Why I'm off the Data Bandwagon

I'm a math guy.  Numbers appeal to me, and I tend to see the world in mathematical terms.

It's a blessing and a curse.  There's lots of problems that I face in my professional and personal lives in which thinking mathematically allows me to see things from a point of view that makes analysis, problem solving, and innovation easier.  I naturally see the connections between the beauty of art, music, architecture, science, literature, and math.

But, very few other people I know yell at their kids when the windshield wipers are on in the car because trying to calculate the number of wipes per minute for no reason while the kids are talking normally can be incredibly distracting.  And, I learned a long time ago that discussing math at a party is more dangerous to one's social standing than discussing religion or politics.  Partygoers rarely care that my favorite number is Phi.  It's as if me going on about it forever makes them think I'm irrational or something.

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

So, you can see why I was naturally attracted to the obsession with data that we've had in education for the past decade and a half.  Playing with numbers was fun.  Plus, there had to be a way to organize and analyze standardized test data into something meaningful that was good for students.

For years I was a data fanboy.   I've left that bandwagon behind, though.

What I've come to realize is that all the analysis, organization, debate, and discussion of data is meaningless if you are looking at the wrong data for what you are trying to accomplish.  Police departments don't check to see how many library books were checked out each month to reduce speeding on Main Street.

Here are a few of the realizations I grew into over time:

• No matter what the standardized test data says, the best remedy for any shortcomings will always be better teaching and/or helping kids with rough home situations get their basic needs met.  Always.  As a teacher, there's a whole lot I can do about making myself a better teacher.  Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, there's often little I can do about the latter.
• Looking at individual student scores on standardized tests is pretty much worthless.  If I'm Johnny's teacher and I don't know his weaknesses long before the state assessments, I'm not doing my job effectively.  Daily, in-lesson informal formative assessments should be giving me that information on a regular basis for every students so that I can meet each one's needs.  If I do know Johnny's weaknesses and strengths before the state tests, the assessment data won't tell me anything I don't already know.
• If teachers in a district/school aren't regularly using the data from daily in-lesson informal formative assessments to make course corrections to their teaching and their students' learning, that's where a district should be focusing its resources - teachers should be discussing best practices, how to replicate amazing lessons, analysis of awful lessons, etc.  And they'll know what lessons are amazing and which ones bomb by whether or not kids learned as evidenced by the daily formative assessments they are giving.  Discussing test data until the cows come home isn't going to help those teachers learn better pedagogy. 
• Standardized test data is useful for seeing curriculum gaps, large trends, and other more global issues in a school or district and it does have a use.  With that being said, focusing on standardized test data usually comes at the expense of focusing on formative assessment and pedagogy.  And the latter are the whole ball game when it comes to student learning.
• Value Added Models used to measure student growth are junk science.  I've never had one person be able to explain to me in any kind of clear terms what the formula is for figuring out such models.  More importantly, anyone who's ever done a science experiment knows that your data isn't valid unless you can isolate a variable.  It is impossible to isolate a variable using these Value Added Models.  You can't isolate a teacher's effectiveness when you can't account for home situation, hunger, hormones, apathy, drug addiction, abuse, etc.  So, basing decisions based on this data is absurd.  Value added models are an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.   
• You value what you measure.  State tests do not and cannot measure the things our students most need to learn in school:  critical thinking, innovation, empathy, adaptability, and learning to love learning.  Focusing on standardized test data moves our values away from that which is most important for our students.

I guess I'm not truly off the data bandwagon.  I'm just off the test data bandwagon.  I still believe that data is incredibly valuable and should guide our decisions.  I just believe that the data we need to be looking at most is in-lesson formative assessment data that allows us to help each student grow in the best possible way.  Using that data to guide our decisions maximizes student learning.  

I know that fact is inconvenient for those still on the big data bandwagon.  You can't put every teacher's formative assessment data in a spreadsheet for all to see and discuss the way you can with state test scores.  And, trusting teachers to do their job seems like an unpopular position in today's educational climate.

Growth is hard, and change is messy.  If we really care about students learning more and being prepared for their futures, we'll start shifting our focus toward the data that really matters. 

Testing: The Enemy of Life-Long Learning

This morning, as I was watching my wife make pancakes for breakfast, I started thinking about the absurdity of testing.  Lori is an incredible cook, but has never once taken or passed a cooking test.  She just learned because she enjoyed it.  She tries new recipes, and we give her feedback on those recipes, which she then uses to learn more.

This got me thinking about how harmful a testing culture is for our students.  I'm not just talking about standardized high-stakes tests, but all tests that are designed to measure learning out of the context for which that learning needs to be used.

