What reality TV taught me about everyday assessment 

Certain design-challenge reality shows demonstrate the value of clear goals, good questions, collaboration, and opportunities to try again.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but when I do, I watch reality TV — not just any reality TV, but a specific kind of design-challenge show. My favorites are The Great British Baking Show, Top Chef, and Project Runway. These shows all have a similar basic structure. A group of participants comes together, they are assigned something to make, and most of the show is those people making that thing. On The Great British Baking Show, these are Britain’s best amateur bakers; on Top Chef, it’s chefs; and on Project Runway, it’s fashion designers. Their challenges involve making the perfect Swiss meringue, cooking a main dish featuring different cuts of beef, or creating an outfit made of items from the dollar store. Then, at the end of the show, a winner for the week is announced, and one person is asked to leave.  

What’s always fascinating to me, as a designer of learning environments and an educational researcher, is that when people leave these shows, they often say some version of the same thing: “I have learned so much. I am transformed. I accomplished things I didn’t know I could.” For years, I have sought to understand how teachers and their students work together every day to determine what students know and are able to do and how to modify teaching and learning to help students reach learning goals (e.g., Furtak, 2012; Furtak, 2018; Furtak & Heredia, 2016). This work makes up what we sometimes call everyday or formative assessment, a kind of assessment that is fundamentally different from tests and quizzes designed to measure the amount of learning students might have experienced in a span of time. In contrast, everyday assessment happens every day, while learning is happening, to enhance and improve the quality of learning.  

So from this perspective, statements like “I have learned so much” make me pause and wonder, what is happening in these shows that supports such profound learning experiences? 

Four elements of everyday assessment 

Let me begin with a disclaimer: There are many interesting things going on in these TV shows — creativity, artistic judgment, performance under pressure, and much more — that I’m not going to unpack here, since they probably don’t have implications for how we think about classroom assessment. But I do want to discuss four elements of everyday assessment that these shows illustrate in compelling ways.  

Clear goals. 

Every one of these reality shows begins with the hosts making it very clear what the participants will do that week. For instance, in one episode of The Great British Baking Show, the assignment was to create a cake that features at least three different techniques with chocolate; in another episode, the challenge was to make a sculpture entirely of bread. These goals are specific, they are interesting, and they stretch the participants to challenge themselves to meet the goals. 

Authentic conversations about progress. 

My favorite example here is illustrated by Tim Gunn, the former chair of fashion design at Parsons School of Design who, until recently, served as mentor to the designers on Project Runway. In most episodes, he didn’t judge the designers’ work; rather, his role was to provide constructive criticism and support.  

Gunn’s signature contribution to the show was his frequent off-the-cuff comment, “Make it work!” What I find most compelling, though, is the way he went around to each participant as they toiled on their designs and asked them to comment on what they were making: “So tell me what you’ve done.” “Tell me about your look.” As they explained how they decided to approach the week’s assignment, Gunn listened intently. Often, they told him what they were struggling with or uncertain about, and sometimes they asked him for advice. He always seemed genuinely curious about the designers’ intentions, the experiences they brought to the design, and what they wanted to accomplish. Then, after a period of back-and-forth conversation, he asked them a series of targeted questions about the specific design choices they made (“What is this? Why did you choose that? How do you feel about how the vinyl is laying in this dress?”) and how they were progressing toward the goals they identified for themselves (“What do you think? How is this high fashion?”).  

Collaboration. 

Each of these shows includes moments of formal and informal collaboration among the participants, who work in a shared space as they make their designs. On Project Runway and Top Chef, they are sometimes even grouped into teams. Even when competing with each other directly, though, they often discuss their designs and recipes, give each other feedback, and help each other out. For example, it’s common on Top Chef for one chef to offer another a taste of soup, ask if it needs more salt, and then make an adjustment. One designer on Project Runway might turn to another, show them some fabric flowers they plan to sew onto an outfit, and ask, “Is this too much?” While these shows tend to be promoted as competitions, first and foremost, they also feature a great deal of collaboration, and participants tend to develop a strong sense of camaraderie and community as they work. And by trading ideas and advice, they each develop a better idea of what’s expected and how they can meet their goals. 

Multiple opportunities for success. 

An important feature of The Great British Baking Show is that the bakers get at least three chances — a signature challenge, a technical challenge, and a showstopper — to show what they can do. The second challenge is always a surprise, announced when the cameras are already rolling. But for the first and last bakes, they are given the assignment ahead of time, and they can practice at home during the week, over and over, before they film the episode.  

When the judges make their final decisions, they do so based on the results of all three challenges, not just a single design or dish, as sometimes happens on Project Runway or Top Chef. So if someone’s custard fails to set, or if the second layer of their cake snaps in half as it pops out of the pan, the baker can say, “I’ll try again on the next bake.” They know that if they attempt an ambitious recipe and it doesn’t quite meet their aspirations, they won’t necessarily be booted from the show. It’s the sum of their efforts that counts, so they don’t have to be perfect every time.  

