Tag Archives: students

Writing

Teaching Essay Writing through Poetry

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As a writer and teacher, I am pained to admit, but in the big picture I do agree with Kurt Vonnegut who opens “Teaching the Unteachable” with “You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that….”

My caveat, however, is about what we mean by “writing well.” Vonnegut above and my agreement are confronting what I would call those who are by their nature and inclinations writers first—those who labor over poetry, fiction, essays, and the like for months and even years (and decades) without any real hope anyone will ever publish that work. These are writers who write because they have to, but not necessarily because they want or need to.

For over thirty years now, I have taught primarily high school and undergraduate students to write—but that effort is rarely about the sort of writer mentioned above; instead I am teaching writing that is essentially functional and disciplinary. And it is there that I diverge from Vonnegut because I know for a fact that we can teach people to write well in the disciplines, often extremely well even when they do not particularly like to write, even when they insist they are not very good writers.

One of the most effective approaches to teaching disciplinary-based essay writing is to focus on large concepts about effective writing and then grounding that in examining poetry in order to teach those concepts. Using poetry to reinforce essay writing helps highlight the universal qualities of powerful writing and continues to push students in their awareness of genre, form, and medium as they impact expression.

This fall, in fact, I have had several students directly challenge my focus on being specific—the importance of details, concrete language, and, as Flannery O’Connor has argued, triggering as many of the reader’s senses as possible.

Kingsolver’s “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator” and the Essay

Barbara Kingsolver from her collection Another America/Otra America begins “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator” with “The woman in the gold bracelets tells her friend:,” and then continues:

I had to fire another one.
Can you believe it?
She broke the vase
Jack gave me for Christmas.
It was one of those,
you know? That worked
with everything. All my colors.
I asked him if he’d mind
if I bought one again just like it.
It was the only one that just always worked.

Her friend says:
Find another one that speaks English.
That’s a plus.

The woman in the gold agrees
that is a plus.

In class, we begin to read and examine this poem, but I use this discussion to highlight the craft of writing (especially as that relates to disciplinary essay writing), not to do the traditional poetry analysis most students expect.

Here are some of the elements of effective writing I highlight:

  • After we begin discussing the poem, I steer the students back to the title, which in this case is extremely important. Thus, I emphasize the importance of the title as well as discuss the art and craft of subheads in disciplinary essays. Many students have not focused on titles, and often submit essays without titles so this is typically a key lesson for first year students.
  • Next, we highlight the use of “gold” in the opening line and the final stanza. The points I stress are about word choice, connotation, and framing. I believe essay writing must begin at the word level for young writers; they need a greater sense of purpose in the words they choose, notably specificity, concreteness, appropriateness (key here is that words have specialized meanings in the disciplines), and clarity. And that connects with connotations of words; in the poem, “gold” carries a great deal of important information about the scene, issues related to wealth and privilege. My students are quick to admit that Kingsolver has chosen “gold” with intent, purpose. Further, “gold” serves as a framing motif since she incorporates the word in the opening line and the end. I stress to students that essays are often framed (and to avoid the mechanistic introduction and conclusion format they have learned in high school). Framing and motifs add powerful and concrete elements to writing that young writers often lack.
  • We also confront Kingsolver’s use of “one” and “it,” especially the latter since I have stressed the problems with the pronoun to my students. In this poem, “one” and “it” create meaning in their repetition but also in their mixed implications about both the domestic worker and the vase. The point of emphasis is that Kingsolver, again, chooses and repeats words with purpose to create meaning, and this contrasts with how students are apt to repeat and use empty or vague language from carelessness.
  • Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of writing with characters and plot as well as the impact of showing versus telling. People doing things are powerful, much more powerful than abstractions. Kingsolver in her poem trusts the reader to know the abstractions she is showing; however, young writers tend to make many grand announcements (often overstated) and fail to show or support those claims.

This fall I followed the discussion of Kingsolver’s poem with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” and the result was impressive. We were able to identify these craft lessons immediately in King’s essay; students were also significantly more willing to embrace the concepts once we worked through the poem and then into King’s writing.

While there is a cynical irony to Vonnegut’s claims about teaching the unteachable—written by a writer who often taught at writing conferences and legendary writing workshops—ones that do elicit laugher, I am convinced that we teachers of writing who serve primarily students who will have to write while in formal education and then may go on to write in the disciplines can be very successful, but only if we take the teaching of writing seriously, and seek ways in which students can grow as writers.

Focusing on the universals of effective writing and then allowing students to examine and practice those universal are essential. And to do that, I find that poetry is an excellent resource for teaching the writing of essays.

For Further Reading

Are we teaching students to be good writers? 

Why Are We (Still) Failing Writing Instruction?

More on Failing Writing, and Students

From Failing to Killing Writing: Computer-Based Grading

Misguided Reading Policy Creates Wrong Lessons for Students as Writers

Education, education reform

Misreading the Never-Ending Drop-Out “Crisis”

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Prompted by Peter Greene’s Why Students Drop Out, further evidence that evidence doesn’t matter for the Obama administration of Secretary Duncan, I post below an entry for the Daily Kos from 4 February 2012.

The political and public concern about high school graduation rates must be placed in two contexts: the historical reality of drop-out rates in the U.S. and the misleading use of “crisis” discourse surrounding drop-out rates.

I also strongly recommend Ralph Ellison’s speech from 1963, What These Children Are Like, which confronts the high drop-out rate among African American students:

I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference. I have no technical terminology and no knowledge of an academic discipline. This isn’t boasting, nor is it an apology; it is just a means of reminding myself of what my reality has been and of what I am. At this point it might be useful for us to ask ourselves a few questions: what is this act, what is this scene in which the action is taking place, what is this agency and what is its purpose? The act is to discuss “these children,” the difficult thirty percent. We know this very well; it has been hammered out again and again. But the matter of scene seems to get us into trouble.

•

Daring to Look Behind the Curtain: The Drop-Out Crisis Redux

“‘Only four out of ten U.S. children finish high school, only one out of five who finish high school goes to college’”—does this sound familiar? Possibly at least echoed in the 2012 State of the Union Address by President Obama, who made this charge regarding U.S. public education?:

We also know that when students don’t walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better. So tonight, I am proposing that every state — every state — requires that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

The opening quote is from a 1947 Time magazine article focusing on John Ward Studebaker, a former school superintendent who served as U.S. Commissioner of Education in the mid-1940s. The drop-out crisis has been one of many refrains in U.S. politics and education for nearly a century.

Fifty years later, in 1997, The America’s Promise Alliance formed, chaired by General Colin Powell, with the express purpose of confronting the drop-out crisis.

Yet, despite decades of some essential facts—many students persisting in dropping out of school, drop-out rates disproportionately occurring in at-risk sub-groups (high poverty, racial minorities, English language learners), federal and state policies and codes mandating school attendance—we find ourselves in 2012 with President Obama declaring yet another mandate, which was met with applause.

