 |
|
I’m pretty sure that, at this point, the learning had already started happening |
I had a great couple of days, last week with folks in Loveland, Colorado, starting off with a wonderfully stimulating dinner conversation with some of the district’s (Thompson School District) tech coaches. I wrote about it here. The next day (Saturday) started off with a keynote for area educators involved in a district initiative and other invited members of the local ed community — great to meet Jim Folkestad, from Colorado State University.
The keynote seemed well received and was followed by some closing remarks by the districts superintendent, Ron Cabrera. All was well until I spent forty-five minutes of casual conversation time with some of the districts administrators. First of all, being a conversational session, I tried to extract answers from the audience, going for conversation rather than Q&A — and it always makes me uncomfortable, not being the source of all answers. I admit it.
Then someone asked, how to get teachers on board with transforming their learning environments — and all eyes were on me. I launched into my position that although formal professional development opportunities are important — we will not be able to just workshop teachers into the 21st century. Then I touched on personal learning networks, trying not to give away too much, since that was the presentation I would be doing after lunch. I started to run through a process that I have suggested in previous blog entries, of starting with about four or five teachers, and introducing them, at-ready points, to a progression of Web 2.0 tools, starting with asking them to start blogging about their daily experiences.
Heads started shaking, almost immediately. Now these administrators were there because they chose to spend there Saturday with other educators exploring technology. So they were not looking for excuses — which is often the case. They saw real barriers to what I was suggesting, which was particularly disconcerting, since I’m just started that chapter in my current book project on PLNs. They rattled off a string of challenges facing their teachers, foremost being Colorado’s high stakes tests.
It’s forced me to table my writing for a few days and think through how to promote personal learning in your education community. I’m actually wondering if it might it be unrealistic to be expecting all teachers to take on the role of “Master Learner.” There’s just too much of the instructional industrial complex that’s standing in the way. It’s one of many reasons why high stakes tests are actually harmful to our children and their opportunities.
Mainly, I am telling this story because of a link to a recent Alfie Kahn article, to be published soon in Education Week, Debunking the Case for National Standards. He does a much better job than I of making the case.
Also, contributing to my current mood is Chris Lehmann’s wonderful keynote address at the ’09 NYSCATE conference. One of the big takeaways from Lehmann’s words was this paraphrasing:
While our students can do so much more as active learners than ever before, we are measuring their learning in the oldest and most limiting ways possible.
Another one that resonated with me was his comments about project-based learning, a concept that nearly everyone agrees with and subscribes to. But he said that if a teacher is applying projects to meet standards and improve or maintain test scores, then it isn’t project-based learning.
It’s doing projects along the way. …The work that students are doing is the most important thing, not the answers they can put on the test.
Powered by ScribeFire.
David,
You’re one of the first bloggers I have read to address this. Many people are quick to say testing is a bad way to assess student achievement. #Edchat on Twitter the other night was all about how assessment needed to change to reflect “21st century” learning. But kudos to those administrators who were honest about how it really is. I am not a teacher, but I have worked intimately with teachers for more than 25 years. Never has there been more pressure on teachers to produce good test takers and less time for them to work on growing professionally so they can “keep up” with the way students need to learn. It’s not just Colorado, I think every public school system in the US has the same problem and the current administration’s answers don’t appear to offer any changes.
High stakes testing is not just bad for kids. It is bad for teachers. It forces them to run on fumes and never allows them the time or energy to refuel. The teachers in my school have been forced into PLCs, the goals of which are all about raising test scores. If I mention PLN the polite ones just roll their eyes. Others offer a much more demonstrative response. I love Alphie Kohn, but the public and politicians aren’t listening to him and unfortunately for students in public it is the public and politician who determine the policies and allocate the funding that dictate the education they receive.
Thanks for speaking out. We need more people willing to see the larger picture and take a public stand.
Hi David,
In Alberta the stakes are admittedly quite high for grade 12 students, counting for 50% of their grades in acadcemic coursework. I’ve never been a proponent of comprehensive exams. Many have much more eloquently stated the case against high stakes testing than I could do. I will say, however, that I see two camps around high stakes testing.
The first camp we hear from on the blogosphere, the rebels against the cause, so to speak. The silent camp, however, is made up of educators, bureaucrats, and politicians who obviously support their creation and implementation. I include educators in the list of supporters of high stakes testing, because, at least in our province, teachers are seconded to sit on the committee developing the exams. They must see validity in one exam as a reflection of a lifetime of learning, otherwise they would not agree to help develop the instrument.
I believe it is incumbent upon those educators to wake up and join the 21st Century.
David, in the school district west of where you live elementary teachers are walking zombies because of the new Reading Street program foisted on them at the beginning of the school year.(In the name of test scores) There is no time or energy for anything not in the script.
I actually had a second grade teacher whisper to me that she was using Skype to connect to a colleague in Guatemala in her class but she couldn’t talk about it because they weren’t supposed to be doing social studies now. I am at FETC right now learning all sorts of things I want to share with teachers but they are so worn out most of them just don’t have the energy.
I won’t argue that in the short run there may be gains in reading scores but at what cost in the long run?
David,
Part of my job over the past 1/2 dozen years or so has been to administer our state testing, analyze the results and share them with the community. In doing so, I have failed miserably in remember what school is all about. While I have been chasing data, I have forgotten that education is a people business… only we are helping to make people not simply politic them.
I wonder now, as I begin the process of unlearning my emphasis on educational data and shift toward a more connectivism approach to education, what would happen if we ignored the tests. By that I don’t mean don’t take them. I mean ignore their significance and focused on personalizing education for each student while still taking the test when they are supposed to be taken. My guess is, and it is only a guess at this point, we wouldn’t see a heck of a change in our test scores and even if they did go down a bit, those gains were most likely superficial anyway, more the result of teaching to the test than true learning.
Until we value learning and hold ourselves accountable to that in a more authentic way, I’m afraid educators will be hesitant to do what I suggest, even if the “real” results, authentic learning and achievement, could be so much more.