98 Percent
First of all, I don't agree with all of the standardized testing. I don't think states, governments, school boards, and sometimes even administration know what they're doing in making new lists of skills--Basic Competencies, Portfolios, NCLB, CCSS. I don't think the time spent on testing--and especially the time spent teaching testing--is worth the cost to students. I taught 7th and 8th grade English for 31 years and lived through permutations of several different tests, and now as I listen to the fevered conversations of advocates and non-advocates for the next great movement, I realize there's a common thread in my reaction to all of them.
I ignored them.
I ignored them and taught what my students needed. I filled my classroom with books and filled our time with reading and discussion and writing. We wrote in our three team classes (English, social studies, and science) every day--lists, poems, prompts, fiction, non-fiction, opinions, arguments, explanations, thoughts. We read every day--class books (a post for another time--there's much argument against reading class books. I say you shouldn't teach a class book badly.) free choice books, articles from the newspaper or online, essays, short stories, poetry, menus, anything with words. And we discussed all of it.
Through that discussion, we discovered rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax. We also discovered beauty. My favorite time of the day was walking through the hall in the early morning and being accosted by students who wanted to tell me what they had read or written the night before, or who wanted to read me a new favorite line, or who needed a suggestion for a next book.
Our test prep consisted of 15 minutes the week before the test, showing them what a test looked like so they knew what they were being asked to do--fill in the bubbles, write a response. We didn't take practice tests. Instead we talked about new books in the library or authors I was going to see at an upcoming conference.
And then we took the test. And they did very well. They always did very well. In my early years of teaching, a principal called me in to ask what I was doing differently from the other two teachers. My scores were 10-20 points higher than theirs. I was relieved to have some measure that what I was doing wasn't the wrong thing. Because I had asked myself that. The other teachers were more experienced than I was. They frowned when I took my students to the library every week. They made comments that the reason students did well in my classes was because it was fun. The dirty word "fun".
What I learned is that it isn't that the tests can't tell us something, but that we don't use what the tests tell us. (more on this in a minute.)
My school went to teaming and my team agreed with me that reading and writing were important. Students spent more time reading and writing in their science and social studies classes.Teachers read to them and discussed pieces of writing. My final year of teaching, 98% of our students passed the standardized tests for writing, our scores for reading were excellent, and scores for the science test were way above the average. Our population of students is a diverse population. We had our share of free/reduced lunch students, IEP students, troubled students--students no one thought could pass the test. And 98% of the students passed.
We knew this was because all of our students read and wrote and believed they had opinions. They had something to say and they knew they could say it so others could hear them. They had found ways to connect with the questions they were asked.
At first the principal was thrilled, impressed, ecstatic, amazed, pick an adjective. He told anyone who walked in the door. Then he backed down. He couldn't upset the other teachers by praising us too much. The rumors had started--we got the best kids (we did! Every kid who walked into our classrooms was one of the best. Another post for another time. It matters what you think of the students in your class.)
The real problem was that we were a failing school. Ninety-eight percent of 1/3 of the school had passed the test. I'm pretty good in math. But even without that, think about the scores of the other 2/3 of the students that made us a failing school. The excuses started.
I knew I was finished teaching the day I got a phone call from my principal talking about the meetings coming up (probably during classtime--great idea to pull teachers from their classes for meetings). We needed to change our entire curriculum.
"You want me to change the way I teach?" I asked.
"We have to. We're a failing school. It's all of our problem," he said.
"It's not my problem," I shot back.
I couldn't imagine myself sitting in a meeting analyzing the Lexile scores of the texts we use in class, timing the minutes we spend on non-fiction vs. fiction, teaching practice test after practice test. I'd be bored to death. And so would my students.
I had enough years in teaching and I had lots of other things I wanted to do, so I retired.
Fast forward two years. A young former colleague has been hired as the teacher coach to help teachers improve scores. She is responsible for gathering data and coming up with plans for meetings and activities. She visits the science teacher I worked with.
"Did you know your team scored 98% on the test?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Why didn't we know it? Why weren't we studying what you did? Why?"
And that's the question. If schools are going to spend as much time (and money!) as they do on standardized testing, they need to understand what the tests can actually show them. They need to see the positives--what's been done well--and figure out how it has been done well and how they can transfer that to other learning.
But before the test matters, schools need to know what really matters. Reading. Writing. For enjoyment. For fluency. For connection. Until that becomes the first concern, the test will be a burden to the teachers, to the students, to the administrators. Once they get that, and the test isn't the center around which their class revolves, the test becomes a tool that allows them to improve. It's no smaller or larger than that. No "high stakes", no "teach to the test", no "failing school".