Daring to Look Behind the Curtain

Power, authority, privilege, and winning are certain narcotics—numbing the mind and soul, limiting vision, and removing the possibility of pulling aside the curtain of assumptions to see the reality behind the pageantry.

I have always had an affinity for The Wizard of Oz, similar to my life-long affection for children’s books like Hop on Pop and Go, Dog, Go! of my childhood. The Wizard of Oz, now, offers an important reading about the nature of critical pedagogy as it confronts the enormity of authority.

A critical reading of the classic film of Dorothy and Toto focuses on the dangers of norms—that those caught up in the given are trapped like bugs in amber, never even considering there is a curtain, much less the possibility of looking behind it—and the need for the brave outsider, that person or those people who both consider the possibility of the curtain and act on pulling it aside.

Americans are tragically bound to our ideals—such as our faith in free markets, rugged individualism, and our contemporary tandem of royalty, wealth and fame—and we fear pulling aside those curtains because we don’t want to confront that those ideals may be wrong.

Thus, our leaders are allowed and even encouraged to do the same thing over and over, while lamenting that things never change (or worse, while never even acknowledging that our so-called “crises” are not unique to our time but persistent realities we in fact maintain by the very cures we prescribe). And such is the case with the drop-out crisis redux (Obama’s 2012 incarnation).

Mandating that students remain in school until 18 or upon graduating is maintaining the status quo while decrying the status quo. Like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the endless accountability spawns of that legislation, creating a national mandate for attending school fails for the same reasons a national curriculum and national testing will fail, for the same reasons that student accountability morphing into school and teacher accountability have and will fail: These are all acts of those who cannot imagine the curtain, and are, in effect, desperately keeping anyone from looking behind the curtain.

So here are just some of the things we should pull aside the curtain to consider:

The prekindergarten expulsion rate was 6.7 per 1,000 prekindergarteners enrolled. Based on current enrollment rates, an estimated 5,117 prekindergarten students across the nation are expelled each year. This rate is 3.2 times higher than the national rate of expulsion for K-12 students, which is 2.1 per 1,000 enrolled.

Four-year-olds were expelled at a rate about 50 percent greater than three-year-olds. Boys were expelled at a rate over 4.5 times that of girls. African-Americans attending state-funded prekindergarten were about twice as likely to be expelled as Latino and Caucasian children, and over five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children.

And Gilliam (2005) details further that gender and race are distinct elements in how pre-kindergarteners experience school:

African-American preschoolers were about twice as likely to be expelled as European-American (both Latino and non-Latino) preschoolers and over five times as likely as Asian-American preschoolers. Boys were expelled at a rate over 4½ times that of girls. The increased likelihood of boys to be expelled over girls was similar across all ethnicities, except for African-Americans (?2 = 25.93, p < .01), where boys accounted for 91.4% of the expulsions.

Students from some racial- and ethnic-minority groups, and those from disadvantaged families, continued to turn in lower SAT scores on average than those of their white, Asian, and more-affluent peers, patterns that have held their shape for the past decade.

In reading, for instance, white students’ average score was 528, and Asian students’ was 519, compared with 454 for Latino students and 429 for African-Americans. In math, white students outscored blacks by 108 points and Latinos by 69 or more points. Asians’ average math score was 55 points higher than that of white students….

Students’ scores continued to reflect their family income and parents’ education. Those in the lowest-income brackets, and whose parents had the least education, scored 125 points or more below their peers at the top of the family-income or parental education grid.”

South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society. What does it mean that the leader of the “free world” locks up its Black men at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?

While white males outnumber African American males 5 to 1 in the U.S., the prison population (which exceeds a ratio of 10 to 1 of men to women) is 6 to 1 African American males to white males.

“You Matter. Your Culture Matters. You Belong Here.”

When Diane Ravitch pulled back the curtain and asked “Does President Obama Know What Race to the Top Is?” some responses to her blog clamored to support the ideals we allow to thrive behind “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”—looking always at the student or the teacher and abdicating supreme authority to tests.

But if we dare to pull aside the curtain we must ask: Why is prekindergarten so much like prison? How do males and specifically African American males find their lives so often trapped in exclusion and punishment?

Yes, if we pull back the curtain of the drop-out crisis, and set aside the notion that compulsion is the answer, we can stop to ask: Why are so many students dropping out?

This question is vital since there is no compelling evidence that dropping out of school has ever been a fruitful path for most people to take.

Linda Christensen offers a rare look behind the curtain, an alternative to Obama’s myopic policy:

The school-to-prison pipeline doesn’t just begin with cops in the hallways and zero tolerance discipline policies. It begins when we fail to create a curriculum and a pedagogy that connects with students, that takes them seriously as intellectuals, that lets students know we care about them, that gives them the chance to channel their pain and defiance in productive ways. Making sure that we opt out of the classroom-to-prison pipeline will look and feel different in every subject and with every group of students[emphasis added]. But the classroom will share certain features: It will take the time to build relationships, and it will say, “You matter. Your culture matters. You belong here.”

Standardizing students is dehumanizing, and likely driving children into our streets. Compulsion doesn’t address that fatal flaw.

Compelling children and young adults to remain in our scripted, test-based classrooms where we can predict how children will be labeled and ranked simply by the accident of their zip codes, the color of their skin, and the language of their homes is inexcusable; it is the act of those who are deaf and blind and numb to the humanity of us all.

Testing, labeling, sorting, and ranking are both the creation and tool of the historical realities of the U.S., a culture committed to the ideals of equity but mired in the realities of racism, classism, and sexism. Testing perpetuates these plagues on our possibilities; testing will never address them.

In hundreds of ways, the Obama administration’s education policies are being orchestrated from behind a curtain where no questions can be asked, not even the wrong ones.

Those with power, authority, and privilege (often built on the pillars of the circumstances of their birth and the fortunes afforded them by test scores) must face the mirror now and ask, “Why are children dropping out?” while making sure they keep their gaze steady into their own eyes where the answers lie.

References

Get adjusted. (1947, December 15). Time.

Gilliam, W. S. (2005, May 4). Prekindergarteners left behind: Expulsion rates in state prekindergarten systems. Yale University Child Study Center.

Teaching

Teaching Students, Missionary Zeal, and the Cult of Personality

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As a teacher educator, I now spend much of my spring visiting schools and observing my seniors who are learning to teach in extended field experiences (my university’s version of student teaching).

What I have learned over more than a decade of making these visits and providing new teachers productive feedback is that one aspect of becoming and being a teacher is a complex but clear combination of teacher persona/presence, teacher awareness of students, and teacher engagement with those students during the flow of instruction.

My most direct and simple way to share this with my teachers-to-be is to note that they appear to be teaching the lesson and not their students. I have seen this phenomenon as I walk the halls of my university where professors are prone to lecture, and have noted on some occasions, I fear that if all the students were to leave the class, the professor would simply continue to hold forth.