Photo credit:  Wikipedia

People always say, "We need tests because life is full of tests."  That's nonsense.  Life isn't full of tests.  It's full of assessments.  As an adult, I can count the number of tests I've had to take since college on 1 hand.  As adults, we do stuff and either succeed or learn to do something differently the next time.  If I make pancakes for my kids, I don't need to pass a test first to do it.  I just make them.  And if they are awful, I either fix the recipe or get asked to make omelets next time. 

That's life.  Trial and error.  

The vast majority of adults don't take tests, but we are constantly tested (assessed would be a better word), and we get lots of feedback. When we prepare kids for a world of taking tests, we don't prepare them for the real world which will require them to process the feedback they constantly get from their assessments. Testing forces them to see things as black and white, success or failure. It teaches them that either they know something, or they don't. It doesn't teach them to learn what they don't know. 

Testing teaches our students not to be the life-long learners that we so often preach about in schools, but upon which we so rarely focus our efforts.  

If we really care about our students being life long learners, we need to start assessing them in a way that encourages them to learn from their mistakes.  We need to move away from a culture of testing and towards a culture of meaningful, relevant assessment that mirrors what students will see when they leave our schools.  

This I Believe

Yesterday Chris Lehmann posted a list of his 10 core beliefs as an educator on his blog, Practical Theory.  He asked his readers to post their core beliefs.  After some self-reflection, here are mine. 

What are yours?

This I Believe

1.  The most important things we do as teachers:  the moments that our students will carry with them for the rest of their lives, the truly meaningful actions that define who we are as teachers – cannot be measured.  If you think they can then you don’t understand what we do.

2.  Learning to love learning is more important that any information with which we can try and fill a child’s head.

3.  Children are born learners.  They are naturally curious and creative.  Teachers should do everything in their power to avoid participating in practices that stifle that curiosity and creativity.

4.  Measuring learning is significantly less important than actually learning.  It should be done only when doing so when the measurement is helpful to the learner.

5.  Grades do not help students learn.  They help adults rank, sort, and judge students.  Students need meaningful feedback from others to learn.  Numbers and letters placed on top of a test are not meaningful feedback. 

6.  The decisions we make in schools should be based upon what is best for the children we serve and not upon what is popular with parents, politicians, colleges, and corporations.

7.  Teachers need to get better.  Every teacher should be pursuing the goal of improving as a professional.  Teachers should be models of life-long learning.  If we focused our energy on providing the support, resources, and inspiration for EVERY teacher to constantly improve instead of identifying and firing those teachers who are “bad” using sketchy test data, every student would benefit immensely. 

8.  Math is not a series of procedures to be followed in order to arrive at correct answers.  Some think they are not good at math because they couldn’t memorize procedure.  Others think they are great mathematicians because they could.  In reality, there are many great mathematicians for whom calculation is not a great strength.  And there are many great calculators who are not good mathematicians.  We need to change how we present mathematics to our students so that “school math” and “real math” are one and the same.

9.  We live in a time of ubiquitous technology.  Student learning should happen in an environment that reflects that fact, but technology is just the tool of our time.  Good teaching is not determined by the technology used but by the quality of the pedagogy.  The basis of good teaching has been the same for millennia, but it may look very different in the 21^st Century than it did when Socrates was teaching Plato.  Just as the Socratic Method was grounded in inquiry, our pedagogy should be student centered and driven by inquiry.

10.  Decisions should be based on data, research, and experience.  Too often decisions are based on data that is most convenient to obtain, cheapest to gather, or cherry-picked to prove a political point.  This does a terrible disservice to our children.  Using data incorrectly is more harmful than not using it at all, and some things cannot be quantified.  Just because we cannot measure what is truly important (see #1) does not mean that we should put importance on what we can measure.   

 

Want Great Schools? Start Simple.

No teacher ever became great by being the best at following the textbook, being the best at reading from a script, or being the best at passing out multiple choice tests from the back of an assessment guide.

No school ever became great by having the best textbook programs from which their teachers read, the best benchmark tests, or the best canned lesson scripts for their teachers.

No country ever became great by having schools that were the best at selecting textbook programs for their teachers to use and the best test-prep programs.

A great national education system starts by having excellent public schools.  Public schools are excellent when they have excellent teachers facilitating learning.  Teachers can only be excellent when they have the autonomy to be.

If we want excellence, we need to start by thinking more simply. We need to start by allowing teachers to be great.  Then encourage them to share what they are doing to inspire others.

Because the current direction of demoralizing them and having them compete against each other simply isn't going to get us there.

The Slippery Slope to Irrelevance

About a week ago someone in my PLN on Plurk asked for opinions on the standardization of assessments among teachers in a school district.  I responded by referring to the post I wrote a few months back entitled "Standardization is the Death of Excellence."

