Academic Divides.........and Chasms ,and Testing
Ferdi Serim
Your posting does shine light in corners where honest discussion is a
rarity, and what discussion does happen usually generates more heat than
light. I've been quite fortunate to have had my thinking profoundly changed
during the past two years, because of a simple but salient idea: results.
In the book "Results: the key to continuous school improvement" (Mike
Schmoker, ASCD) we learn that team work, goal setting and performance data
are all required before we can make the improvements we desire on a scale
that matters. He reports successes in schools that traverse the spectrum of
schools you describe in your Virginia experiences.
Perhaps because of the passion that surrounds arguments about how we
allocate the precious time available to us to work with children, standards
and testing take the spotlight. However, all too often we confuse
standards, evaluation and assessment. I don't have a negative connotation
for "assessment" since I see it as simply reporting what did or didn't
happen. Standards are a way of organizing what we want to cause to happen.
Our problem comes in our rush to judgement at the evaluation stage (wasn't
it the knowledge of good and evil that got us booted out of Eden?) where we
assign meaning on a numerical basis to inadequate performance data. Test
scores are played like a trump card to terminate discussion (yeah, but did
the test scores go up?)...when we don't really even know what's going on
with our students. But the key for me is in one of your later paragraphs,
where you say:
>it is quite hard to learn to ride a bike, harder still to shoot
>baskets, and one of the hardest things to learn how to do is to hit a baseball
>consistently. If one watches children trying to learn these skills, what one
>sees is that they fail most of the time, but keep on trying until they learn,
>usually over years.
When we look at learning longitudinally (over the years) as opposed to how
a set of 40 minute segments stacks up each day, we see possibilities for
this kind of growth, which largely go untended. People who learn to play
music or dance or a sport make their improvement because they are
continually assessing their progress. It's not simply binary (did it work?
didn't it work?) but involves gradations (did this effort work better? what
else can I try? does that work better) *that are clearly understood by the
learner* and it guides their sustained practice over years. Musicians learn
when they discover how to practice, how to identify and work through rough
spots. The relationship of the advanced musician to her/his teacher is as
close as we come to a model for the "guide on the side" so many of us
espouse.
We also know from decades of research in how the brain learns, and what
powerful learning looks like, that assessment must be built into
instruction. My thinking has been inexorably changed by the ideas of Grant
Wiggins (http://www.classnj.org), Mike Schmoker and Heide Hayes Jacobs, all
of whom are better sources for further information and inspiration than I.
But I can tell you that it works. There is no way I know of putting the
students at the center of their own learning than giving them the means to
assess their own efforts, because then the transaction is about their
learning rather than our teaching. There is no better way for us to act as
facilitators or guides than when we can chart our course based upon
performance data that both student and teacher perceive on a daily basis.
Ferdi
ps - as you can tell, I've been thinking about this...it's the topic of the
May issue of MultiMedia Schools which I'm currently working on, and I'd
welcome continuing this conversation via individual email
(fe...@silicon-desert.com) with anyone interested in sharing their personal
experiences or developing an article for that issue.
______________________________________________________
Ferdi Serim phone: 609 921-3135
Princeton Regional Schools fax: 609 924-7347
Computer Teacher
Online Innovation Institute, Director http://oii.org
ferdi...@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school)
http://oii.org/ferdi/Ferdi.html
co-author: NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/netlearn/
"We are more than the sum of our knowledge,
we are the products of our imagination." - Ferdi
Bonnie Bracey
standards? I don't think so.
The problem may not be the standards but the endless assessments of standards
based learning and pre teaching, practice and pedagogical issues around being
ready for " THE TEST". The amount of standards, national, local, and school
based, and the assessment,is growing, which we all know is in addition to
other kinds of assessments going on. Nobody knows the testing I 've seen.
Nobody knows but the teacher who really wants to teach. Glory Hallelujah!
TIME
Time has always been a problem in the school curriculum. Unless you are a
teacher in a particular classroom in a particular classroom, you may not know
how many kinds of assessments, and preparations happen in a year. It is
something staggering in SOME schools. We cannot hold the Dept of Education, or
NEGP, or distant educational resource people responsible for it. We have to be
able to share our concerns. But, who can talk about this problem? Not many.