Central to this aspect of teaching for me is the problem with lesson planning as it contrasts with being prepared to teach. I have noticed that the traditional emphasis on lesson planning and the older god of behavioral objectives (how I was trained to teach) and the newer god of backward design (teaching with the assessment in mind) both fail many teachers by forcing so much investment in planning that teachers feel consciously and unconsciously obligated to implement the plan and assessments prepared regardless of what learning is taking place. (The last thirty years’ focus on high-stakes standards-based teaching has only intensified this problem of teacher time inappropriately invested in planning and aligning and not preparing the what and how of each day’s lesson based in part on all the lessons that have come before.)

The result is lesson plans and tests done to students with the outcomes often misleading and counter-educational (this rigid and mechanical process can raise test scores and mask that learning never occurred).

Plans, tests, and all sorts of prescriptions of learning and teaching are far less important, I believe, than teacher expertise (yes, a teacher must know everything about which she/he is to teach, and then almost everything else—this is the critical authoritative imperative) and teacher awareness of her/his teacher persona as well as engagement with students during the flow of instruction.

This in-class concern about teaching is a subset of a larger problem related to missionary zeal and the cult of personality.

Often when I am teaching graduate courses in education, veteran teachers will respond to questions about their teaching by simply saying “I teach four block” or “I use Marzano”—programs and education gurus.

While “missionary zeal” is often invoked about and as a positive aspect of Teach for America and its recruits, “missionary zeal” can be seen in nearly blind commitments to phonics instruction, group work, Nancie Atwell’s workshop method, literature circles, understanding by design, and a list too long to identify here and not bound to any end of the ideological spectrum.

I’ve written about this before, and while it is a personal anecdote, I argue this is representative of the problem.

My daughter worshipped her second-grade teacher and my wife taught at the primary school my daughter attended. One day my wife and my daughter’s teacher were talking, and that teacher noted that my daughter had been making really high grades on her spelling tests, until the class began some direct phonics instruction marking my daughter’s grades dropping.

When we teach a lesson, a plan, or a program, and when we become so narrowly focused on the cult of personality behind what we teach and how, students are often lost in that missionary zeal, often mis-served.

As a literacy educator for over thirty years, I watch and hear the exhausting grammar and phonics debates refuse to die. These debates are exhausting because they often rest on a false premise, the straw man—that there are teachers who are against teaching grammar and phonics (none exist, by the way)—and devolve into what is most wrong with teaching, the missionary zeal to teach a skill as if it is the ends desired.

Grammar and phonemic awareness are aspects of composing/writing and reading, but when we become bound and determined to teach grammar and phonics without regard to a student’s writing or reading as well as that student’s developing eagerness to write and read, we are no longer teaching students, but appeasing our petty agendas to prove that our way is right and someone else is wrong.

That, simply put, is not teaching.

Teaching must begin in the classroom with what students know, what students don’t know, and what students misunderstand, placing all of that in the context of what students are interested in and what students need.

Teachers then must be prepared to implement a wide array of strategies to foster the outcomes that fulfill those student interests and needs.

If teaching grammar directly and in isolated ways raises student test scores on isolated grammar tests, but students write rarely and many come to hate writing, we have slain the authentic need of students on the alter of teaching grammar for grammar’s sake.

If conducting literature circles creates a well managed classroom, but students come to hate reading and have almost no opportunities to read by choice, we have slain the authentic need of students on the alter of teaching literature circles for literature circles’ sake.

We teach students—not lesson plans, not skills, not programs, not to-the-test, not Common Core or any standards of the moment, not flipped classrooms, not Core Knowledge or cultural literacy, not the teaching bible of the day or the teaching guru of the moment.

We teach students.

Testing

Students Should Be Tested Less, Then Not at All

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Students Should Be Tested More, Not Less by Jessica Lahey is not a compelling case to test students more, but another example of journalism failing to represent accurately a relatively limited study related to education.

Several aspects of the article reveal that the title and apparent claim of the need for more testing are misleading:

Henry L. Roediger III, a cognitive psychologist at Washington University, studies how the brain stores, and later retrieves, memories. He compared the test results of students who used common study methods—such as re-reading material, highlighting, reviewing and writing notes, outlining material and attending study groups—with the results from students who were repeatedly tested on the same material. When he compared the results, Roediger found, “Taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying the material.” Remarkably, this remains true “even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information.”

And to be fair, this is the actual abstract of the study discussed above:

A powerful way of improving one’s memory for material is to be tested on that material. Tests enhance later retention more than additional study of the material, even when tests are given without feedback [emphasis added]. This surprising phenomenon is called the testing effect, and although it has been studied by cognitive psychologists sporadically over the years, today there is a renewed effort to learn why testing is effective and to apply testing in educational settings. In this article, we selectively review laboratory studies that reveal the power of testing in improving retention [emphasis added] and then turn to studies that demonstrate the basic effects in educational settings. We also consider the related concepts of dynamic testing and formative assessment as other means of using tests to improve learning. Finally, we consider some negative consequences of testing that may occur in certain circumstances, though these negative effects are often small and do not cancel out the large positive effects of testing. Frequent testing in the classroom may boost educational achievement at all levels of education.

Not to trivialize the study, but in short, the research associates “learning” with retention (memorization), and assumes a relatively direct correlation between test scores and the narrow view of learning as retention. In other words, if you want to raise summative test scores of retention, a series of smaller (and formative) tests are more effective in raising those scores than compared study strategies.

The problem with this “well, duh” study is that it remains trapped within the testing paradigm, even though the authors do concede (and then marginalize) problems with high-stakes testing and also briefly endorse the power of formative assessment: “the general procedure of using the results of classroom assessments as feedback for teachers to guide future instruction and also for students to guide their future studying” (p. 201).

This study, however, is not a compelling argument* as the title states for more testing.

In fact, it is an ideal opportunity to argue that we must move beyond retention, recall, and memorization as foundational to what counts as learning. We must also begin to reject that traditional testing formats (including selected-response formats in the classroom as well as standardized testing such as the SAT) are credible goals or evidence of learning.

Students should be tested less, and then not at all. Students should be offered opportunities to practice and perform whole and authentic activities (such as playing an instrument, creating a work of art, composing an essay, designing a budget for a project) during class time instead of preparing for and taking a battery of narrow assessments. Additionally, students need ample teacher feedback, and not grades, as part of drafting and revision processes surrounding those activities.

Retention and enhanced memory come from authentic engagement with real behaviors that students want to perform; memorization need not precede authentic displays of understanding, and must not be a primary proxy for learning. Ultimately, memorization is not deep learning, and testing limits, and never enhances deep learning. Test scores also misrepresent student learning, teacher impact, and school quality.

Lahey’s article and the research on testing do offer valuable concerns about high-stakes associated with testing, and lends credibility to formative assessment, but both in the end remain trapped within the failed testing paradigm that needs to be lessened and then rejected entirely.

