The main goal of this blog is to share my beliefs, resources, strategies, and methods about teaching Physical and Health Education in the IB MYP Program. 

Before joining IB school I went through a Teacher Preparation Program certified by the University of British Columbia, so I had an opportunity to learn the IB program, for 1 year before beginning my practice of teaching MYP. This was such an eye-opener. A sliding door into the best teaching practices. A privilege. A rare opportunity many teachers don’t get.

We will converge here to share and learn from each other. To reflect on our practices and philosophies. To interrogate long-held beliefs and inject new thinking.

My name is Elves Domingos Tembe.  I am a Physical Health Education teacher and Learning leader from Mozambique, currently teaching MYP ( Middle Year Program).

Today I will share with you through the process I take to create my summative assessment. For clarity or coherence, it would be beneficial if you interacted with my previous post to see my previous post where I talked about how to plan a fitness unit because the summative I am going to create is a continuation of the previous unit. Find it… {here}. 

We already have a Statement of inquiry from our previous unit:

Healthy Interaction may contribute to change in lifestyle choices

The first thing you need to understand is that in order to create an authentic summative you need to link it with your statement of inquiry, you need to have a clear relationship between the SOI and the summative assessment.

Before we start the process, it is important to understand why we assess our students, and how the assessment drives the learning process. 

You don’t create assessments to punish students or to prove to them that they don’t know anything about what you have been teaching them. When I was in grade 8 I used to have a teacher who would give us an assessment and tell us – all of you are totally blocked – and he would leave the classroom and come back after a few hours and collect the papers. On the day of receiving the papers, we all would get zeros, and the teacher would feel proud because we could not manage to solve his assessment. Of course, we all got zeros because there was no relationship between what he taught us and the task he gave us.

In IB MYP  assessments are meant to help students believe that they are capable thinkers, by giving them open tasks, and observing and constructing new learning with them. As a teacher, I assess the students to help them improve by using the information that I collect in Formative or summative assessment.

From Principles To Practice you will find the principles of MYP Assessment, have a read before we start to work on our summative for the fitness unit.

Assessment is integral to all teaching and learning. MYP assessment requires teachers to assess the prescribed subject-group objectives using the assessment criteria for each subject group in each year of the programme. In order to provide students with opportunities to achieve at the highest level, MYP teachers develop rigorous tasks that embrace various assessment strategies.

It’s also important for you to understand that before going with the summative assessment you need to assess the student with formative assessments to collect information to help them understand the summative. Basically, the formative assessments will prepare students for the summative, which is a way for you to see what the students know and give them feedback to help them improve.

Now that you have any Idea of why we assess the students, you are ready.

Summative assessment using GRASP

Let me give you more detailed information to help you understand how it works.

The goal is the SOI, you only need to copy the SOI. , 

GOAL: Your goal is to show how Healthy Interactions may contribute to change in lifestyle choices

Then we move to the role. Put yourself in the student’s shoes, and create a scenario that will help him to better understand the summative assessment and a clear connection with the SOI.

We are working with a Fitness unit, and being a coach can help to have a better perspective, so ROLE will be a Fitness coach, and who the students are going to work with it will be the AUDIENCE: Your client (Classmate), they will work among them playing coach and client rope.

The GRASPS is not complete but you can see that there is a great connection between the Goal, Role And Audience. It is important to continue like this until the end in order to create a clear situation and product that will align with the statement of inquiry.

Make the situation as realistic as possible, and I look at what is happening in the school. In this specific example, I talked about a regional sports event, which is a huge event for the school where most of the students work hard to be part of school teams that travel to compete with other schools in various sports.

And for the fitness unit, my SITUATION IS:

The new season of a regional sports event is coming, and the Athletics director is planning to do a trial on components of fitness for all students interested in joining the events. Your classmate is confident in his skills in the sport. He wants to join, but he wants to change his level of fitness and he decided to interact with you.

In the situation there are also the concepts that we are exploring in the unit that will help you to ensure that you are on the same track, you are creating a summative that is aligned with the statement of inquiry, which should be the same for the PRODUCT:

You will help your classmate identify his strengths and weaknesses and design a plan to strengthen his areas of improvement. CRITERION B

You will compare his data by looking at his level of fitness at the beginning and after implementing the plan you designed for him. And you will reflect on his performance. CRITERION D

My product is definitely going to give students chance to show their understanding of the statement of inquiry and to finalize you have the STANDARDS:

Your work will be judged by Criteria B and D in all strands.

Show the objectives of the product to direct students and make clear to them what exactly they have to do for each criterion.

After having your grasp complete, you can create a poster to share with the school community so that anyone who passes by the gym or office can tell what exactly your students will be doing for summative assessment and some teachers can like and invite you for an Interdisciplinary Unit.

Once you are finished with your GRASPS you just need to explain the relationship between the summative assessment and the SOI.

The statement of inquiry talks about how Healthy Interaction may contribute to change in lifestyle choices. For the summative assessment, the learners will design a plan to help a classmate to change his level of fitness. For change to occur they will have to interact and the task is giving an opportunity for students to work together to achieve the same goal. Their interaction may define the success of achieving the goals that they will define at the beginning, and at the end of the unit, they will reflect and see the factors that contributed in order to achieving the desired results. 

Hope this was helpful for you, please, Like, Share and comment. I would appreciate it if you could share how you feel after reading this text, what you would like to know and what future topics you would like me to address.

Autor: Elves Tembe

Editor: Antoney Luvinzu