Country: Belgium. Steiner school of Leuven, De Zonnewijzer ( www.steinerschoolleuven.be ). The framework itself, designed to evaluate artistic competence is used in several mainstream academies in Flanders (e.g. professional development, artistic programmes).

The ages of the learners who can be assessed using this method: 15-18 years. This framework can be adapted to any open assignment, as soon as the pupils are ready for this type of assignment.

Who can conduct this assessment: teacher, students

Educational contexts: artistic education, practice suitable for various subjects and age groups. Open assignments in any subject, often combining subjects. This method is best suited for personal research projects and open assignments that students carry out on a variety of subjects depending on their personal interests and skills. Open assignments in specific subjects can also use this method. Well suited for subjects like cooking, metal and wood work, textile arts, graphic arts.
This example was collected during Erasmus+ project “Personalised and Formative Assessment Practices Supporting School and Learner Development” of the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education, Learning for Well-being Foundation and the Hungarian Waldorf Federation and published in their developed book “Assessment as Dialogue: Twenty Inspiring Practices from Classrooms and Schools Across Europe”. The stories, included in this collection of good assessment practices, were contributed by courageous, inventive, and open-minded teachers, parents, school leaders, experts, and students from 12 countries around Europe. Based on the didARTiek framework as defined by Erik Schrooten and Luk Bosman for the evaluation of artistic competences (artistiekecompetenties.blog).

Type of assessment

Formative: continuous evaluation throughout assignment, in particular during the meetings between pupil and supervisor.
Summative: the written report delivered at the end of the project is based on an evaluation of how the students embodied and developed within the different roles.
Ipsative: the framework evaluates the pupil’s own progress based on his or her starting point at the beginning of the project.
Self: pupils assess their own process and performance based on the roles and discuss their impressions with their supervisor.

Values

Contextualised: the assessment tool gives the pupil clear criteria of evaluation at the beginning of the process and a road map to manage the project at the same time.
Individualised: the written reports and oral formative evaluations are based on the pupil’s progress in their project and tailored to the objectives defined with the supervisor.
Participatory: pupils are asked to self-evaluate and discuss their evaluation with the supervisor at various stages of the project.

Teacher Sam Versweyveld combined the best of two worlds by introducing a framework developed in the context of part time artistic education into the four senior years of the Steiner Waldorf secondary school de Zonnewijzer. This framework serves as a basis for the guidance, formative and summative assessment of open-ended personal assignments that pupils carry out throughout the year. Rather than giving a grade on the overall performance, supervisors evaluate how their pupils have embodied five roles that are key to the development of a project: researcher, team-player, artist, crafts-man and performer, as well as the 6th very important role that concerns the expression of their uniqueness within their work.
The broad range of aspects covered by the six roles evaluated make it not only useful as an evaluation method but also a road map for the pupil and the supervisor throughout the learning process.

Timeline and preparation:

A few hours to be invested at the beginning to understand the six roles and be able to communicate them to the students.

Form of documentation

Extensive personalised written feedback that is handed to the student at the end of the project.

The Teacher

Sam Versweyveld teaches Subjects: languages and music. He also coaches/supervises pupils in classes 9, 10, 11 and 12 for their yearlong projects, and it is in this context that he introduced the Five roles and a unique me practice.