—

* Broadly, the authors ignore entirely issues related to who decides what should be learned; in other words, critical educators tend to explore education not bound by the traditional testing paradigm within which this study resides like a bug trapped in amber. The narrow and static view of knowledge and learning is as problematic as the idealized view of testing that the study fails to challenge.

Teaching, Workers

Conditions of Teaching Are Conditions of Learning: On Students

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I’m not prone to New Year’s resolutions, but I have decided that with the arbitrary designation of a new calendar year, I have a way to focus on new commitments, specifically in how I interact in the virtual world. So when I read a derogatory comment on one of my blog posts (describing my post with “stupidest” and then making a word choice error or typo), I resisted the urge to comment, but posted how painful it was not to do so on Facebook.

Many of my wonderful former students commented, leading to two threads and many comments that genuinely made my day and evening—justifying my decision not to interact with the person leaving the comment.

From that exchange, I wrote Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters because I began to think about my 18 years teaching high school English as well as how I both failed my students and served them well (by the way, my former students tend to be stunningly kind and recall our days and years together with a fondness that makes my heart enlarge like the final scene of How the Grinch Stole Christmas).

The reason my exchange with former students spurred a blog about teacher autonomy and classroom experience is that, upon reflection, I believe when I was at my best as a high school teacher, I was functioning at an autonomous level—doing what I knew to be best for what any one of my students needed (especially when that meant listening to them while they struggled under the weight of crying about a boyfriend or girlfriend)—and when I was at my worst, I was complying with mandates I felt were at least misguided.

So as I blogged about the need for listening to teachers’ voices, for honoring classroom experiences not solely but initially, I was making a case about the conditions of teaching—a case that I failed to connect to the conditions of learning and how teacher autonomy is inextricable from student autonomy.

While I remain, frankly, stunned at the antagonism expressed when I call for teacher autonomy and voice, I am equally dismayed that we tend to render both teachers and students essentially invisible and mute.

Two comments on pieces of mine, then, need to be highlighted.

On my teacher invisibility post included at The Answer Sheet, StudentsLast added: “If teachers are invisible to policy makers, what then are students? Non-existent?”

To which I must respond, yes.

And responding to Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters, Martha Kennedy highlighted:

Something I have never seen brought into this conversation is the fact that many people look at teachers through the lens of their own experience in school. I don’t think most people liked school. Judging from my university students, the teacher is viewed as an adversary, classes are obstacles, it’s all just “hoops to jump.” I think as long as this is true, teachers will have a hard time with “the public.” There’s also the fallacy that if a kid hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught. Judging from my students, many don’t even really understand WHAT the teacher is teaching. This is a larger problem since the advent of NCLB where students are taught to pass exams. Students are conditioned to find a discrete answer to every question. This pretty much steals from questions their intrinsic interest.

The first point above is extremely important: How often are the actions of teachers inculcating in students negative associations with not only school but also teachers? How often are those actions the result of misguided mandates imposed on those teachers? How might all teachers embrace their autonomy so as to avoid these conditions in the classroom?

So as I return to my blog post about honoring teacher voice and classroom experience, I must emphasize that calling for a reconsideration of how we view teachers, how we honor (or don’t) teacher autonomy, and whose voice matters, I must stress that the conditions of teaching are the conditions of learning.

And how teachers feel as well as how students feel about those conditions matters in ways that must not be ignored, must not be marginalized against a normalized rational view of the world.

As we become more and more entrenched in “an age of infinite examination” where teachers and students are “never finished with anything,” we must begin to ask new questions and then seek different answers. And as we seek ways in which teachers and workers can embrace a new solidarity, let’s not forget our solidarity with the students in our care.

Education

A Reminder: “The Children Do Notice”

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Most of us who teach are now in a moment of pause, between semesters, between classes. Although we are mid-academic year, we are facing a new calendar year, traditionally a time to reflect, recommit, and redirect.

I offer below a repost of a piece from 2011, something I think that is enduring and important—a lesson from a student of a former student of mine, now a teacher.

“The Children Do Notice”*

I spent the first eighteen years of my career as an educator, teaching high school English at the high school I attended in my home town. There, I was fortunate to teach hundreds and hundreds of wonderful young people who made my life richer and fueled my desire to be the best teacher I could be.

The last thirteen years have been devoted to teacher education. I now have about three dozen young English teachers who have come through my courses and field experiences, creating for me a different kind of pride in them and my work.

All of these students I love. I miss them dearly, and recall them fondly. Facebook has been a wonderful opportunity to reconnect, although virtually, with a few hundred students. Yes, I “friend” students and former students—because I have told all of my teachers-to-be that they should ignore the misguided advice often given to young teachers: “Don’t be friends with your students.”

I have yet to understand what characteristics of friendship we should deny the children in our care. . .

Because of my life and profession as an educator, and because of the wonderful students and teachers who have been in my classes, I admit that I am quick to bristle at the current criticism and misinformation about teachers and the entire profession of teaching.

Two-plus years ago, I received a notice in my gmail account that a former student, Stephanie Johnson, who now teachers in DC had tagged me in a comment on Facebook, and this is what she wrote:

Today, I got a beautiful reminder from a student about why I’ve chosen this profession. The student (an 8th grade male student with special needs) planned and hosted a reception to honor five staff members who have had a positive impact on his life.  He decided he wanted to do it, he got help from the necessary people to make it happen, and he hosted a beautiful program to honor them.  I’ve been to events planned by adults that weren’t of this caliber.  It was amazing. And it led me to say this to my teacher friends…In this time when teachers are disrespected by those that make the decisions about our profession AND those completely outside of it, it’s important to remember that we do this for CHILDREN. To be a positive part of CHILDREN’S lives. To empower and nurture CHILDREN. Though our efforts go unnoticed and are under-appreciated by the powers that be, the CHILDREN do notice. They notice when you go out of your way to support and care for them. They notice when you recognize the gifts they have that others can’t (or won’t) see. They notice that you are there every day, longer than you should be. They notice. And they appreciate you.  So, in this stressful end of the year time with testing, IEPs, etc., I hope you’ll continue to stay positive and hopeful.  I hope you’ll continue doing everything that you’ve always done that has made you the wonderful teacher (social worker, administrator) that you are.  Enjoy your last few weeks with your students.
Peace.

Every time a self-appointed education reformer claims she is putting children first, think about these words above.

Every time a self-appointed education reformer argues that education has too many bad teachers, think about these words above.

Every time a self-appointed education reformer accuses teachers of being satisfied with the status quo, think about these words above.

Every time a self-appointed education reformer says we give too many tests and then calls for more tests, think about these words above.

“The CHILDREN do notice”. . .

They notice adult hypocrisy, they notice our wars, they notice that many, too many, people have too little in the richest country in the world. . .

