Two teachers' journey, one teachers' tale: an autoethnographic narrative of creating an assessment and evaluation system using a learning community framework

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore how a learning community model of collaboration helped to create a system of assessment and evaluation in a high school physics course that has been used to navigate a number of challenges teachers face. Through an autoethnographic methodology the author explores his own experiences by relaying and analyzing a number of conversations with a colleague. By weaving together literature on assessment and learning communities with personal narratives, the author describes the formation of the assessment model and how it has impacted students. The results describe what the author learned about leveraging learning communities to build assessment and evaluation models. While the genesis of these models started in a physics course, the author demonstrates examples of working in other disciplines to build similar models.