It would seem to be disloyal. A dirty little secret is that some teachers,
cheat to make sure that they will not be held accountable or blamed as being a
part of the problem. Most of us brave the experience without assistance.
PRISONERS OF TIME
Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American
public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only
rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available. It
should surprise no one that some bright, hard-working students do reasonably
well. Everyone else-from the typical student to the dropout- runs into
trouble.
A FOUNDATION OF SAND
Unyielding and relentless, the time available in a uniform six-hour day and a
180-day year is the unacknowledged design flaw in American education. By
relying on time as the metric for school organization and curriculum, we have
built a learning enterprise on a foundation of sand, on five premises
educators know to be false.
The first is the assumption that students arrive at school ready to learn in
the same way, on the same schedule, all in rhythm with each other.
The second is the notion that academic time can be used for nonacademic
purposes with no effect on learning.
Next is the pretense that because yesterday's calendar was good enough for us,
it should be good enough for our children-despite major changes in the larger
society.
Fourth is the myth that schools can be transformed without giving teachers the
time they need to retool themselves and reorganize their work.
Finally, we find a new fiction: it is reasonable to expect "world-class
academic performance" from our students within the time-bound system that is
already failing them.
<A HREF="http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/Prisoners.html">Prisoners Of
Time</A>
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/Prisoners.html
It also may be that the standards do not dove tail, and that many teachers
really find themselves in conflict with so much on the plate and so little
time to do it all.
Those of you who are principals are also caught up into the assessment, if
only by implication of the test scores being published in the people.
Unfortunately to many people the test scores are the only things that counts.
FIRST THERE WERE STANDARDS
These were originally created in the various disciplines.Teacher advocates in
various subject matter groups created standards. This happened long before
they were national standards . I received the math standards at a special NASA
conference years ago. As a geography teacher and as a member of the NCGE we
actually testified, and debated as to what those national standards should
be.Many of us were involved, if we were members of a national teachers group,
such as NCGE, NCSS, NCTM, NSTAin the standards evolution.Many teachers in
urban and rural sites , do not have a real understanding of the standards of
any kind. They have not been involved in the dialogue in meaningful ways
unless they have technology. Imagine the difference between a teacher who can
peruse, study, examine and use technology to see what this is all about and
one who receives chunks of standards as prepartion for testing.
The National Educational Goals Panel initiative was started.
http://www.negp.gov/webpg20.htm
AOL LINK <A HREF="http://www.negp.gov/webpg20.htm">The National Education
Goals Panel</A>
As a teacher , I welcomed the standards. I used to teach and live in Europe,
and there were national curriculums and standards. And there may be states
where this is working well. I have been told that Iowa and North Carolina are
good examples of how standards work to better teaching and learning. But, I do
not live or teach in either of those states and I do not know from experience.
I taught in Virginia.
STANDARDS OF LEARNING
We had a really difficult time with new state standards, and I know that on a
public forum like this neither teachers, principals and other administrators
can risk giving their true thoughts. We are public servants and accepting the
state mandate is really a part of the job. It is also easy to create the
argument that I am against standards. I think that the problems are not that
simply defined. It is lack of time, it is sometimes the accumulation of so
many standards which do not work, it is where the students are when they start
,and the progress they make but, most people do not seem to see the
difference between working with students who are very low, and making
wonderful improvement, because there was no measurement of where they were,
prior to the assessment testing and working with children who always test
well.
Many children in some communities, speaking several languages, are new
immigrants, and the underclass, the first academic divide. In Virginia, there
is another shocker.
There was not available curriculum in many of the areas that the state
standards outlines. No books, no teacher experience, nothing.. na da. There
was not a gathering of resources , as there is in California and in Illinois,
on the web to support the state standards.
<A HREF="http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/lquestions.html">Questions and
Answers About the Standards</A> Illinois
http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/lquestions.html
REFLECTIONS
I knew how different it was from the north side of the county, where I had
taught for ten years, where for the first day of school we had a welcome
breakfast and we went to work, to the south side, where we were given
stopwatches and a pep rally on testing , and we started right in on the first
day, looking at the schedule of tests, and pretests, and practice tests.