But most of all, they notice the kindness and genuine love of that adult whose classroom they enter for the first time purely by chance. They notice that we have chosen to be teachers because we expect to love them, we expect them to be all that they imagine they can be.

I can only paraphrase Stephanie, “Enjoy your time with your students.”

And despite all the things that make us question being teachers, be thankful that come the next school year, there will be more students to empower and nurture.

To love.

* Reposted from Daily Kos (May 9, 2011).

Education

Teachers of Conscience and the Common Core Scylla and Charybdis

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In our popular discourse, we are prone to say we are caught between a rock and a hard place, a veiled allusion to Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis.

For K-12 public school teachers over the past thirty years, our Scylla and Charybdis have been federal, state, district, and school mandates on one side and our own professional expertise and autonomy on the other as we navigate the rough waters of serving our students.

When Diane Ravitch spoke at my home university, she offered a talk to a small group in the afternoon and then attended an informal gathering before her main speech. Since she and I had become virtual friends through email and Twitter, this was the first time we met in person. I took that opportunity to introduce Diane to a former graduate student of mine who at the time was struggling in a “no excuses” environment at the high-poverty, majority-minority public school where she taught.

I explained this as I introduced the early-career teacher to Diane, who immediately looked up from signing her book to say, “Don’t lose your job. We need you in the classroom.”

Those of us at the university level—especially emeriti and tenured professors—have positions that are unlike those of K-12 teachers, especially K-12 teachers in Southern states that are right-to-work (non-tenure).

Having taught in public school in SC for 18 years before entering higher education for the last 13 years, I know those worlds well.

And so I immediately thought of Diane’s comment when Katie posted on my blog post, Supporting Common Core Is Supporting Entire Reform Machine:

What suggestions do you have for productive resistance for those of us who have no choice but to work with it?

I also was forced to confront a hard lesson I learned when I was a co-instructor in the Spartanburg Writing Project. A new teacher, Dawn Mitchell, was in our summer institute, and once we confronted her with the tension between her first-year practices and best practice in literacy, she became the personification for me of the potential paralysis classroom practitioners face because of the Scylla and Charybdis of mandates and best practice—as well as the weight of teaching and blogging that is passionate and demanding themselves.

Dawn taught me that my role is to help teachers navigate the Scylla and Charybdis—not to reinforce the hard place of best practice. I now (thank you, Dawn) try to emphasize that teachers need to seek ways to incorporate one new best practice on Monday, but not to feel obligated to reinvent their classrooms wholesale tomorrow, and above all else, not to sacrifice themselves on the alter of nonconformity.

Now Katie has joined a long list of others who have taught me. As an apology (I should not be blogging in ways that contribute to the anxiety and pressure that K-12 teachers already feel) and an act of good faith to do better, let me answer her question:

  • First, let’s all start with do not harm to children and students. If we start here, we can evaluate better how to navigate our practices under the stress of mandates and best practice.
  • Be professional. K-12 teachers must be diligent about their professionalism when interacting with administration, colleagues, parents, and students. Part of that professionalism is knowing our fields. Let’s start with a powerful knowledge base of best practice, and then be prepared to show how mandates do and do not reflect that best practice. Too often, we start with the mandates; let’s flip that paradigm.
  • Find or create a community of professionals, preferably within our schools but including wider communities such as forming a Facebook group, joining state and national professional organizations, committing or recommitting to graduate degrees or graduate courses. One of the most corrosive aspects of teaching is isolation. Isolation erodes your professionalism and feeds your anxiety as well as your distrust in yourself.
  • Once you’ve found or created that community, take the time to do a careful and honest appraisal of what mandates are genuinely beyond your control to change and what mandates are open for how they are fulfilled. Start your efforts for reform with the latter. Few things are as harmful to our field of teaching than a misguided fatalism about what things we perceive as requirements of our teaching.
  • Seek ways to communicate with your administration that are professional and evidence-based. Share articles that highlight the need for best practice and the problems with mandates. Discussions with administration are best when they are between you and the administrator(s)—in other words, not public and not unannounced—allowing those with authority to consider your points without feeling as if that authority is being challenged. Begin to build a collegial atmosphere in your school, among teachers and among teachers and administrators.
  • Be political in ways that will not jeopardize your job. Share research and best practice with parents and state-level representatives, especially those directly involved in education committees. Share that research with school board members. Teachers are our best hope for teaching everyone, not just the students in our classes.
  • Create a public voice for yourself by blogging, Tweeting, and/or writing Op-Eds for local, state, and regional publications. With this, I urge caution. All K-12 teachers run some degree of risk by becoming a public voice, but I remain convinced that we must speak publicly. The challenge for each teachers is learning what works, what is safe, and then what you can do to increase the safe space for teachers’ public voices. Teachers need also to consider how to join the scholarly community by conducting classroom-based research and submitting work to scholarly journals—often a less dangerous avenue to creating a public voice.
  • Offer alternatives to the practices you feel are misguided. Since mandates are the given in the field of teaching, we are not served well by simply discounting what is being done (even when we are right). What should we do instead and how will that be better? Can you share with colleagues and administration models of the alternatives you have implemented in your classroom, highlighting how those practices serve both best practice and mandates?

In short, Katie’s question leads to ways in which all teachers can establish themselves as knowledgable, proactive, and professional.

Few things will deteriorate a teacher’s passion more than the fatalism of conforming to mandates she/he feels are misguided. As with students, teachers need and deserve autonomy, voice, and action.

As a final real-world point: Some Common Core advocates have responded to me by stating that the math CC standards are better than what the state had before. My argument is that instead of advocating for CC, all teachers should be advocating for teacher autonomy and thus the professional embracing of best practice identified by our perspective fields—not mandated in public policy by non-teachers, and not linked to highs-stakes testing.

Education certainly needs reform, but that reform must come from the professionals and for the good of our students.

We don’t need standards to teach, we need students. And we don’t need test scores to know how we have done, we need the faces and voices of each child we teach.

Katie, be true to your students, be true to yourself, and walk forward with patience and confidence. As Henry David Thoreau reminds us: “One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”

Choose your something with care, and don’t let it be a burden, but a call.

CCSS

I Don’t Need Standards To Teach, I Need Students

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Just days ago, I completed my twenty-eighth year as a teacher [1]—eighteen as a high school teacher of English followed by ten years as a professor of education.

And I am excited about the coming semesters because, as I have felt every year of my teaching life, I know I failed in some ways this past academic year and I am confident I will be better in my next opportunities to teach.

As a teacher, I am far from finished—and I never will be.

On this Mother’s Day*, I want to make a statement to the many and powerful leaders in education reform, all of whom have either no experience or expertise, or very little, as teachers:

I don’t need standards to teach, I need students.

If You Have Never Taught, You Simply Don’t Understand

Governors, policy wonks, and think tanks, I don’t need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Secretary Duncan, I have no interest in racing to the top, when that means the top of the pile of my fellow teachers trampled by the policies you have created and promoted.