You can't have both standardization and excellence.  The former prevents the latter.  And while excellence is something that all teachers should strive for, it's naive to think that we'll all reach that level.  Even if you do, there's always someone who does it better than you - someone from whom you can learn, someone you can collaborate with to get better, someone who can show you new ways to see problems that arise.  When we standardize teaching, a nasty side effect is that we discourage teachers from even striving for excellence.

Image:  FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Standardization, whether it be of assessments, teaching practices, curriculum goals, or anything else prevents those someones from being available to those trying to learn.  When everyone is the same, nobody is setting the bar higher.  Nobody is innovating.  Nobody is growing.  Nobody is learning to do it better.

Let's come right out and say it - the only purpose for standardization is to prevent inferiority.  And while it's great to try eliminate inferior assessment practices, our students deserve more than the mediocrity that is left in the wake of standardization.

The argument I often hear for the standardization of assessment practices is based on the need for grades in each classroom to mean the same thing.  As if grades meant anything meaningful now anyway.

Assessments should be done to provide students vital feedback so that they can learn.  When we assume that grades are that feedback we send the message to students that their learning means nothing more than a number in a gradebook.

Our students deserve more than that.

Not only should assessments not be standardized between classrooms, they shouldn't even be standardized inside classrooms.  Students should be free to express their learning in the best way they see fit.  If one student wants to demonstrate understanding of division by creating a video explaining how farmers use division to determine medication doses for animals, another by creating a slideshow showing how car companies use division in determining the effectiveness of their factories, and a third wants to write an letter to their congressman explaining how the states resources are not being divided equally among its citizens, shouldn't they be able to?  Shouldn't they be encouraged to?

None would be allowed if teachers were forced to use a district mandated multiple choice test.

It's time for teachers to stop this slippery slope to irrelevance.  After all, that's where we are headed if we keep letting others tell us how to teach and how to assess our students.  We are professionals.  We have certifications given to us claiming that we are experts in these decisions.

If we start giving up this control, we will be left following canned lesson plans and giving canned assessments that some corporate textbook company came up with.  When we give up that control we will turn teaching into a job that any schlep with a pulse can do.

And our kids will be left with an education that's the same quality as if any shlep with a pulse was teaching them.

A Year of Contradictions

Image:  http://www.edwebproject.org/

Today was the last day of the 2011-2012 school year.  Looking back, it was the most rewarding and enjoyable year I've had in my fifteen years of teaching.  As I look back and examine the reasons for having such an excellent year, I'm faced with a few contradictions.

• I taught less this year, and yet my students learned more.  As time goes on, I continue to learn ways to make students responsible for their own learning.  I find myself standing in front of the room talking less and walking around giving encouragement, feedback, and guidance more.
• I graded fewer assignments and yet my students got more feedback to guide their learning.  My focus continues to shift from giving grades to providing opportunities for students to get meaningful feedback on their work from myself, classmates, and others outside my classroom.
• My students worked harder, produced more on-line content, researched more, and learned about a greater number of  topics than any other class I've ever had, and yet I've been told numerous times by many students and parents that this was the best school year that they've had.  Since they had more control over their learning, school didn't seem like work as much as a chance to pursue their interests.
• This year it felt like I worked less hard than at any other time in the past, yet I probably spent more hours collaborating with my PLNs, reading educational blogs, discussing education with other teachers, and reflecting on my practices than ever before. 

I've written plenty about how our educational system needs to catch up to the realities of the 21st Century in which we live.  As that happens, it will continue to be a struggle to balance the demands of a broken system with what we know is best for our students.  I feel like this year I made good progress towards figuring out how to do that. 

Maybe after fifteen years I'm starting to figure out this teaching thing a little.

Friday's Five - Assessment: Our Students Deserve Better

I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately.  Not "assessment" in the narrow term meaning the high-stakes tests to which we are forced to subject our students, but assessment in the more global sense: how we determine what our students know and change our teaching to make sure they are learning.  That's what assessment is for, isn't it?  Despite the nonsense that is being thrown around by non-educators about the need to test kids to identify bad schools, bad teachers, bad kids, bad administrators, etc., assessment is really about identifying how we can help kids learn more.  The rest is all political mumbo-jumbo that's hurting our kids because it takes the focus off where it should be - student learning.



There are a few reasons that assessment has been at the forefront of my mind lately.  The most obvious is that the last month of school has been a fragmented mess of teachers struggling to promote real learning in the wake of schedule changes, lost teaching time, and stressed students due to mandatory state "assessments."  I've also spent a lot of time reflecting on my own assessment practices as part of my PAEMST application (one of the more grueling and beneficial experiences I've done as a teacher), which is due on May 1st.  Finally, this is the time of year that we place students into their courses for the next year - a practice that has increasingly become dependent on "data" instead of teacher recommendation.

