My across the hall neighbor returned from a trip to visit her daughter this week, absolutely astounded by a conversation she had with a fifth grader from Texas during her plane ride. The child had asked whether or not the students in our school took state tests and they got to talking about when they were taken. The child was amused that our students take them in the fall as opposed to his school district where they are administered in the spring.
My friend asked him if he got nervous about taking the exams and he said that indeed he did because he didn't want to stay back. Now my colleague had to pause for a moment to process what this 11 year old had just said. After recovering from the shock of what this implied she went on to ask him if many children actually were held back and he responded with an explanation that no, not many children did stay back.
Their conversation involved insight into parents having a vested interest in their children's education. This young man let her know that many parents secured tutors and participated in other preparatory opportunities to ensure that their student passed these tests. If a child did not pass, they were given the opportunity to participate in a remedial summer school program and retested in August over the areas they had not passed. If the student passed, they were promoted to the next grade and if they did not they were in fact kept back.
I am not ready to agree with retaining children based solely on testing results. After all, there is a great amount of research providing an argument of the effectiveness of retention at all. To me this conversation shed a light on parental involvement when the stakes were high enough. Again, I am not arguing for or against retention at this point, I am just wondering about the implications this idea has. I know that even at the grade level I teach, second, retention is hardly even heard of. There has to be strong data backing your decision based not just on academics as a stand alone but evidence showing that the lack of achievement is due to absenteeism, disability, etc.... and students know it!
I don't think it should be a dangling carrot day in and day out, but, and this goes along with thoughts from my last post, how do you "jump start" parents into being active participants in their children's education; from the consistency in eating and sleep schedules, to the support in learning the curriculum and achieving that standards set for them? My thoughts are forming for another blog post: Ideas on how to get parents involved.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Infected! (In a good way)
Well, I know that my whole idea of change has been based on the Ghandi quote "Be the change you wish to see in the world" and I believe that some of my "educational system rants" have indeed infected the minds of people around me. My for instance is in the paragraphs below from an email I received from a very close friend after a discussion we had about the "options" for reformation when a school has been "black listed" (AYP). As you can see in the first line, they were looking for a place to share and the words are a wonderful articulation of my often muddled thoughts. He says:
"So just a little food for thought here... I thought you might appreciate my rant. Or maybe your teacher friends.
What if you set your alarm to go off every 20 minutes during the night, for the span of a week? During this week, you would be taught in the same way you always had, and would be tested at the end of the week. Your test scores at the end of this nearly sleepless week would probably not be as high as they were the week before, right? Even though nothing has changed about the teaching methods, you'd be getting worse results.
What is the solution? Extend the amount of time for teaching / studying / homework? Of course not! You'd be even more exhausted and would probably not improve, but you may do even worse. So what would you do? Unplug your alarm clock or set it properly.
Now apply this alarm clock analogy to any number of things. Diet, exercise, household environment, patterns of stimulus [TV and other media], medication, etc. Maybe America is doing so poorly in education compared to the rest of the world, not because of our teaching methods (or not strictly so) but because of our way of life in general.
How can your learn, if you CAN'T learn? If your brain / body / neurotransmitters are out-of-whack, then no amount of "buckling down" or "getting serious" is going to help. When your car engine has fouled spark plugs, do you just mash the gas even harder, or do you replace them? Sure, pushing down on the pedal works in the short term, but eventually your engine will stop working or blow up. Suicide and self-medicating? School and workplace shootings? People shutting down or blowing up.
Why are we trying to hammer in a nail with a high heel shoe instead of a hammer? Why are we "fixing" education when we should be fixing our lives?"
Really, I could not have said it better myself. :)
"So just a little food for thought here... I thought you might appreciate my rant. Or maybe your teacher friends.
What if you set your alarm to go off every 20 minutes during the night, for the span of a week? During this week, you would be taught in the same way you always had, and would be tested at the end of the week. Your test scores at the end of this nearly sleepless week would probably not be as high as they were the week before, right? Even though nothing has changed about the teaching methods, you'd be getting worse results.