Bill Gates, I don’t want a dime of your billions; in fact, I am not even interested in what you do (I have always used Apple products) as long as you drop education as your hobby.

Michelle Rhee, I have no interest in my students having mouths forcibly shut by me. I am here to hear their open minds and mouths.

Pearson, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, and every company seeking to sell me anything to support my implementing CCSS or preparing my students for NAEP, state high-stakes tests, or the SAT, I am not interested in buying anything. No software, no hardware, no textbooks, no worksheets. Nothing.

Professional organizations and unions, I need you to stop racing for a place at the table with the reformers and corporations noted above, and instead, to seek ways to support my autonomy and agency as a professional so that the autonomy and agency of the children in our schools can become the primary focus of universal public education for free people.

And, finally, to anyone who thinks you know what I should teach and how, please seek a place at the front of a classroom filled with other people’s children, teach for a few years, and then let’s get together and talk. I am eager to be collegial in the pursuit of community as a key part of teaching and learning.

Then What?

Becoming and being a teacher is a constant state of becoming. A teacher must be always a student and scholar of her/his field(s), her/his pedagogy, and her/his students.

What the people and groups identified above seem not to understand is that for my eighteen years of teaching high school English, I probably taught about 2000 students; thus, I taught about 2000 different classes. And not a single measurable outcome of any of those students predicts much of anything about my effectiveness or if I’ll succeed with any future student. Some of the students who appear successful did so in spite of my failures. Some of the students who appear to have failed were provided my very best as a teacher. Almost all of the good and bad I have created as a teacher are not measurable or apparent in manageable ways.

I wasn’t concerned about meeting anyone’s standards or preparing any student for a test or making sure any student was prepared for the next grade, college, or the workforce.

And I never will be.

Instead of standards, testing, competition, labeling, ranking, and sorting (all the cancerous elements of traditional schooling and the current accountability era), as a teacher, I need to offer my students authentic learning opportunities in which they produce artifacts of their understanding and expertise. My students need from me my authoritative feedback to those authentic artifacts.

I have no interest in competing with my fellow teachers for whose students score highest on tests so I can earn more money than my colleagues. I don’t, either, want to join forces with my in-school colleagues to outperform other schools in order to compete for their customers. I couldn’t care less how my state’s schools compare with other states or how U.S. schools compare on international tests.

Absolutely none of that matters.

While not unique to Howard Gardner, we have a very clear idea of what it is teachers should do in the pursuit of learning. Gardner’s The Disciplined Mind examines a conception of education not distracted by accountability.

Teaching and learning must be primarily collaborative, a community of learners.

The goals of learning must be the broad and clear—although always evolving—defining qualities of the fields of knowledge we honor in academia.

Every history course, for example, would pursue, What does it mean to be a historian? Every science class, What does it mean to be a scientist? Every writing class, What does it mean to be a writer?

Teaching and learning are the collaborative pursuit of questions. Anything else is indoctrination, dehumanizing, and antithetical to democratic ideals and human agency.

Humans never will—and never should—learn the same box of knowledge. Humans never will—and never should—learn in linear, sequential ways.

And there is no need for any of that anyway as long as we seek to be a community instead of barbaric individuals committed to the conquest of goods at the expense of others.

There, I think, is the harsh and ugly fact. Those privileged elites—again the people and groups noted above—have acquired their status on the backs of others, corrosive evidence for them that they somehow deserve that and that it all is the way things should be. It is theirs then to perpetuate dehumanizing ways of being—labeling, sorting, ranking against the rules that gave them their power.

I choose otherwise.

I don’t need standards to teach, I need students.

* My becoming a teacher can be traced directly to the wonderful and rich influence of my mother, and that influence is inextricable from the powerful and enduring influence of my father.

[1] Originally posted at Daily Kos (May 13, 2012), and re-posted at The Answer Sheet (May 17, 2012)

Testing

GUEST POST: Continu—what? Sara Newell

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Continu—what?

Sara Newell

How do you derive meaning from a number? Should a parent or student respond differently to a 97% than to a 99%? What about a 75%? How do you know what number to assign to a student created product you’ve never seen before? As a 5th grade teacher at the Charles Townes Center for highly gifted students in grades 3-8, I felt these questions were a constant thorn in my side.

My students qualified for invitation to the center in Greenville, South Carolina based on scores in the top percentile on nationally normed tests. The current, numerical grading system has always presented quite a challenge to me as a public school classroom teacher—how do I push my students to strive for excellence without encouraging the crippling effects of perfectionism? In giving students and parents a true measure of learning, personal achievement, and goal-setting, the numerical grading system always seemed to me ineffective at best. Since I began teaching gifted students, I have been in a constant struggle to find a more effective way to provide accurate feedback about their current performance while motivating them to continue to give their best effort on whatever challenges are presented next.

The assessment issues faced in our school were exaggerated versions of the problems caused by the numerical grading system in schools across the country. The nature of our students simply intensifies the problem. For example, the vast majority of my students can ace a grade-level multiple-choice test before I even engage in the first lesson. Should they just receive “A’s”? Is that what they earned? And, if I – instead – increased the depth and complexity of my instruction to provide the appropriate intellectual challenge and a student then only mastered 92% of that material—is it “fair” to assign a less than stellar grade?

This issue becomes even more important as students begin to move into high-school level courses. How does a 92 affect their GPA when they are enrolled in high-school and honors courses beginning in 7th grade? Should they be scored less than their peers who attend mainstream schools? Teachers of gifted (and all) students face these types of problems again and again as they are asked to differentiate to meet the needs of diverse learners. How does a teacher maintain some sort of equity and still challenge students appropriately? Some schools have attempted to rectify this disparity by offering higher grade points for honors or AP classes. This does not remedy the problem—it simply magnifies the spectrum of an inaccurate ruler and introduces an additional disadvantage for college applicants whose schools do not offer this option.  The issue of quality feedback and appropriate challenge remains.

For a while, I thought the solution to the problem was that I needed to design better rubrics. If I could just break assignments down into more concrete sections, the students would see what they needed to do and would be able to demonstrate mastery in a way that provided equal access to all while challenging students appropriately. (And I could still put a number on it and feel good about it.) Unfortunately, there were still roadblocks.

In a subject-integrated inquiry-based classroom, how do you quantify “delightful,” “sophisticated,” “clever” and all of the other descriptors that address the work of students who clearly went above and beyond the scope of the assignment? The scale model in gingerbread of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the original musical composition in response to a Langston Hughes poem received a 100% that was “worth” exactly the same amount as the student who ploddingly met the minimum requirement for each element. So, the rubric was a start, but it still lacked the depth I was seeking to truly communicate effectively with my students (not-to-mention their parents) about the quality of their work. Truly authentic assessment with feedback that can guide students into becoming independent learners still seemed out of reach.