I had never taught in a school where test scores were so low. The pressure
started on amazing. Even in that school there were concerns about who had the
"smart' kids. So the kids were taught in teams and the scores were grade
level. There are lots of problems that do not come from Washington, but that
come from the survey of learning landscape in the community, and how it is
interpreted locally.
IN VIRGINIA
Under the state's plan, a school will lose its accreditation in 2007 if fewer
than 70 percent of its students have passed the battery of tests in English,
math, history and science. The required passing rate is 50 percent on two of
the exams, third-grade history and third-grade science.
Many schools did not even come close to meeting that standard. In Northern
Virginia, 171 schools had a passing rate below 35 percent in at least one
subject in which a 70 percent passing rate was required.
WHAT HAPPENED?
A Washington Post analysis of the scores also showed that schools with large
numbers of low-income students will be among the most likely to have trouble
keeping their accreditation. At the 171 Northern Virginia schools that had the
most ground to make up, 33 percent of the students are eligible for federally
subsidized lunches. At all other schools in the area, the percentage of
students getting subsidized lunches is 14.5 percent. And in the 17 schools
that managed to achieve the state standards, only 3.1 percent of students get
subsidized lunches. I taught in one of those schools.
I attended a conference in Maine. I was one of a group of teachers attending.
I supported standards, and shared how the standards gave me something to use
as a tool to create, to define, to share the process of teaching and learning
. I explained that standards gave me permission to be a constructivist
teachers, constructing on the basis of the knowledge of the students that I
had.
The conference used this theme.
"Technology has the power to change learning itself. Because when a learning
experience becomes a voyage of discovery, the learner himself takes charge.
The teacher -- traditionally a facilitator, a collaborator, a fellow
adventurer and counselor -- can now be partially, or even totally replaced as
the learner, young or old, interacts with a technology, a machine, or a
repository of facts and ideas that almost miraculously opens new ideas, new
approaches, new avenues to the world. Technology also lets us simulate new
learning situations which in reality would be too dangerous, too expensive, or
just outright impossible. "
As Alan Kay says, powerful ideas need love too.
He says that,"In order to be completely enfranchised in the 21st century, it
will be very important for children to get fluent in the three central forms
of thinking that are now in use: "stories", "logical arguments", and "systems
dynamics". The question is "how?".
One of the arguments advanced for why it is so difficult to get most children
to learn to think in these new ways is that "this kind of thinking is hard to
learn". But it is quite hard to learn to ride a bike, harder still to shoot
baskets, and one of the hardest things to learn how to do is to hit a baseball
consistently. If one watches children trying to learn these skills, what one
sees is that they fail most of the time, but keep on trying until they learn,
usually over years. This is more like their attitude when learning to walk and
talk than the defeatism so often found in schoolwork. In fact, what really
seems to be the case is that children are willing to go to any lengths to
learn very difficult things and endure almost an endless succession of
"failures" in the process if they have a sense that the activity is an
integral part of their culture.
Our children cannot experience failure.. and success. There may not be enough
time in the school day for " real" learning. Rote is more efficient in the
factory method. Alan says, "One of the great problems with the way most
schools are set up is that the children quickly sense that most of the stuff
they are asked to do is not "real", especially as opposed to optional
activities like sports and games, art and music. They know these are "real",
and a school has to go to great lengths to make them artificial enough for the
children to lose interest. "
There has to be a way to combine the power of the technology with the task of
learning, that can bridge the digital and educational divides. It is hard to
construct paths for lifelong learning when all learning ,or most of it is
reactive to testing.
Bonnie Bracey
www.bracey-pearl.org
Bonnie Bracey
Parents do want results and here is what a person wrote to me, privately.
"
Much of the pressure for testing comes from the parents. With that kind of
political pull, I think testing is here to stay. Maybe you could focus on
the right ways to use test results....like a pre-test to find where the
student is at the beginning of the school year.....and post tests
periodically to find the progress? "
I hope that the essay did not make people think that I do not think some kinds
of assessment are not needed. I was only trying to recite the mantra that I
hear from the teachers about time and the process, and how too many things to
do affect the classroom.I used to use the tests for permssion to teach in a
constructivist mode. The high scores gave me permission to use multiple ways
of teaching and learning.