Because I believe every school can create an environment that produces the same 98% passing rate and encourages learning.
Read. Write. Connect.
I ignored them.
I ignored them and taught what my students needed. I filled my classroom with books and filled our time with reading and discussion and writing. We wrote in our three team classes (English, social studies, and science) every day--lists, poems, prompts, fiction, non-fiction, opinions, arguments, explanations, thoughts. We read every day--class books (a post for another time--there's much argument against reading class books. I say you shouldn't teach a class book badly.) free choice books, articles from the newspaper or online, essays, short stories, poetry, menus, anything with words. And we discussed all of it.
Through that discussion, we discovered rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax. We also discovered beauty. My favorite time of the day was walking through the hall in the early morning and being accosted by students who wanted to tell me what they had read or written the night before, or who wanted to read me a new favorite line, or who needed a suggestion for a next book.
Our test prep consisted of 15 minutes the week before the test, showing them what a test looked like so they knew what they were being asked to do--fill in the bubbles, write a response. We didn't take practice tests. Instead we talked about new books in the library or authors I was going to see at an upcoming conference.
And then we took the test. And they did very well. They always did very well. In my early years of teaching, a principal called me in to ask what I was doing differently from the other two teachers. My scores were 10-20 points higher than theirs. I was relieved to have some measure that what I was doing wasn't the wrong thing. Because I had asked myself that. The other teachers were more experienced than I was. They frowned when I took my students to the library every week. They made comments that the reason students did well in my classes was because it was fun. The dirty word "fun".
What I learned is that it isn't that the tests can't tell us something, but that we don't use what the tests tell us. (more on this in a minute.)
My school went to teaming and my team agreed with me that reading and writing were important. Students spent more time reading and writing in their science and social studies classes.Teachers read to them and discussed pieces of writing. My final year of teaching, 98% of our students passed the standardized tests for writing, our scores for reading were excellent, and scores for the science test were way above the average. Our population of students is a diverse population. We had our share of free/reduced lunch students, IEP students, troubled students--students no one thought could pass the test. And 98% of the students passed.
We knew this was because all of our students read and wrote and believed they had opinions. They had something to say and they knew they could say it so others could hear them. They had found ways to connect with the questions they were asked.
At first the principal was thrilled, impressed, ecstatic, amazed, pick an adjective. He told anyone who walked in the door. Then he backed down. He couldn't upset the other teachers by praising us too much. The rumors had started--we got the best kids (we did! Every kid who walked into our classrooms was one of the best. Another post for another time. It matters what you think of the students in your class.)
The real problem was that we were a failing school. Ninety-eight percent of 1/3 of the school had passed the test. I'm pretty good in math. But even without that, think about the scores of the other 2/3 of the students that made us a failing school. The excuses started.
I knew I was finished teaching the day I got a phone call from my principal talking about the meetings coming up (probably during classtime--great idea to pull teachers from their classes for meetings). We needed to change our entire curriculum.
"You want me to change the way I teach?" I asked.
"We have to. We're a failing school. It's all of our problem," he said.
"It's not my problem," I shot back.
I couldn't imagine myself sitting in a meeting analyzing the Lexile scores of the texts we use in class, timing the minutes we spend on non-fiction vs. fiction, teaching practice test after practice test. I'd be bored to death. And so would my students.
I had enough years in teaching and I had lots of other things I wanted to do, so I retired.
Fast forward two years. A young former colleague has been hired as the teacher coach to help teachers improve scores. She is responsible for gathering data and coming up with plans for meetings and activities. She visits the science teacher I worked with.
"Did you know your team scored 98% on the test?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Why didn't we know it? Why weren't we studying what you did? Why?"
And that's the question. If schools are going to spend as much time (and money!) as they do on standardized testing, they need to understand what the tests can actually show them. They need to see the positives--what's been done well--and figure out how it has been done well and how they can transfer that to other learning.
But before the test matters, schools need to know what really matters. Reading. Writing. For enjoyment. For fluency. For connection. Until that becomes the first concern, the test will be a burden to the teachers, to the students, to the administrators. Once they get that, and the test isn't the center around which their class revolves, the test becomes a tool that allows them to improve. It's no smaller or larger than that. No "high stakes", no "teach to the test", no "failing school".
Because I believe every school can create an environment that produces the same 98% passing rate and encourages learning.
Read. Write. Connect.