Then, our principal brought back the idea of using continua from a school visit in Seattle. These reading, writing and math continua are based on the work of Bonnie Campbell Hill and provide a system to analyze student skill and progress over many years. The lists are simple and concise. They do not include every possible state standard but instead provide an overview of the crucial skills students need to be successful.

I jumped on these tools and piloted using them with my students almost immediately. My students completed self-evaluations, rating themselves at the “beginning,” “developing,” “proficient,” or “independent” levels described on the continua. I then added my own assessment of their skills. We used these in our student-led conferences, and I could see the beginnings of evidence-based discussions in their conversations. Students were using their writing portfolios and math assessments to provide concrete support for their evaluations. This represented a terrific shift in the way students and parents thought and talked about student work.

Instead of parent comments like, “What did you miss?” or “Great job!” I was hearing, “How did you decide you were proficient in reading fluency instead of independent?”  One parent asked his son, “I didn’t know you should be reading different genres. What are you reading right now? Is that the kind of book you always read?” These conversations were so much richer than the previous years’ event which basically consisted of students proudly showing their work while their parents made appreciative mumbles and nodded their heads.  I was excited by the beginnings of the give and take that marks a truly thoughtful discussion, but something was still missing. There was still not a way to communicate the truly exceptional or the gifted student who was playing it safe.

After musing on this initial success and talking repeatedly with a middle school colleague struggling with many of the same frustrations, we decided that we needed to create an additional continuum. The difference between the “minimum doer” and the outstanding student in our school was based not only on the ability to demonstrate skill mastery, but on the willingness to strive to apply critical and creative thinking skills. With this in mind, I pulled together a number of resources and began to hammer out a draft of a critical and creative thinking skills continuum. (I still haven’t hammered out a shorter name, though.) Dr. Richard Paul’s mini-guides on critical and creative thinking, Torrance’s work on creativity and Van Tassel-Baska’s writing on application of these skills in the classroom were all of great benefit to me as I worked. My hope was that this document would bridge the gap between the seemingly arbitrary nature of a number grade and the lightning strike of truly outstanding work. I ended up with a scale more rooted in psychology and child development than pedagogy and standards. This was initially surprising, but it became more satisfying as I realized that perhaps with this tool we might finally get to the roots of why one student was clearly outperforming another and more importantly—what to do about it.

The purpose of this creative and critical thinking skills continuum is to provide specific feedback for students and parents about the students’ current progress as well as to communicate in a straightforward way the next steps in their educational growth. Numeric grades are loaded with judgment, both objective and subjective, as well as academic stigma. Students feel that a 100% means that you are perfect while a 67% means that you are a loser. I’ve even had students tell me that even numbers are better than odd numbers (a 99% means that I am a point away from perfect—the most frustrating thing—but a 98% means that I’m solidly in the high “A” category). The focus on the number rather than what the number represents is a bizarre, yet true manifestation of the problem with attempting to quantify something as variable as knowledge and learning. Students become so focused on the number and what it “means” that they completely lose sight of the true purpose of assessment– reflection and growth. A continuum has no numbers—hence, no judgment. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to evaluate oneself with this method.

On first executing the continua in my classroom, I did not ask my students to provide evidence to support their evaluations. (That came later…) It was absolutely fascinating to see students read through and begin their self-evaluations on the critical and creative thinking continuum. I only allowed one hour of the class period for students to complete their analysis of this one-page document. However, most of my students took much more time than that. The room was silent. My students were incredibly focused on their reading and analysis. As 5th graders are still fairly ego-centric at this concrete operational stage (thanks Piaget), they seemed to feel that an assessment all about them was well worth their time. The questions students asked about concepts like “intellectual humility” and perseverance got to the core of what I had been trying to teach for years. Why is it important to continue to try to find a solution to a difficult problem? What does it mean to demonstrate originality? How do I know if I am taking an intellectual risk? These were the questions that I wanted my students to ask—and this was finally a document that set the stage to ask them.

Another revelation occurred when I reviewed these documents individually. I began to get a much more relevant picture of how each child saw him or herself. It was striking to compare the self-assessments with the list of test-score data that my principal had just sent out. (Yes, we are still in a public school. And yes, we still have to do things like set learning goals based on the number of points students “should” improve on certain tests.) Those standardized test scores have been relatively meaningless to me in the past. However, coupled with the information from the continuum self-assessments, a fascinating phenomenon was revealed. By and large, students in the top performing test score group had consistently given themselves the lowest evaluations on the continuum while the students with the lowest (comparative) test scores had marked themselves as having mastered all or almost all of the critical and creative thinking skills. The Dunning Kruger effect in action! We had a tremendous class discussion about this effect—in which less competent people in a field tend to overestimate their abilities. We analyzed how it applied to their attitudes and approaches to learning.  I began to see a shift in several students’ attitudes and performance following this one illuminating discussion.

This initial work was very inspiring. I was surprised and pleased at the effort my students put into their evaluations. The vocabulary from the continuum was popping up in our discussions again and again. Instead of “I don’t get it,” I was hearing comments like, “I need to clarify this—do you mean…?” The students were beginning to look at learning through this alternate lens. I continued to have students review the continuum and reflect on their progress as we completed units of instruction. They documented their growth and reflected on their struggles.

We also used the continuum to decide on areas of focus for the next units. I previewed with the students what I felt were the “big ideas” for learning while they made choices about skills they thought it important to develop. The quality of our communication continued to improve. Our goals were aligned—I was attempting to provide opportunities for them to improve in areas that THEY had identified as needing work. This method gave them a sense of control over their own learning.

Other teachers in my school are currently working to apply the math, reading, writing, and thinking skills continua in their classrooms. In the middle school, students are expected to provide support for their analysis as they complete their initial evaluations. In the lower grades, teachers use the continua to shift the focus from what students can’t do to what students COULD do. These continua are shared between teachers vertically to provide a long-range picture of the student’s development over time. This is something that a numeric grade based on grade-level standards fails to communicate.

At first some teachers struggled with how to make the continua relevant to their students, and all teachers recognized that the thought and effort needed to accurately utilize the continua required more time than typical “grading.” However, the value of the knowledge gained far outweighs the extra effort the analysis requires.

The next breakthrough came when I began to use the critical and creative thinking continuum in one-on-one parent conferences. For years, my conferences followed a fairly typical script. First, I would go over the previous year’s test scores. Then, I would discuss grades. The parent(s) and I would discuss any issues or “concerns,” and then I would try to end on some kind of positive note. For the parents of my highest achievers though, this was not a helpful meeting. While I’m sure they enjoyed hearing me list all of the delightful adjectives that described their child, I’m not sure that they felt that they were getting a clear picture of what their child could do to continue to grow.

The use of the continua has changed our discussions. My conferences conducted this fall focused on which elements their child was clearly demonstrating as well as areas their child could continue to develop. I was able to explain the Dunning Kruger Effect to parents who thought their child was practically perfect but who in reality was barely making an effort. I described to the parents of the perfectionists what intellectual risk-taking was and how their child could begin to do it. The conversations were so much richer than in the past, and parents did not feel that I was judging their parenting, or their children.