The Practice

The didARTiek framework was developed by Erik Schrooten and Luk Bosman with the aim of guiding pupils to become competent art practitioners, in the context of part time artistic education programmes. The development took several years and was then rolled out in most art academies in Flanders (artistiekecompetenties.blog/artistieke-competenties).
An important part of their work was to name and describe artistic competences relevant for all artistic careers in a clear and open way to give direction and at the same time enough space for teachers and the artistic process. The six roles that re-group the competences are six simple and recognisable words that represent areas pupils can explore, and a common mindset, the DNA of artistic education. All artistic subjects can include the six roles, with varying importance given to one or the other depending on the form of art that is being evaluated. These roles serve as a basis for evaluation and the result is a much more meaningful overview of the different aspects of the pupil’s work compared to an overall evaluation intertwining all the roles together.
The framework also includes a series of tools to help teachers give relevant oral and written feedback. In fact, Sam explained that teachers in artistic education are not necessarily trained to give qualitative personalised feedback in words and these tools give them key words and qualities to be used as inspiration.
Sam was invited to a conference on the framework and immediately saw the potential of using it in the context of the personal and open long-term assignments that students are asked to do every year from class 9 to class 12. The 9th class pupils are asked to do a biography assignment, 10th class a project that brings social value to their environment, and classes 11 and 12 do end of year projects on the subjects of their choice. These projects are very open and comprehensive. It can be anything from training a dog to be a sheep dog, keeping sheep and observing the effects of this on the well-being of humans involved and their environment, to writing a book or composing songs and making an album. These very diverse topics were hard to evaluate in a uniform way, and at the same time they needed a framework to have some kind of objectivity in the feedback given.
What makes evaluation based on the 6 roles so rich is that it does not only enable a holistic and personalised assessment of the project, it also provides guidance for the pupil and the supervisor throughout the process. To reach the final goal successfully, pupils will have to be researchers, craftsmen, artists, team players, performers AND express their unicity. These six roles are interpreted as follows:

Researcher: how you research your topic in a broad sense. This includes text study but also interviewing relevant people, going to a museum, visiting relevant places, etc. One of the main qualities linked to this role is curiosity, the desire to find out more about the topic in any way possible.
Craftsman: the basic skills you need to develop to achieve your goals. These skills vary from project to project and can range from very technical to more academic: skills to produce a qualitative paper, to repair a machine, play an instrument, etc. An important quality here is the capacity to learn and apply new skills.
Artist: the creativity that you put into your work. This role covers all the creative aspects: creativity in the artistic sense but also problem-solving capacities and the capacity of developing new ideas. Sam gave a great example of a project that involved repairing an old motorcycle. The pupil had prepared well and encountered an unexpected problem that he could not solve when doing the repair. The pupil developed a new tool that did not exist in the toolbox to be able to continue and that was a beautiful example of creativity in a very technical setting.
Team player: working together with other people. This role is relevant in different ways depending on the project. At the very least you are able to communicate well with your supervisor/coach but in some projects, it goes much further than that and teachers sometimes add an assignment for pupils to work together. In class 10 the social projects often involve working in teams.
Performer: the capacity to perform or present the result of your work. In the open assignment context this concerns the presentation that pupils are asked to give in front of their teachers, class and parents. For the end-of-year projects at the Zonnewijzer they even have 15 minutes of presentation to an open audience. The challenge is to talk about the process they went through in an objective and positive way.

The sixth role, the most important one: UNIQUE SELF. This role is about the level of connection you have with everything you do, the individual expression and the unique quality your work has because you put something of yourself into it. Sam explains that often if the other roles are good, this one is there, too, as it strongly influences personal motivation and implication. This is also the role that really convinced him to use the framework as it embeds the objective of developing everyone’s unique potential in the evaluation system.

When these roles are presented to pupils at the beginning of the project (Pupils receive a document with the instructions for the project, the learning goals and the way it will be evaluated according to the different roles), it gives them a solid framework and at the same time a lot of freedom. Sam’s experience is that it is the right balance between freedom and direction to support learners in the development of their independence and creativity. The way the roles are used during the process varies greatly from one pupil to another. Some need no more guidance and others need it to be developed into clear deadlines and objectives.

In terms of assessment, the final evaluation of the project consists of an extensive written document in which the supervisor goes through each role and describes how they experienced them. There is also a general statement indicating whether they consider the goal was achieved or not. This however is not turned into a grade and is not scaled. Projects that exceeded expectations greatly are recognised, but no other comparison is possible.

