Hamilton: The Revolution

"Finally some light reading, right? I chose this book because the work that we do specifically on the innovative edges of educational assessment is, as I said earlier, a mixture of scientific rigour and artful practice. Essentially, it is all about designing under constraints. The design decisions have to permeate everything, from the way you design the activities to the way you design your scoring to the way you design the reporting to the way you design how in teams you work together to make all of this happen. I am, personally, a big supporter and fan of performing arts: musicals, plays, concerts, comedy. I have seen over 900 shows in my life. In many different countries. When I moved to the East Coast, I eventually got closer to New York City, and that is like paradise for anybody who loves the performing arts of any kind. Every day you could go to several different shows that are phenomenal. Hamilton is a musical, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I think that most people have heard of it in some way by now. What he did to me is just such an inspiration and I love what it represents on so many levels. It is a musical that he created based on an inspiration that he had when he read Alexander Hamilton’s biography on a vacation. He thought it would be a hip-hop story. Then, over many years—as you find out if you watch his film or read this book—he created, in many different steps, with many different iterations, many different colleagues, and many different decisions, this engrossing musical that is so different from any other musicals that currently exist in the world. It fuses a variety of musical styles like pop, rock and hip-hop in a beautifully flowing narrative. It teaches you about a part of history. It teaches you about the personal challenges of people who were involved in the history. That makes it really accessible. It is beautifully staged. The music is phenomenal. The lighting is fantastic. I admire the complexity of all of these decisions that had to be made and all of the people who had to come together to make a project like this successful. If you know anything about Broadway or other kinds of professional theatre, producers will say that most of the money gets lost and they are not profitable. I forgot what the number was, but I think only 10-15% of musicals ever recoup their initial investment on Broadway . Everybody wants the holy grail like Hamilton. To really change the culture of what it means to be a musical in this way, I find that so inspiring. For me, going with my wife and seeing this show or any other good show for that matter really lifts me up. It lifts my soul up, and I bring that to my work. I try to take that same spirit into conversations that we have around assessment design or when we write articles, and to really always be an artist while also being a scientist. I think having this kind of creation out there as a landmark is just unbelievable. It is such a wonderful and admirable piece of work, as many others have said. I highly recommend seeing Hamilton and supporting the performing arts. One of the sadder things about standardised assessment over the years, is that the predominant focus has often been on math, science, and reading. STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—is important but the inclusion of ‘A’ for the arts—STEAM—is really important, because I feel the arts are such a powerful contributor to how human beings are shaped, what their values are, what their beliefs are. It is how their passions are ignited. It can bring out the best in people. It is important to support that through educational assessments, which is I why I really admire innovative assessments where maybe learners or learners have to design certain kinds of artefacts or tools or environments, and we try to measure that, and model it, and give them feedback on it in such a way that it is still assessment and not just a cool exercise. Yes, absolutely. It is even happening, to some degree, on these international surveys that I mentioned earlier. It is certainly happening in research projects that have been used in school districts. For example, one of my colleagues has designed a system called InqITS for science. The research team has developed apps for teachers where they can monitor how learners in their classroom are doing and get indicators of engagement and feedback on the learners, while the learners can do interactive tasks that are smartly designed to help them do scientific experimentation. Then I have colleagues who are doing research on video games—some people call those ‘serious’ educational games. One is called Newton’s Playground, where learners have to design, graphically, innovative solutions that help a ball reach a balloon in an environment with obstacles. It uses understanding of physics to help learners do that, but it has these creative design components. All of this is happening, but it is typically at the edges, so there are quite a few research projects that are funded by the National Science Foundation, MacArthur, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Institute for Educational Sciences, or start-ups. I think those assessments are a critical part of our future. Unfortunately, it is understandably not the first thing that people think about when they think of educational assessment, which is more like the standardised, sit-in-a-classroom, paper-and-pencil test, with relatively abstract questions that seem, for many people, disconnected from what adults do in their professions. That is of course partly true, but that association is also partly a shame because that is not the entirety of where the field is or the core of where it is going."