What Are You Doing Differently?

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.

1.           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?)
2.           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.