What is the solution? Extend the amount of time for teaching / studying / homework? Of course not! You'd be even more exhausted and would probably not improve, but you may do even worse. So what would you do? Unplug your alarm clock or set it properly.
Now apply this alarm clock analogy to any number of things. Diet, exercise, household environment, patterns of stimulus [TV and other media], medication, etc. Maybe America is doing so poorly in education compared to the rest of the world, not because of our teaching methods (or not strictly so) but because of our way of life in general.
How can your learn, if you CAN'T learn? If your brain / body / neurotransmitters are out-of-whack, then no amount of "buckling down" or "getting serious" is going to help. When your car engine has fouled spark plugs, do you just mash the gas even harder, or do you replace them? Sure, pushing down on the pedal works in the short term, but eventually your engine will stop working or blow up. Suicide and self-medicating? School and workplace shootings? People shutting down or blowing up.
Why are we trying to hammer in a nail with a high heel shoe instead of a hammer? Why are we "fixing" education when we should be fixing our lives?"
Really, I could not have said it better myself. :)
Friday, March 5, 2010
Revising High School
After reading about some of the possibilities, I can see the greater good in revising how we "do" high school. As Marc Prensky put it in his article Shaping Tech for the Classroom, "A big effort? Absolutely. But our kids deserve no less." It isn't that there are just a lot of aspects to be considered and overhauled, it's taking a look at the entire picture of what a high school currently is and does.
As an educator, there is a fear of criticism from not only parents but also administrators. How can you "act radically" and try to begin the movement and still keep your job? For me, it is easier to make small changes withing my own classroom and speak up when the opportunity arises, than to create the "big wave", and as the articles pointed out, these small changes don't really add up over time but more or less just end up back at the start.
A couple of ideas that would be wonderful to put into place were, specialized academic plans for each student, student advisors that stayed with them all four years, and also offering an advisory period each day where students can gather. It is said that students will do better socially, emotionally and academically, when they are invested and involved. How else do we as humans become invested other than by building relationships with others and for students, that's with their peers and teachers.
From a student perspective, it would take some getting used to. Because learning so often involves memorizing a set of facts, when you ask students to be creative and respond in general to something, they have no idea where to begin. I can remember from my own high school education that there were some projects that now as a teacher I would have thought were a great way to assess the students learning. I would have been excited to implement such an assessment, but as a student who had never really experienced demonstrating learning in ways other than a "traditional" test, I did not even no where to begin.
In conclusion, I don't have one. The possibilities seem endless and yet overwhelming. Where do we even begin? How can we take the research that has been done, the opinions that abound, the wonderful ideas, the examples we have been shown, and design an educational system that truly prepares our citizens for at least today and hopefully tomorrow.
As an educator, there is a fear of criticism from not only parents but also administrators. How can you "act radically" and try to begin the movement and still keep your job? For me, it is easier to make small changes withing my own classroom and speak up when the opportunity arises, than to create the "big wave", and as the articles pointed out, these small changes don't really add up over time but more or less just end up back at the start.
A couple of ideas that would be wonderful to put into place were, specialized academic plans for each student, student advisors that stayed with them all four years, and also offering an advisory period each day where students can gather. It is said that students will do better socially, emotionally and academically, when they are invested and involved. How else do we as humans become invested other than by building relationships with others and for students, that's with their peers and teachers.
From a student perspective, it would take some getting used to. Because learning so often involves memorizing a set of facts, when you ask students to be creative and respond in general to something, they have no idea where to begin. I can remember from my own high school education that there were some projects that now as a teacher I would have thought were a great way to assess the students learning. I would have been excited to implement such an assessment, but as a student who had never really experienced demonstrating learning in ways other than a "traditional" test, I did not even no where to begin.
In conclusion, I don't have one. The possibilities seem endless and yet overwhelming. Where do we even begin? How can we take the research that has been done, the opinions that abound, the wonderful ideas, the examples we have been shown, and design an educational system that truly prepares our citizens for at least today and hopefully tomorrow.
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