life/other lives? 8) what do I feel most like saying about the workshop?

My idea here was that this would compel them to spend at least some time reflecting on their process and that this would then support them in their self-grading assignment. I also figured out criteria for self-grading - their attendance and punctuality, how far they thought they had progressed from their individual starting points, their attitude to the learning process, their ability to work with the rest of the group.

In the second week, we were able to focus more fully on the process itself and our mutual understanding grew. At the end of Thursday, I explained the assessment process and gave the questions for reflection saying that they could begin to think about them over the weekend. This left time for further clarification on the Friday. They were surprised at the simplicity, directness and personal nature of the questions and the grading process.

I responded by saying: that the questions were a just a starting point for them to reflect on what they thought they were learning; that they could change the questions if that helped; that they need not reveal anything that they didn’t feel comfortable with; and that they would submit and that I would read what they had written before prior to one-to-one meetings to be held on the final day of the workshop during which they would each tell me what grade they thought they deserved and we’d discuss it and re-negotiate the grade if necessary (if I thought it wasn’t accurate).

What happened next

What happened was as remarkable as it was unexpected. In undertaking the written work, all the students except one chose to answer ALL of the questions that I had suggested, with the manuscripts typically running to many pages. The writing revealed personal issues, struggles and insights which had been often been hidden in class, in some cases articulating lifelong struggles with body-centred issues such as obesity, anorexia and poor self-image, as well as more general human issues such as lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem.

Many reported positives changes as a result of their workshop experiences. I was surprised and extremely touched by the level at which they had engaged with what I had offered in both in this writing task and the workshop as a whole. One tutor who was yet to read what had been written, shared my amazement, remarking that, simply in terms of volume, this was more written work than they had produced for all that semester’s previous written assignments combined.

When it came to the one-to-one interviews, I was impressed by how seriously the students took the task of grading themselves as they explained what they thought they deserved after carefully weighing all the criteria that I had suggested should be taken into account. What was interesting to me was that the majority gave themselves exactly the grades that I thought they deserved — in preparing for the interviews I had pre-graded the students as a guide for myself according to what I had observed and what I had read.

Interestingly, the majority of exceptions (five) had graded themselves lower, in one case far far lower, than I thought fair — during the course of the interview, I felt it was my job to persuade them to increase their grades. I left the final decision with them.

The one exception was a lad who brazenly asked for top marks because we had a nice rapport — I gently explained that having a nice rapport with me was not part of the criteria! Drawing his attention to his attendance record, which amounted to the absolute minimum, and the fact that I thought he was over-focused on his “natural talent” and might have got further had been present and worked more diligently in class led him to back off from a perfect mark.

One final point is that in the final interviews when the students gave themselves grades, many of them wanted to take into into account the grades of the whole group when giving their own final grade, demonstrating an awareness of their relation to the other members of the group even while concerned with self-assessment.

Summing up

The whole assessment process surprisingly became an integral part of the learning process for the students. Since this experience I have regarded assessment as a powerful tool for self-reflection and self-empowerment.

Unfortunately, in many situations where I have been asked to teach and grade students since, there is simply not enough time to go through this process — time for the final interviews and time to introduce the elements that I feel made it work in this example. I think that there was something about the length and intensity of this course that lend itself to this assessment process — it arose from the very specific conjunction of elements described above after all.

My major regret about ending the course this way was that we didn’t get to meet as a group again after these final individual interviews. I’m curious what I could have fed back to them as a group and what might have developed from that. However, maybe it was precisely the fact that there were no plans to meet again as a group that led to their writings being so candid.

The general lesson has stayed with me however and in recent years (as detailed above in part one) I have come to regard the ability to self-evaluate (self-assess) on a moment-to-moment basis as one of the core skills that I am attempting to teach.

Good practice

The senior lecturer who had brought me to the college, Jackie Smart, was coincidentally interested in the issue of assessment. She went on use my assessement process as a model of good practice when she presented a paper at a workshop entitled Improvising Assessment: Developing Effective Criteria for Improvised & Devised Performance Workshop at the University of Wolverhampton in November 2001.

Along with Steve Dixon, in October 2002 she published The Discourse of Assessment: Language and value in the assessment of group practice in the performing arts in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. The article in which my work is cited as one of three case studies, is often quoted in recent discussions of the issue of assessment in performing arts.