Throughout the process the roles are also used for the formative evaluation of the learning process and help to identify areas for further exploration and improvement to reach the next level. This is useful both for the pupil and the supervisor, as if one of the roles has been overlooked, it often gives an indication of what the pupil needs to focus on next (e.g. being stuck because not enough research was done, or missing basic skills to go to the next stage.). Up till now there has not been any formal documentation of this formative process. The self-evaluation aspect is carried out orally during the supervisory meetings, and in some cases with the help of a written document (The document contains general questions and then the six roles with space for description and three general evaluation options that the students can circle to indicate whether the role has not been developed at all, has been developed but in a limited way or is well in development.) that pupils fill in with their observations. Sam comments that there is space for improvement in the time dedicated to this discussion, especially for the roles that learners often find the most challenging, such as the role of artist.

Teachers who use this method are also satisfied with the support it brings to leading pupils and evaluating the process as it unfolds.
Some Sam colleagues who teach subjects that are harder to assess in a traditional way have taken on parts of it to assess their course, using the Evaluation Rose in combination with the relevant roles. This rose allows more precision in the overall evaluation of each subject by defining key learning goals that are all evaluated between one and six. Dots for each goal are then joined to form a rose. The objective is to avoid collapsing roses, both for process and results. Pupils are invited to draw their own roses and then time is taken to discuss the differences between their and the teacher’s rose. Sam recounts that in many subjects pupils underestimate themselves and that this exercise is very important for the development of self-awareness and independence. Pupils feedback that the evaluation rose is not their preferred tool because it emphasises the points they need to work on. As Sam pointed out, this is all part of the learning process. Tools such as this one aim to bring the focus back to the qualitative aspects of feedback and influence in a positive way how pupils learn and study. The evaluation rose is used in the context of the Five roles and a unique me framework, with each role being one of the learning goals.

Pupils receive regular updates that parents can consult too, but often the updates are not detailed enough, so the method is explained to parents at parent-teacher evenings. Sam recounts that a lot of parents recognise the type of process from their working environments and are willing to think outside the box. In fact, assessing in this way may also participate in the preparation for professional life as understanding which role you are in at a certain moment is an important component of professional development. Sam explains that there are always some parents who are very attached to grades and competition, and this reflects in the pupils’ reactions too.

The Feedback

Country: Lithuania
The ages of the learners who can be assessed using this method: 3-19 years or older
Who can conduct this assessment: learner, teacher, peer
Educational contexts:
In formal and non-formal education, it is important to provide feedback (response, reaction...) that encourages learning, builds the student's self-esteem, and creates a positive atmosphere in the classroom. It is relevant to provide it in all educational subjects.
Feedback is provided by the teacher, a classmate, the student himself. A student and a teacher or a student and a classmate are partners who share information about learning successes and difficulties.

The assessment method

Feedback for student support and encouragement. It is important for the teacher to find something to be happy about, to say something good to the student, so that he gains self-confidence, in his own strength, so that the student's self-esteem is strengthened and the courage to take on more difficult tasks grows, and if he makes a mistake, to try again.

In feedback, error as an opportunity - a positive attitude towards a wrong answer. Wrong answers are a step towards finding the right answer.

Feedback for students working together - searching for an answer in pairs, teaches cooperation by sharing ideas, teaches to help each other or accept help.

Feedback is a "recipe" for what and how to continue learning.
Feedback "here and now".
Feedback as a system.
Feedback has criteria.

Techniques for feedback:
Mini review (in writing: the essence of the lesson and what was the most difficult).
Clarification of essential knowledge (written or oral).
One sentence summary.
Proposal for practice (the knowledge gained in the lesson application in life).
Additional time (for work improvement).
Plus, minus, equality (comparison with previous work).
Method "Quick writing" (students write for 2-3 minutes about what they heard in the lesson).
The "12 word summary" method.
The 3-2-1 method (3 ideas learned, 2 applications or things that surprised you, 1 unsolved question or problem).