Building A National TEAM: Theatre Education Assessment Models

The Rise of Assessment Reform

School teachers use assessments to hold students accountable for learning. States use assessments to hold districts, schools and principals accountable for student achievement. For example, the No Child Left Behind law of 2001 holds 50 million students and their 80,000 schools accountable through the use of state-administered assessments called  “standardized tests” that occur once a year and are constructed using multiple-choice questions. However, the negative consequences of standardized tests—a narrowing of the curriculum into a test-prep drilling of basic skills such as rote memorization—have prompted school reformers to design more rigorous tests of student knowledge. Performance assessments emphasize critical thinking skills and demand students to demonstrate their understanding of academic material.

TCG’s Response

For professional theatre education directors, assessment has become very important to programming. For several years the issue of assessment has been written about in TCG Centerpieces, and discussed in teleconferences and at Crossing Paths. A key question that keeps coming up during these field discussions is: how can assessment be used to improve teaching and learning in education departments in American theatres?

TCG’s Initiative

In response to this important question, TCG and ASSITEJ/USA launched a project entitled, Building a National TEAM: Theatre Education Assessment Models with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Esther B. Kahn Charitable Foundation and the Max & Victoria Dreyfus Foundation. Laurie Baskin, TCG’s director of government and education programs convened a group of 10 education directors from TCG and ASSITEJ theatres across the country, beginning a two-year process of creating assessment models for the field. With the help of a national assessment consultant, Robert Southworth, the goal has resulted in the creation of more than 15 flexible models or templates that can be transported and modified to fit the needs of an individual theatre’s range of programming.

TCG is pleased to continue work on the TEAM project, and with generous funding from the Dana Foundation, between 2008 and 2010, TCG plans to 1) Repeat the Assessment Training to bring more Education Directors into our fledgling national assessment community; 2) Add another step in the training – once the surveys and other assessment models have been developed and gathered, training will be offered to aide education directors in tabulating these results – what claims can theatre educators make about student learning? 3) Continue to build the TEAM website.