From reality TV to real classrooms 

So what does this mean for the creation of educational environments that support everyday assessment? If we keep these four elements in mind — setting clear goals, asking authentic questions, collaboration, and giving multiple opportunities for success — we’ll assess our students in ways that provide strong support for learning: 

• Setting clear learning goals. Helping students to see where they are headed and being specific about those goals have been shown to relate positively to learning outcomes (Seidel,Rimmele, & Prenzel, 2005). Phrasing those goals in ways that are engaging for students will help motivate them to learn, especially when we ask questions that are relevant to their experiences and interests (Penuel & Shepard, 2016). 
• Asking authentic questions. How often do we ask students questions to which we already know the answer? Starting our conversations with real questions — “How do you know that?” “Why do you think so?” “What are you working on?” “How are you doing?” — will help our students share what they really know and are able to do (e.g.,Cazden, 2001). We can’t know exactly what’s in our students’ heads, but questions like these are likely to surface vital information that can later inform instruction. We also can use that information to give students specific guidance to help them move forward in their learning (Filsecker & Kerres, 2012). But we have to be sure to ask these questions in ways that enable students to feel safe to really let us know what they are struggling with, so we can support them (Atkin & Coffey, 2003).  
• Encouraging collaboration. Everyday assessment doesn’t have to go through the teacher alone. When students work together, they learn from each other and clarify their understandings of goals and expectations (Horn, 2012). As they observe and comment on each other’s work, they can help each other to assess their progress toward those goals.
• Providing multiple opportunities for success. It’s rarely a good idea to make a consequential decision on the basis of a single test (Shepard, 2000). Teachers observe their students’ performance every day, and when deciding how best to support and evaluate those students, they can easily consider their progress over time, or over a series of assignments and tests. There’s no need to judge young people by their performance on just one high-stakes, end-of-year exam. 

A real-life example 

When I reflect on these four elements, I remember a teacher I once worked with — we’ll call her Ms. Schafer — who taught 6th-grade science at a middle school in the rural Pacific Northwest. Ms. Schafer worked with her students to understand the answer to a simple but motivating question: What makes things sink and float? Her goal was to help students understand the relationship between mass and volume and how it relates to sinking and floating.  

Ms. Schafer had helped her 6th graders measure the mass and volume of everyday objects like a can of Coke and a hard-boiled egg and then conduct investigations to see if they would sink or float. One day, her student Cole asked, “Does this have anything to do with density?” Instead of just saying yes or no, Ms. Schafer asked an authentic question in response: “That’s an interesting word you used, Cole. What do you mean by density?” 

Cole responded, “If you had a piece of bread with holes, and a stack of paper, about the same size — the paper would have more density, because it has more mass.” 

Ms. Schafer asked more questions, working out why it was important that the bread and paper were the same size, in order to see which was denser. In this conversation, Ms. Schafer turned Cole’s question into a teachable moment (Brown, 2008) and gained critical information about what Cole really understood about density as the amount of mass taking up a certain amount of space. Then she built on this information as she continued to guide students through the unit. 

As I reflect on my experiences working with Ms. Schafer, and so many other teachers I have learned with and from over the years, I’m forever struck by how subtle and unobtrusive — almost invisible — such everyday assessments can be. But teachers who teach well are, in fact, engaged in assessment almost all of the time, and if we pay close attention to their work in the classroom, we can see how powerfully those assessments contribute to their instruction and their students’ learning. Just like the contestants on reality TV, we can all improve and make progress toward our goals if those goals are clear, if we’re asked to wrestle with real questions about what we’re doing and why, if we have chances to collaborate and learn from our peers, and if we have multiple opportunities to try, fail, and try again.           

References 

Atkin, J.M. & Coffey, J.E. (2003). Everyday assessment in the science classroom. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press. 

Brown, B.A. (2008). Assessment and academic identity : Using embedded assessment as an instrument for academic socialization in science education. Teachers College Record, 110 (10), 2116–2147. 

Cazden, C.B. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 

Filsecker, M. & Kerres, M. (2012). Repositioning formative assessment from an educational assessment perspective: A response to Dunn & Mulvenon (2009), Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 17 (16). 

Furtak, E.M. (2012). Linking a learning progression for natural selection to teachers’ enactment of formative assessment. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49 (9), 1181-1210.  

Furtak, E.M. (2018). Supporting teachers’ formative assessment practice with learning progressions. New York, NY: Routledge.  

Furtak, E.M. & Heredia, S.C. (2016). A virtuous cycle: Using the formative assessment design cycle to support the NGSS. The Science Teacher, 83 (2), 36-42. 

Horn, I.S. (2012). Strength in numbers: Collaborative learning in secondary mathematics. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.  

Penuel, W.R. & Shepard, L.A. (2016). Assessment and teaching. In D.H. Gitomer & C. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching (5th ed., pp. 787-850). Washington DC: American Educational Research Association. 

Seidel, T., Rimmele, R., & Prenzel, M. (2005). Clarity and coherence of lesson goals as a scaffold for student learning. Learning and Instruction, 15 (6), 539-556. 

Shepard, L.A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture, Educational Researcher, 29 (7), 4-14.