Hello John,

Recently, I had a brief discussion with a new high ranking official about assessment. He told his followers that teachers seem to have the idea of assessment all wrong. He gets that we need to address “teaching to the test,” but that teaching to the test isn’t the problem. According to the test, we should look at assessment for “what it is”:  a tool to find out how teachers can improve their teaching and increase achievement.

I giggled to myself, and I rarely do so.

It’s not that I disagreed with him per se. While the argument he made was generic enough that everyone could agree, I felt the general tenor of his argument made it seem like teachers aren’t “in” on what he’s talking about. His argument hinges on the idea that the resistance to the current political climate stems from teachers not wanting to assess children. It’s a weird argument since I don’t know of a teacher who doesn’t want to find out what their students can do and already know, whether the assessment is teacher-made or otherwise.

Let me be fair, too, because we have plenty of arguments to make about the way we assess children. For one, we don’t always know whether we’re assessing for what the child taught or what the teacher learned. We don’t always get the training for the best assessment methods for any given situation and how to align our assessment to standards or any other criteria. We often have to learn how to create tests and quizzes on the fly, depending on our teaching styles and how the rest of the school views assessment. Many of our schools may become too dependent on assessment via publisher to guide them on how to approach questioning. Some of these arguments have validity in different circles.

But he wasn’t making that argument. His argument assumed teachers (specifically, teachers who strongly voice their concerns about testing) must not understand the purpose of assessment at all.

Of course, after asking a clarifying question, I immediately said, “The problem isn’t assessment. The problem is with the high-stakes part of it. Everyone assesses, formally or otherwise. The difference is in the consequence and material more than the learning.” Of course, others chimed in, but he couldn’t rebut my argument sufficiently enough for me to say he even understood his own argument.

For, educators as a whole want desperately to find out what students learned, how they can better teach their material so kids get it, AND do it in a way that allows them to make sure they can follow it up with the student, regardless of whether they did well on the exam or not. We also want to make sure these exams don’t become a referendum on whether we can teach, especially since study after thorough study shows how inappropriate it is for teachers to use such exams to do anything besides find out what kids know about the questions given right in front of them. on that particular day and that particular year, it seems.

As our high stakes assessments come up starting next week in NYC, we can only hope our students do well, but if they don’t, I’d prefer that these exams not be an indictment or prediction of how good a teacher I am, or the value of the student taking the test for that matter. We ought to use these assessment to take a pulse, not to check the child’s health.

Hey John,

Watch this until 3:15 first.

Yes, it’s Bill Gates, doing an interview with the Washington Post. Obviously, he has a lot to say, but he makes a few arguments that made me go “Hmmph” loudly. While I’ve voiced my displeasure with his position in education more often than not, I also want to work with the arguments he’s making. For the purposes of this specific arguments, I’ll just focus on his first comparison of student assessment and teacher assessment.

He is correct in stating that students get evaluated all the time, from the first time they enter a classroom all the way through college and beyond. Getting a degree demands having plenty of tests getting thrown at you, high-stakes or otherwise. These tests often determine if you achieve the next level or not, and whether we like them or not. That’s our current education system, so ramping up the amount of tests only perpetuates the status quo. I’m not in the camp that says, “Teachers shouldn’t get evaluated, but students should.” Professionals get evaluations all the time.

I just can’t help but wonder if we actually evaluate students the right way, and if the measure we currently have for student achievement helps determine success in life after college. One should argue that far too many factors come into play when looking on a case-by-case basis.

Bill Gates is often called the exception that proves the rule: he couldn’t care less about graduating from college and he’s had a longstanding seat at making decisions about education from a wealth amassed from not getting any degrees.

Conversely, we’ve seen a growing trend of intellectually capable poor students not get into college and driven college students stay unemployed for longer periods of time due to a stingy and inward-looking job market. Our supposed meritocracy isn’t that fair.

Thus, if student assessment as it currently stands isn’t the only driver for student achievement, then how can teacher assessment modeled after his student argument be trusted as a viable measure for determining student achievement? It’s odd.

*** photo courtesy of: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1630529,00.html ***

Hey John,

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Hey John,

Thank you for the latest post on why you’ll be wearing red more often. Our dedication to students starts by looking at the way we perceive intelligence and learning. The struggle for how we look at learning often comes from a lens of assessing intelligence, rather than other factors that might contribute to academic retention. In other words, do our perceptions of what it means to learn equate to whether or not we think they’re intelligent?

Take, for instance, the last of Leonard Cooper, the young kid who “shook up the world” (or at least the audience) when he came from behind to win at the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament. The moment went viral on my Twitter and Facebook timelines, prompting me to consider the implications of why this moment mattered so much. Was it because this olive-green-long-sleeve wearing, kid with an unkempt Jackson 5 fro came onto a national stage and destroyed competition with a gusto unseen in such a normally prim and proper show? Or is it because …

Well, here’s this. We’ll assume for a second that everyone understands that people who get selected to this show have already prepared for questions and have a certain amount of trivia knowledge in different fields to make the show competitive. We’ll also assume that, for a second, everyone who read the article (and didn’t watch) already know Leonard was going to win, but just didn’t know how.

Now, based on those assumptions, we can reasonably assume that many of the people who shared this article didn’t do it simply because it was Leonard Cooper. It could have been anyone and it might not have gotten the buzz it did. Thus, we’ll say everyone really wanted to cheer for the underdog. At some point, Leonard was down 14 to 16 thousand dollars to the other competitors on stage. To make up all that ground and surpass them in what amounts to 14 minutes or so is pretty awesome.

But why is he the underdog?

Is it because so many either sympathize or empathize with a story about a kid who, already perceived as unintelligent due to his mannerisms, actually beats the competition? Is it because some of us have a very limited understanding of “knowledge” or what an educated person looks like? Do we still perceive intelligent as natural to some and exceptional in others?

Leonard Cooper represents the potential of all children to transcend the perceptions already laid upon them. How people see his early follies and his manner of speech mattered little at the end when, after working twice as hard for those remaining minutes, felt like he had nothing to lose. He represents the kid in the math class who, despite his best efforts, won’t ever get past a B because he was already estimated for a B and nothing more. He represents the kids who comes after school every day, but she won’t see a certificate for her efforts because she didn’t get a good grade on the one day her teacher was grading effort.

He represents adults, too, at least the ones who understand that what we see isn’t always what we get, and that’s a good thing for Leonard. For too many of our children, the buzzer sounds long far too early, and the judges aren’t as nice.

Hey John,

There’s been plenty of conversation about adding more time to the school day and its usefulness in the current environment. The overemphasis on the quantity versus the quantity prompted a blog I wrote recently that took a satirical look at how schools could use more instructional time.

Renee Moore, one of our favorite bloggers on this program, took a more serious look at this topic in her recent post.

Slowly, we are realizing that learning and time do not have to be conjoined. It is not only possible, but possibly much better for students to learn at varying paces, based on the subject matter, availability of resources, their particular learning strengths, interests, and weaknesses–moving toward common goals, but arriving from different directions.

This “personalization” of education doesn’t necessitate online learning, though that’s an available route. The more salient route might be to get a better understanding of schedule, and for that matter, what school means. The Carnegie units of school may give a good framework for people who don’t know where to start from, but limit those who truly want to innovate learning.

Why do we expect learning and / or schooling to be linear when we as humans aren’t? Good points by Renee overall, and worth a read.