ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how schoolteachers pedagogically hacked Google Sheets to assess student learning. Pedagogical hacking refers to educators’ capacity to repurpose existing systems to enable liberating engagements and pedagogical outcomes. This chapter explores emerging competency-based assessment practices of four teachers in British Columbia and sheds light on the conditions that enabled them to use alternative online assessment approaches that worked effectively during the pandemic. Interviews with teachers and analysis of their assessment practices with online competency charts demonstrated that four conditions enabled participants to shift from tests and grades as measures of learning to competency-based and personalized ways of assessing students: (a) the new provincial curriculum with its competency-based assessment principle and goal of personalized assessment outcomes; (b) the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closing of face-to-face learning in schools in 2020, forcing assessment methods onto online learning platforms; (c) the teachers’ choice to embrace digital technology for pedagogical hacking as they formed their professional learning community; and (d) current educational research on assessment and learning, which has echoed the teachers’ beliefs about what makes assessment for learning integral for the 21st century, recognizing that assessment is learning and should be the basis for meaningful pedagogy.