I tried to use DOE information on time, and the process of teaching in my
essay.
I taught in a school where kids took the SATS prep tests at the end of 5th
grade.
Here are some controversial readings on testing and technology in the places
of underpriviledge.
Some teachers have concerns about schools where ILS and slow readers are the
main people who get to use technology. What are your thoughts?
Without the prod of a standards-based curriculum, computers tend to be used
not for creative exploration but for drill and practice work, which is more
likely to frustrate students than it is to inspire them.
One of the greatest fears of those who are skeptical about the potential for
technology to help reinvent schools is that it will benefit only rich schools
and will therefore widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. But
information technologies can transform education for any student. Already, in
a handful of inner city schools around the country, students are riding the
Internet to access information and talk to students throughout the world. They
are participating in science experiments with tens of thousands of their
peers. They are managing imaginary stock portfolios using information from
Wall Street. They are working with desktop publishing programs to put out
school newspapers and collections of their poems and short stories.
The problem is that for the majority of disadvantaged schoolchildren, such a
transformation is nowhere in sight. It is not that poorer schools do not have
computers; almost all schools in the United States now have some computers.
But without the funds to maintain hardware and upgrade software, computers sit
broken down in closets and computer labs. Without the resources to train
teachers, computers are unwelcome interlopers in the classroom.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/techgap/navigate.cgi
<A HREF="http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/falling.html">The Digital
Divide: A Survey of Information "Haves" and "Have Nots" in 1997</A>
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/falling.html
<A HREF="http://www.benton.org/Library/Low-Income/">Losing Ground Bit by Bit
</A>
http://www.benton.org/Library/Low-Income/
These are more controversial.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/aftech.htm
AOL Link
<A HREF="http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/aftech.htm">Technology
Versus African-Americans - 99.01</A>
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/aftech.htm
Brillo Magazine, Issue Number 3, "The Invasion"Resisting Erase-ism on the 'Net
<http://www.virago-net.com/brillo/erasism.htm>
It is a touchy subject especially when combined with technology. Bonnie Bracey
Barry Kort
> powerful learning looks like, that assessment must be built into
> instruction.
If you look at human beings compared to almost any other living or
nonliving system, you will note a number of features that humans
possess which are less apparent in other living and nonliving systems.
To my mind, the standout features of humans are:
1) the ability to learn, and
2) the property of having a rich spectrum of emotions.
It occurred to me that the conjunction of these two properties is
not a coincidence. It occurred to me that the property of having
affective emotional states is deeply connected to the property of
being able to learn.
In other words, learning is the quintessential emotional experience.
Emotions are the instrument panel on the dashboard of life. Emotions
are powerful clues as to what we are most ready to learn next in life.
If one adopts that hypothesis, it dramatically alters one's thinking
about the design of learning environments.
The theory connecting emotions to learning suggests that learners
necessarily experience affective emotional states such as curiosity,
fascination, confusion, bewilderment, anxiety, boredom, intrigue,
frustration, satisfaction and confidence at varying times as they
traverse a given learning curve. The question for the educator who
is attuned to such matters is: How can I intervene best so that the
learner experiences the positive emotional states as much as possible,
and the negative ones as little as possible?
The answer to that question dramatically alters one's perspective as
an educator. Among other things, it leads naturally to constructivist
and learner-centered models in the spirit of Piaget, Montessori, Papert,
and Kay (among others). My own research has explored ways to create
alternative learning environments which are designed to return positive
emotional rewards for learning. In short, I try to set it up so that
learners experience endorphin highs frequently as a natural product
of successful learning. Thus children become addicted to learning,
as they derive more pleasure from it than from competing activities.
Will these ideas ever find their way into mainstream public education?
Perhaps someday. If they ever do, I predict it will revolutionize the
system of public education, transforming it from an unpleasant, coercive,
teacher-centered design to a self-motivated learner-centered model.
I hope to live long enough to see that happen.
Barry Kort, Ph.D.
Consulting Scientist
The Orenda Project
http://www.musenet.org/orenda