What assessment is for here | Te aronga aromatawai

Assessment in this unit does three jobs at once:

1. Measure learning — did ākonga move from recognising colonial narratives to building evidence-led counter-narratives?
2. Support learning — the formative pieces below exist to feed the essay, not to generate marks. Every checkpoint returns something the student can use.
3. Build ownership — self-assessment against the rubric is part of the task itself. Students who can locate their own work on the criteria are doing the critical thinking the unit is about.

What gets assessed follows the unit's method: historical knowledge, source analysis and provenance-checking, argument construction, and the care with which ākonga handle Māori perspectives and te reo Māori terms. The essay rubric carries all four strands — see the criteria below.

Before lesson one: find the starting point | Aromatawai tōmua

Five minutes, anonymous if you like, before any teaching happens. The point is to surface the narratives students already carry, so you know which myths the unit has to do work against.

• Describe Māori society before European arrival in three to five words.
• Agree, disagree, or not sure: "the te reo Māori and English texts of te Tiriti say the same thing."
• Rate your agreement from 1 to 5: "Māori were treated fairly by the Crown."
• One thing you want to learn in this unit.

Use it to: spot the specific colonial framings in the room ("stone-age society", "the Treaty ceded sovereignty", "that's all in the past"), tune your emphasis lesson by lesson, and keep the responses — the same survey at the end of the unit shows each student their own narrative shift, which is more convincing than any grade.

Exit tickets | Ngā tiketi puta

Three lines at the end of each lesson: one shift, one piece of evidence, one question. The pattern holds across all five lessons; here are the tickets as each lesson runs them.

Read them the same evening if you can. They tell you whether the source work landed or whether students are still repeating the frame they walked in with — and the questions students "still have" are your warm-up material for the next lesson.

Essay checkpoints | Ngā arowhai tuhinga

The counter-narrative essay is too big to mark once at the end. Four checkpoints spread across the writing weeks keep every draft visible before it hardens:

1. Topic and thesis. Students submit a topic choice and a draft thesis. Your feedback answers two questions only: is the colonial narrative they are challenging named clearly, and is the counter-narrative specific? Brief written comments; a few minutes per student.
2. Introduction draft. A full opening paragraph. Does it make a claim rather than announce a topic? Are the primary sources identified? Mark with one strength and one next step.
3. Peer review. Full drafts reviewed in class against the rubric — the same rubric they will be marked with, no surprises. While pairs work, you check whether they can actually apply the criteria; misreadings of the rubric surface here, while there is still time.
4. Self-assessment. Before submitting, students score their own essay against the rubric and hand the self-assessment in with the final draft. The gap between their score and yours is itself feedback — and often small, which tells you the criteria did their job.

The conference and assessment sheet is built for checkpoints 1–3: it structures the conversation around historical claim, evidence and sourcing, and revision moves, and carries a sign-off line so both of you know what was agreed.

The summative task: counter-narrative essay | Te aromatawai whakamutunga

Ākonga choose a colonial narrative, name it, and rebuild the story from evidence with Māori perspectives at the centre. The full rubric, with band descriptors for every criterion, is the essay rubric and submission checklist; the criteria are:

Work sits in one of four bands — Strong (90–100), Proficient (75–89), Developing (50–74), Emerging (0–49). The bands describe the writing, not the writer: an Emerging essay is one that still mostly retells the dominant narrative, which after this unit is a revision conversation, not a verdict.

Students should draft alongside the counter-narrative writing guide, which unpacks the six writing moves the rubric rewards and is explicit that a counter-narrative is not a simple reversal of the old story.

Working with the exemplar | Te whakamahi tauira

The unit ships with a Proficient-level exemplar study sheet (82/100, on Parihaka) with annotations showing where the marks came from and what would lift it higher.

Be straight with your class about what it is: a worked example written for teaching, not real ākonga work. That honesty matters in a unit about interrogating where stories come from — and it frees students to critique the exemplar hard, which is exactly what you want them doing.

• Before writing: read it together and reverse-engineer the marks. "Where does it name the narrative it's challenging? Where does a source get analysed rather than quoted?"
• During drafting: students borrow its moves, not its content — the study sheet's transfer plan asks them to name which move they are stealing and where it lands in their own essay.
• At marking time: use it to calibrate. "Your draft is between Developing and Proficient — here is the difference in the exemplar."

One exemplar is deliberate for now: a single Proficient example shows the standard without offering a template for every band. Exemplars at other levels are planned, and will carry the same provenance framing.

The printable kit | Te kete tā

Everything above links out to four handouts. For planning, this is the complete set:

• Counter-narrative essay rubric and submission checklist — the marking truth; share it before drafting begins.
• Counter-narrative writing guide — the six writing moves, for students, during drafting.
• Conference and assessment sheet — structures checkpoint conversations and peer review.
• Proficient exemplar study sheet — the annotated worked example and transfer plan.

For the ground this assessment stands on — cultural safety, trauma-informed practice, and the classroom agreements that make honest writing about hard history possible — see the Teacher Companion.