In light of today's news about the confirmation of the next Secretary of Education--a confirmation that I have strong opinions about but will confine to a footnote*--and because of a conversation I had with my students today, I thought I'd put some time into chewing on a piece of education that I talked about before but haven't been able to shake. So, in some ways, this is "Grades are Gross: Part II".
Because I teach history and Language Arts at the same time, I try to end my literature readings in tandem with the end of the history unit. That way, there's a feeling of closure to both. At this point in the year, I am finishing up with Pride and Prejudice and the Agricultural Revolution. For the book, I ask the students to do a project in which they explore the text in a fun and (I hope) interesting way. But for the Agricultural Revolution, I don't do anything. I don't have a test, an essay--nothing.
In some ways, this goes against my training. There's no reason to teach students something, as the thinking goes, that isn't going to be assessed. And there's no reason to assess if you're not going to do something with the information (or data, as we like to call it).
Not having a test/assessment of some sort flies in the face of this, though I got to this point by looking hard at the second posit (what to do with post-assessment data) and realizing I didn't care what the result was of the test. I wouldn't pull kids aside and remediate, I wouldn't go back over the test to review what they got wrong--and if I did, I wouldn't assess the remediated stuff to see if anything stuck.
This negligence on my part laid its first seeds in my mind when I was teaching some seniors in my Shakespeare class a couple of years ago. We had landed on the concept of love (as ought to come about in a long enough conversation about Shakespeare), and I asked the seniors if they could remember the Most Important Lesson of tenth grade (there are two, actually: one about love, and one about hatred (the Holocaust)). They gave me vaguely recalling faces, eventually pulling enough out of the dim reaches of two years before to hobble together an almost answer.
The point is, they didn't remember it.
Now, it's also true that I didn't "test" them on the Most Important Lesson, I didn't have any assessment. I simply said, "This is important. You ought to remember it." Maybe if it had been on a test, they would have recalled it better. Maybe it would have been the Most Important Remembered Lesson. Maybe I'm more to blame than the students.
At any rate, I've been in a spiral of skepticism about the lasting effect of the "important to remember" stuff that one assumes is on a test. The projects, I feel, give them something tangible to work on and turn in, a sense of having done something. But what satisfaction is there in taking a test? Sure, in doing well on a test, but if the test is assessing something other than what you're prepared for, there's no sense of satisfaction and a poor grade to go along with it. That seems screwy.
So I've done away with tests this year. (I did mini-essays last year, but those were hollow, too, I felt.) What I worry about is that I'm making a huge mistake.
How can I be certain that removing the age-old expectations is at all useful? There's immense pressure for passing state- and federal tests, things that not only can lend themselves to political footballery (note: that's not a word) but to issues with accountability. I'm not a fan of standardized tests, but I think there's a purpose and a use for them, not the least of which to ensure that a teacher is actually doing the job properly--inasmuch as a test could indicate that.
Maybe that's why I'm willing to throw out tests for the history part of it all: There aren't any state mandated tests for history**. (I'll admit that it's a bit of a shock that history--arguably one of the most essential tools that we have to preserve our democracy--is completely ignored. Nevertheless, that's the system we have...for now. With Secretary DeVos around, things are likely to change, though I have grave reservations about the quality of those changes.) Without that "fear" of the test, I have some freedom to explore alternatives. However, since they are focused on insubstantial experiences rather than hard data, it's impossible to measure if they're effective, save in metrics that are subjective.
In short, I have no way to make any sort of proof that what I'm doing is the right thing. And that's a little scary.
---
* As a matter of principle, I distrust President Trump's ability to make a decision based upon the best available candidate. Every president's cabinet is set up according to politics, of course, but DeVos' air of corruption, contempt of public education, and lack of definitive plans for the future of education in America puts her confirmation into a different level of problematic. For the first time in my life, I called my senators and told them my opinion. (One was a voicemail, the other's inbox was so full that I had to tweet at him. He never replied.)
** Students have to pass the citizenship test in order to graduate from a public high school in Utah. At our school, that's our government classes' responsibility. It's the only thing that approaches a standardized test for the social sciences.
Because I teach history and Language Arts at the same time, I try to end my literature readings in tandem with the end of the history unit. That way, there's a feeling of closure to both. At this point in the year, I am finishing up with Pride and Prejudice and the Agricultural Revolution. For the book, I ask the students to do a project in which they explore the text in a fun and (I hope) interesting way. But for the Agricultural Revolution, I don't do anything. I don't have a test, an essay--nothing.
In some ways, this goes against my training. There's no reason to teach students something, as the thinking goes, that isn't going to be assessed. And there's no reason to assess if you're not going to do something with the information (or data, as we like to call it).
Not having a test/assessment of some sort flies in the face of this, though I got to this point by looking hard at the second posit (what to do with post-assessment data) and realizing I didn't care what the result was of the test. I wouldn't pull kids aside and remediate, I wouldn't go back over the test to review what they got wrong--and if I did, I wouldn't assess the remediated stuff to see if anything stuck.
This negligence on my part laid its first seeds in my mind when I was teaching some seniors in my Shakespeare class a couple of years ago. We had landed on the concept of love (as ought to come about in a long enough conversation about Shakespeare), and I asked the seniors if they could remember the Most Important Lesson of tenth grade (there are two, actually: one about love, and one about hatred (the Holocaust)). They gave me vaguely recalling faces, eventually pulling enough out of the dim reaches of two years before to hobble together an almost answer.
The point is, they didn't remember it.
Now, it's also true that I didn't "test" them on the Most Important Lesson, I didn't have any assessment. I simply said, "This is important. You ought to remember it." Maybe if it had been on a test, they would have recalled it better. Maybe it would have been the Most Important Remembered Lesson. Maybe I'm more to blame than the students.
At any rate, I've been in a spiral of skepticism about the lasting effect of the "important to remember" stuff that one assumes is on a test. The projects, I feel, give them something tangible to work on and turn in, a sense of having done something. But what satisfaction is there in taking a test? Sure, in doing well on a test, but if the test is assessing something other than what you're prepared for, there's no sense of satisfaction and a poor grade to go along with it. That seems screwy.
So I've done away with tests this year. (I did mini-essays last year, but those were hollow, too, I felt.) What I worry about is that I'm making a huge mistake.
 |
| Yeah. That. |
Maybe that's why I'm willing to throw out tests for the history part of it all: There aren't any state mandated tests for history**. (I'll admit that it's a bit of a shock that history--arguably one of the most essential tools that we have to preserve our democracy--is completely ignored. Nevertheless, that's the system we have...for now. With Secretary DeVos around, things are likely to change, though I have grave reservations about the quality of those changes.) Without that "fear" of the test, I have some freedom to explore alternatives. However, since they are focused on insubstantial experiences rather than hard data, it's impossible to measure if they're effective, save in metrics that are subjective.
In short, I have no way to make any sort of proof that what I'm doing is the right thing. And that's a little scary.
---
* As a matter of principle, I distrust President Trump's ability to make a decision based upon the best available candidate. Every president's cabinet is set up according to politics, of course, but DeVos' air of corruption, contempt of public education, and lack of definitive plans for the future of education in America puts her confirmation into a different level of problematic. For the first time in my life, I called my senators and told them my opinion. (One was a voicemail, the other's inbox was so full that I had to tweet at him. He never replied.)
** Students have to pass the citizenship test in order to graduate from a public high school in Utah. At our school, that's our government classes' responsibility. It's the only thing that approaches a standardized test for the social sciences.