Six on Schools: John Merrow: What Have Our Test-Centric Policies Produced?; New Educator Toolkit to Protect Data Privacy Rele
philip panaritis
"The evidence of this folly, he says, is the latest ACT reports.
What can we learn from them?
Our seniors are not getting smarter as a result of the testing regime imposed on them.
“These seniors have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed. How much more evidence do we need of the folly of “No Child Left Behind” and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” before we take back our schools?
“People who have consistently been ‘half right’ have been in charge of public education for too long. Now some are changing their tune (“Perhaps we have been testing too much,” they say) and asking for another chance. Others, however, are doubling down, calling for more charter schools, vouchers and other aid for private schools, and more anti-union initiatives. I say a plague on both their houses.”
Then you realize . . . you haven’t created the rubric yet.
You know that clear expectations and feedback are critically important to the learning process. You know that rubrics can help you in assessing what students know and are able to do. So you sit back down and eventually decide to use four scoring columns instead of five. Six rows of criteria instead of three. Clear descriptors. Nine point font all crammed into your matrix so that it fits on one page. Definitely tons of feedback gonna happen from this beauty.
But it’s worth it, right?
Mmm . . . using a great rubric can speed up the grading and assessment process but they can also create other issues besides the amount of time it takes to create them. A student shows creativity way beyond what the rubric asks for in a way that you hadn’t anticipated and your columns and rows aren’t able to reward that. Or a kid spells everything correctly but the grammar and punctuation is terrible. Maybe she nails the document analysis but fails to use evidence in her claims and your rubric has those two things together.
And is there any way – other than individual conferences – to really know whether students actually go deeper into your scored rubric than to look at the final grade circled in the bottom left hand corner?"
"A. Qui, a graduate student from Inner Mongolia, recalls: “We were like machines in school, not humans. It was study, study, study. We did nothing else and were not allowed to have boyfriends and girlfriends. Everything was focused on exams.” Professor Li Jin at Peking University says: “The Gaokao kills diversity, innovation and novelty. Students strive for the exam because it determines their fate. It only tests how good you are at absorbing facts.”
The concern of a growing number of teachers, employers and policymakers alike is that schooling focuses too narrowly and intensely on restrictive final exams for graduating students. That neglects broader skills, and risks crushing creativity and innovation. Singapore’s Ministry of Education has for several years developed a “framework for 21st-century competencies” with a fresh focus on project work, art and culture."
"As I said, the study is interesting. They found that these teacher meetings generally fell into a few categories: pacing, logistics, “tips and tricks” and collective interpretation.
“Collective interpretation” was the least observed category, but the researchers felt that it was, in fact, the most beneficial for teacher and student learning.
Here’s what they say about collective interpretation:
In 35% of our coded meetings, teachers’ conversations focused on collective interpretation of teaching—the format that most supported pedagogical concept development, what we came to refer to as high-depth meetings. These meetings are marked by dialogic discourse, exchanges among multiple participants that put formal and lived concepts in contact with each other. Typically, these richer conversations occurred as teachers investigated problems of practice: interpreting student work, debriefing a disappointing lesson, or trouble shooting challenges with struggling students. In most cases, workgroups linked the concepts developed through their discussions to their future plans…"
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