Assessment Ideas for a Classical Literature Class
One of the great challenges of classical education is assessment. If we assume the classical ends of wisdom and virtue are the true ends of everything we do, it really is not obvious how we should assess a young person’s growth in these regards. If we want a student to take away from their reading of a given text whatever will enhance his or her character, it is not obvious what tools teachers have at their disposal to detect, let alone measure, such enhancement. How would one know, for instance, if a young man truly absorbed the meaning of Augustine’s conversion unless we followed him for the next twenty years and observed him steadily extricating himself from his vices and cultivating piety? Reducing the impact of a text like the Confessions to a test that is studied for and then quickly forgotten borders on the verge of a sacrilegious act.
This conundrum is rendered all the more acute by the relentless regime of assessment that defines the general model of education prevalent today. Our contemporary educational apparatus requires constant scoring, in order to keep track of students’ alleged progress and proficiency. These numbers affixed to student work result from the sheer scale of contemporary educational systems, and the need to facilitate their efficient operation. Unable to provide the sort of holistic evaluation that would serve students in their efforts to develop their intellectual gifts, the modern school conjures up a host of numbers meant to serve as a simulacra of such an evaluation. The primary impetus for this kind of regime emerges from forces external to a concern for student growth – bureaucratic funding, college placement, and so on. Both these ends and the pedagogical method they dictate should be anathema to a classical educator. Yet somehow we are obliged to negotiate our way through a system defined by them, in order to ensure our students have the opportunities for advancement which they deserve.
Granted then that as classical educators we are pursuing goods intrinsic to the growth of students, and adopting methods appropriate to that end, the question remains how to assess that growth. Here, a certain confidence in the substance of a classical education is called for. I want to say that any student who diligently applies him or herself to the texts of Plato and Dante, to the history of Rome and America, is bound to come away with a wisdom they did not possess before. So perhaps the highest goal we can set for our assessments is to invite students to wrestle earnestly with the texts and ideas laid before him, and design assignments that can gauge the willingness and ability of students to make such an application. I very much agree with Joshua Gibbs’ claim that an assessment should itself be an experience from which students can learn, rather than just an opportunity to display what they have already learned. If, through the assessments we lay before them, we can elicit from our students a concentrated and energetic response to the material we have placed before them, we can confide in that material to do the rest, and to reward the intellectual exertions of our students by revealing the riches of their content to them.
I have been thinking much about this conception of assessment design as we continue to give shape and direction to the curriculum at my school. Specifically, I have been thinking about these issues in relationship to our literature curriculum, which I am partly responsible for teaching. What would a genuinely classical literature assessment look like? What would it mean, once we push the multiple-choice bubbles aside, to ask a student to demonstrate some level of comprehension and appreciation of a text we read? Here are three models of a literature assessment that might answer to such a description:
1. Writing in Imitation of an Author: I have made this point elsewhere, but it is one I think deserves some emphasis. The traditional way students were asked to respond to the texts they read was not through analysis, but through emulation of the style, tone, and argumentative structure of those texts. Students who read Cicero were not asked to write about Cicero; they were asked to write like Cicero – to employ his syntax, his rhetorical appeals, in the construction of an argument all their own. Insofar as they were able to make this appropriation effectively, they were clearly demonstrating comprehension of the original; a student cannot employ stylistic and rhetorical techniques which he does not understand. But that comprehension is being exhibited in the context of an exercise that allows the student to start acquiring a facility with those techniques, and make them his own.
There are many opportunities in a contemporary literature class to ask students to do likewise. Their reading of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels can be followed by the writing of a satire on some current absurdity in our culture, in which they are asked to use the same techniques of allegory and hyperbole that Swift uses in his own. Their reading of the literature of medieval chivalry might culminate in an assignment where they are asked to write a story about a hero who demonstrates the characteristics of the chivalrous man, as those characteristics emerged from their discussion of the reading. One assessment I have given students throughout my career has been to ask them to write a sonnet after we have spent several weeks studying the sonnets of Spenser and Shakespeare. In the first place, this drives them back to reread those poems, in order to take a closer look at their stylistic and logical structure, so the assessment deepens their acquaintance with the texts we are studying. In adopting that stylistic and logical structure for the expression of their own thoughts, they are acquiring enhanced powers of expression. I am then able to assess, to the extent they capture that structure in their own work, how deeply they have imbibed the form of a sonnet, and thus how much they have truly understood that form.
2. Dramatic Monologue – The previous assessment model is clearly more directed towards assessing the style and structure of given texts rather than their content. There are clearly times when we want to gauge our students’ engagement with the subject matter of the works they are reading. Towards this end, I have often found it helpful to have students write in the voice of a fictional character – sometimes one from the text, sometimes one they imagine – in order to do the work of analysis from that particular perspective. This introduces an element of creativity and stylistic ingenuity into what can be, for many students, the onerous task of literary analysis. What I have found, remarkably, is that students’ capacity for incisive analysis generally improves as they are allowed to exercise that capacity in conjunction with their more creative capacities.
In the past, I have asked students, when reading The Crucible, to write in the voice of Elizabeth Proctor, writing a letter to her grandson in which she describes the character of her dead husband. I have asked them to imagine themselves, when reading Measure for Measure, to imagine themselves in the role of an assistant to the Duke, attempting to convince him of Angelo’s unfitness to serve as his surrogate. Other teachers I have worked with have given similar types of assessments to students; one really excellent colleague I taught with used to have her students write a travelogue in the voice of a sailor who accompanied Odysseus on his journeys. What we both found is that the scope for imaginative play involved in such assessments calls out mental energies that can be fruitfully applied to the task of analysis, which might otherwise have lain dormant.
3. Writing from a List of Quotes – The previous two models are best suited to longer essays, that students can work at over a protracted period of time. For in-class tests, there is a format I have been adopting lately which I find to have several benefits. Upon completing our study of a certain text, I will provide the students on a given day with a list of passages or quotes from that text (sometimes I allow them to help pick those quotes out in advance). I require them to use a certain number of those quotes in an essay, and emphasize that they provide sufficient context to make their comprehension of those quotes evident. This allows me to gauge their grasp of a number of key passages in the text, but it also serves to send the students back to those passages, to think harder about them. In this way, the assessment does serve as an opportunity for deeper learning.
I do not give the students more instruction than this. There is no prompt which would determine their thesis. By allowing them to determine their thesis for themselves, I can tell whether they have grasped the key themes of the work as well. Particularly for upper level students, this allows them to demonstrate their ability to get at the heart of the text through their reading and discussion, and so offers me a great measure of whether they are taking away something from the core of the work we have studied.