Dark, Standardized Days Ahead

Yesterday, I read Kelly Gallagher's November 12 article in Education Week. I'll start with the salient point:

A study published in the journal Science Education in December 2008 looked at two sets of high school science students. One set “sprinted”; the other set had teachers who slowed down, went deeper, and did not cover as much material. The results? The first group of students actually scored higher on the state tests at the end of the year. This is not surprising, as their teachers covered more of the test material. I am sure it made their parents, teachers, and administrators happy. What is more interesting, however, is that the students who learned through the slower, in-depth approach actually earned higher grades once they made it to college. This, too, is not surprising. These students were taught to think critically.

The study in question, from the journal Science Education, underscores my deep concerns about our continued emphasis on standardized testing as a comprehensive measure of students' learning and our increasing emphasis on it as a measure of teachers' skills. Because the test standards focus on content knowledge and the tests themselves contain an essentially random subset of that content knowledge, in order to squeak our students' scores up, we're encouraged to try to cover as many of the topics as possible.

The result is higher scores, for sure. Not much higher, since the fundamental skills necessary to ace a test are taught over a series of years, not in a few months, but measurably higher. Failure to create this little bump or worse, turning up in the numbers as a teacher whose students' gains are lower than average, can be a problem in your career, and that's only going to get worse as the emphasis on "value-added teaching" increases.

So, in order to be seen externally as a good teacher, you have to engage in crappy teaching. Spend too much time teaching your kids to think critically and reflectively, and you'll get identified by your district as a poor teacher. Your kids will do better in college and in life, but you'll sacrifice yourself in the process.

And they wonder why good teachers often don't feel like they can teach capably and authentically within our system. What really, really stinks is that our highest risk districts are going to feel the brunt of this misplacement of priorities.

Picking up the pieces of a blown mind

Here's some evidence that our pilot is working as we thought it might, presented as a "Prezi," the software Ally wrote about in her blog last week. You'll probably want to watch it fullscreen as some of the text will be a little small if you try to see it in the embed box.

Make Some Fiction About Your Fiction

Here's today's writing assignment for my 10A classes:

Create a character with your name, and put him or her at Staples. Tell us a true story, but don't worry about sticking to the actual things that happened. Mine your life for something true, real, and meaningful, and change all the details around until your story really gives us the truth of it.

Put a disclaimer at the top of your story that goes something like the one from the front pages to The Things They Carried:  "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary."

Is the first follower the real leader?

"The first follower is what transforms a loan nut into a leader."

When Schools Ruin a Good Thing

I've been looking for ways to integrate different communication skills into the curriculum, and the TED talks stand out to me as a great example of powerful communication in multiple media, so I've been watching some of the popular ones. The talk below, entitled "Schools Kill Creativity" makes no use of digital tools other than the microphone, but it's a wonderful example of effective personal presentation. Ken Robinson uses humor as a fundamental piece of his presentation style, but his comments are deadly serious.



You can download a podcast of the talk or a transcript by navigating to its page.

I listened to this talk at my desk, and I listened to it twice more as a podcast on my way home from work that day. I was absolutely startled to find a 2006 talk that so neatly pierced the heart of one of the issues I struggle with. I wrote on this topic back in July, and Robinson takes the concept a whole step further.

Here, I think, is the salient passage:

What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

If we accept that the premise here is true and that we stigmatize mistakes all the way through our educational system, and that we crush the creativity out of many (clearly not all) of our students, we have a massive task to engage in. Instead of testing kids constantly and punishing their teachers and schools, we ought to be considering a fundamental reinvention of the way we structure education.

That, however, is a topic for another day. What I'm interested in today is how much damage I can undo in my own classroom, while still operating within the curricular and conventional guidelines prescribed by my job.

This whole blogging project with my 10th graders seems like a good start. They can speak freely and theorize without fear of punishment or having the wrong answer. They're judged entirely on their level of engagement with the prompt and process of each post. Still, I find the students have a very, very hard time being truly creative in their approach to a topic or a task. That fear of mistakes runs very, very deep, and it's hard to really convince them that experimentation and engagement are more important than right answers and grades. They'll agree with that if you ask them, but their behavior belies a real terror of being wrong and getting bad grades.

I wonder if I can do more than simply stop reinforcing wrong-answer-avoidance and nurture creativity. I wonder if there's something truly subversive I can engage in here.