Instead, the focus was on attributes and evidence.  Parents were surprised and fascinated when reading their child’s reflections. The conferences now were a detailed conversation about the whole child and how he or she interacted with the world. Even more importantly, parents were now able to support our classroom objectives with greater accuracy.  One parent commented, “We were delighted to discuss and learn about the Creative Continuum. The Continuum is visual and the skill sets are clearly presented…Our meeting was one of the most informative conferences I have attended.”

Shifting our focus from a numerical grading system to a continuum-based evaluation has started to address many of the assessment issues I was facing. My students have stopped asking, “Is this for a grade?” as though that alone determines the value of an assignment. I continue to work to provide more opportunities for students to develop those critical and creative thinking skills. Knowing that I am going to be asking them to evaluate their growth—I am very conscious of the need to design learning experiences that require students to demonstrate those skills.

Most importantly, the students themselves feel a sense of ownership over their learning, and now they are making the effort to ask accurate, insightful questions about what they can do and what they still need to learn to do. Removing the focus from the number grade and putting it back on the evaluation of skills and attributes improves the quality of instruction, performance and communication. The end result is a focus on authentic student learning and success.

References

Davis, G.A., & Rimm, S.B. (2009). Education of the gifted and talented (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence (PDF). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(3), 83–87.

Elder, L., & Paul, R. (2005). The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts & tools. (4th ed.). Dillon Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking.

Hill, B. C. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.bonniecampbellhill.com/support.php

Van Tassel-Baska, J., & Stambaugh, T. (2006). Comprehensive curriculum for gifted learners. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

For Further Reading

Rubrics

Kohn, A. (2006). The trouble with rubrics. English Journal, 95(4), 12-15.

Wilson, M. (2007). Why I won’t be using rubrics to respond to students’ writing. English Journal, 96(4), 62-66.

Wilson, M. (2006). Rethinking rubrics in writing assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Self-Assessment

Liberating Grades/Liberatory Assessment, sj Miller

Testing

What Are Tests Really Measuring?: When Achievement Isn’t Achievement

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High-stakes standardized testing must be the most resilient phenomenon ever to exist on the planet. Joining high-stakes standardized testing in that (dis)honor would be the persistent but misleading claim that test scores are primarily achievement (and a growing future candidate for this honor is the claim that test scores by students, labeled “achievement,” are also credible metrics for “teacher quality”).

Let’s start with a couple statistical breakdowns of what test scores constitute:

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

Just 14 per cent of variation in individuals’ performance is accounted for by school quality. Most variation is explained by other factors, underlining the need to look at the range of children’s experiences, inside and outside school, when seeking to raise achievement.

Next, consider this from the UK:

Differences in children’s exam results at secondary school owe more to genetics than teachers, schools or the family environment, according to a study published yesterday.

The research drew on the exam scores of more than 11,000 16-year-olds who sat GCSEs at the end of their secondary school education. In the compulsory core subjects of English, maths and science, genetics accounted for on average 58% of the differences in scores that children achieved.

While the genetics claim is potentially dangerous, and certainly controversial, the article offers some important clarifications:

The findings do not mean that children’s performance at school is determined by their genes, or that schools and the child’s environment have no influence. The overall effect of a child’s environment – including their home and school life – accounted for 36% of the variation seen in students’ exam scores across all subjects, the study found….

Writing in the journal, the authors point out that genetics emerges as such a strong influence on exam scores because the schooling system aims to give all children the same education. The more school and other factors are made equal, the more genetic differences come to the fore in children’s performance. The same situation would happen if everyone had a healthy diet: differences in bodyweight would be more down to genetic variation, instead of being dominated by lifestyle.

Plomin said one message from the study was that differences in children’s performance were not merely down to effort. “Some children find it easier to learn than others do, and I think it’s appetite as much as aptitude,” he said. “There is a motivation, maybe because you like to do what you are good at.”

Genetics, he said, caused people to create, select and modify their environment, and so nature drives nurture, which in turn reinforces nature. A child with a gift for maths seeks friends who like maths. A child who learns to read easily might join a book club, and work through books on the shelves at home.

Additional points drawn from this research present some strong cautions about continued reliance on not only standardized tests, but also uniform national standards:

“Education is still focused on a one-size-fits-all approach and if genetics tells us anything it’s that children are different in how easily they learn and what they like to learn. Forcing them into this one academic approach is going to make some children confront failure a lot and it doesn’t seem a wise approach. It ought to be more personalised,” he said.

“These things are as heritable as anything in behaviour, and yet when you look in education or in educational textbooks for teachers there is nothing on genetics. It cannot be right that there’s this complete disconnect between what we know and what we do.”

Finally, consider this research on the disconnect between test scores and student abilities:

To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests; in many cases, passing those tests is necessary to receive a high-school diploma. These high-stakes tests have also been shown to predict students’ future educational attainment and adult employment and income.

Such tests are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school — what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence.” However, schools whose students have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in “fluid intelligence” — the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically — according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University.

In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems….

Instead, the researchers found that educational practices designed to raise knowledge and boost test scores do not improve fluid intelligence. “It doesn’t seem like you get these skills for free in the way that you might hope, just by doing a lot of studying and being a good student,” says Gabrieli, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

So should we be shocked when students passing high-stakes reading tests in Texas admit they cannot read?:

A female classmate of Tony’s says she can’t get through the stories she reads in school unless someone explains them to her. She’s passed all her state tests, too. How? She says she uses classroom-taught “strategies” on her English reading test and that if she underlines and highlights enough and narrows down her options, she has a better chance of guessing right by playing the odds. She failed her math state test because of the word problems, so she employed her English strategies there on the retry attempt and passed.

Or that the most recent analysis of the teaching of writing in middle and high schools has found that best practice in writing hasn’t occurred because of accountability and high-stakes testing?:

Overall, in comparison to the 1979–80 study, students in our study were writing more in all subjects, but that writing tended to be short and often did not provide students with opportunities to use composing as a way to think through the issues, to show the depth or breadth of their knowledge, or to make new connections or raise new issues…. The responses make it clear that relatively little writing was required even in English…. [W]riting on average mattered less than multiple-choice or short-answer questions in assessing performance in English…. Some teachers and administrators, in fact, were quite explicit about aligning their own testing with the high-stakes exams their students would face. (Applebee & Langer, 2013, pp. 15-17)

Our educational world has been turned over wholesale to testing, despite ample evidence that test scores are many things (markers of privilege, markers of genetic predispositions, markers of teaching-to-the-test), among the least of which are student achievement and teacher quality.

If we don’t have the political will to de-test our schools, the evidence is clear that the stakes associated with testing must be greatly lessened and that the amount of time spent teaching to the tests and administering the tests must also be reduced dramatically.