Larry and I engage in on-going conversations around two
issues, which impact curriculum and instruction dramatically for the purpose of
empowering the teachers and administrators we engage with. I synthesize those conversations with two
questions we continually challenge ourselves to answer.
- How can we help educators understand standards in a conceptual sense so they can communicate to students what it is they need to know and be able to do? (What is the bigger picture, the true purpose for learning?)
- How can we help educators understand reading, writing, speaking and listening as processes for communication that should be integrated for the purpose of THINKING in a broader context, as related to standards.
Though most have adopted the Common Core State Standards,
and many proclaim it is a new day for education, I ask, “What are you doing
differently?”
With new standards, new assessments and in many scenarios
new teacher and administrator evaluation systems, it’s easy to convince
ourselves we are changing teaching and learning; however, I make the argument
that much of this is lip service.
We are still pulling out last year’s test results, interim
exams, chart, graphs…you name the data whatever you wish, to analyze discrete
content, skills and computation perceived as student weaknesses so we can
design interventions for the purpose of the next test, as opposed to long term
student need. As we begin the spring
semester, plans for practice tests are in the making, modeled after previous
test items and, of course released PARCC or Smarter Balanced released items.
Author, researcher and middle school teacher, Kelly
Gallagher, writes in his book Readicide:
“When teachers spend hour upon hour preparing students for shallow tests, the
effects are devastating. Test scores may rise, but in the process we are
denying students the opportunity to develop the regions of their brains that
are crucial to them becoming deeper thinkers. Worse, we are teaching students
that reading is an activity we do primarily to prepare for exams. Recreational
reading—the kind of reading we want students to do long after they graduate—is
killed.”
We are still selling out to test performance, not student
achievement. They are not one in the
same!
Larry and I continually tackle the two questions above
because we do not believe the purpose for teaching and learning is to merely
practice skills and acquire basic knowledge for the moment, that moment meaning long
enough to take the end of the year exam.
We believe proficient, researched-based teaching will empower students
to perform on tests. We also see value
in spending time on test taking techniques or strategies, which is entirely
different from my previous examples.
So, how do we start those conversations around the above
questions? We think about how we can
spend the majority of our time engaging our students in a broad curriculum,
which allows them to think, solve problems and communicate their understanding
of important concepts and complex issues in our students’ lives and the world.
