I have been given a lot of grief from other teachers within my building about not giving tests. I absolutely do not like tests that show me nothing other than can the kid guess on a multiple choice question. This has bugged me and always will bug me. I like for students to show me how what they actually know about the skills we have been working on in class for the week. We work on skills throughout the week and build up to a task for them to create something either with technology or with an activity in class that is not a sit down and take a test. A few examples of what I like to count as tests in my classroom are having kids cut out newspapers, magazines, and other materials to show me different text features. This is something that I could look at easily and it was a concrete real life material the kids know. If the students didn't know what a text feature was then this would be easily portrayed. Another example of the students creating something is creating a comic on Google Slides. The students were working on theme all week and their test was for them to create a comic and have the character portray a theme from beginning to end. This allows the students to be creative and express themselves along with showing me if they understood theme. These are not your normal tests but the students respond so much better, are engaged fully, and give their best efforts which might not be the case on a old fashion test.