In order to use assessment properly, to increase student learning, here are five things we need to keep in mind:

1. Use the right tool for the right job.  Often we are told as teachers to "use assessment data to drive instruction."  The problem is that by "assessment data", those making this demand are talking about state assessments, benchmarks, or diagnostics.  You can't make day to day changes that benefit students based on this data.  Learning that one of my students scored low in the "geometry category" five months ago on a state assessment is worthless to me compared with the exit card that showed me that he/she didn't understand that area was a two-dimensional measurement.  The latter allows me to correct the misunderstanding immediately, thus leading to greater learning.
2. I've heard Chris Lehman say before that educational technology should be like oxygen - imperceptible, ubiquitous, and necessary.  The same can be said for assessment.  We need it and should be using it all the time as a way to guide our students, but if our students are stressed about how they are being graded, ranked, sorted, or judged, they aren't focused on learning.  And learning should be our goal. 
3. "Assessment" and "Grading" are not interchangeable terms.  Often they are used that way because we tend to want to make everything measureable.  Data doesn't have to be numbers to be useful.  Again, learning should be our focus, not ranking or judging students.  Tests and quizzes will, for better or worse, always likely have a place in schools.  What is more beneficial for students, though:  giving them a 30 on a quiz in which they got 7 out of 10 questions incorrect, or sitting down with that student to discuss their confusion and helping them identify ways to learn what they haven't yet?  "Grading" is something that is done for the benefit of teachers, parents, colleges, and others.  Good "assessment" is done for students. 
4. Standardized tests, benchmarks, and diagnostic tests are not bad assessments unless we use them in ways for which they were not designed.  When we start using data from a benchmark or diagnostic tests to determine a student's placement in basic or advanced math classes or data from student standardized test scores to judge teacher efficacy and school quality we fail our students.  Arguments that my car got great gas mileage because it goes from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds or that my brother is a great basketball player because he has can punt a football 60 yards would be dismissed as absurd because those aren't valid metrics to use to judge such things.  Why aren't the conclusions we are erroneously drawing from bad metrics in education being dismissed as absurd?  I believe, as Joe Bower put it so well, we can't measure what's important, so we are putting importance on what we can measure.  It needs to stop for the sake of our children.  They deserve better.
5. We need to do a serious cost/benefit analysis of how we assess students.  The assessments that are given the most importance in schools right now are also the most costly in terms of time and money that have ever been given in schools before.  We spend billions of dollars as a country each year on the tests themselves, test prep materials, and resources to meet the logistics of administering the tests.  We spend weeks of time that could be spent on learning critical thinking and innovation demanding that kids learn test taking skills and low-level thinking facts so that they can pass the tests.  And what do we get?  Lousy data.  Data that is far, far inferior to the formative assessment data I could have collected in much less time and that could have been used immediately to teach students. 

Some will say, "but scores have gone up since we started testing kids, so there must be some benefit to all this testing."  While scores on state tests have gone up, this argument is totally false.  We, the public are being manipulated.  Politicians have made the tests easier over the years to show how wonderful they (the politicians) are at "improving education."  Anyone who has compared state tests from 7 or 8 years ago to current tests can see this easily.  Our students score almost exactly the same on international tests as they did before we implemented high-stakes testing.  We've spent trillions of dollars and countless hours of time that could have been spent on real learning for nothing.  Actually, it hasn't been for nothing.  We've spent it to make politicians look good and to help their buddies who own stock in companies that produce testing materials make a buck.  We could have gotten so much more for so much less.  Maybe it's time to let educators determine how to educate our kids. 

Friday's Five - I'm Not a Trained Monkey! (and other thoughts)

Some Fridays it's hard to come up with a topic about which to write.  Others it's hard to choose one topic because there are so many ideas I have floating around in my head.  Today is the latter.  I guess that means I should have blogged more during the week.  In any case, I'm going to share five thoughts that I've had the past couple of days.

Photo Credit: C. Frank Starmer

1. I'm not a trained monkey.  It's state assessment week(s) here in Pennsylvania.  The majority of my time in school has been spent watching students fill in bubbles with a #2 pencil.  Any trained monkey could do this.  I want to teach.  I want my students to learn.  The purpose of assessment is to guide teaching so that students learn more.  I won't get the results of this assessment until these students have moved on from my classroom.  It's a political shell game that doesn't benefit my students, and all the free snacks in the world won't convince them differently.  I'm a teacher, not a trained monkey.  Let me teach.  Let my students learn.
2. About those free snacks during state testing time - If research shows that kids' brains work better when they are well fed, have snacks, etc., shouldn't we be giving them the snacks during the learning and not during the assessment?  Funny how something as simple as a snack can illustrate so perfectly how out-of-whack our priorities have become.
3. Yesterday in the faculty room, someone was complaining that our elementary school pedagogy is too driven by the demands of colleges.  When talking about being more innovative with how we assess, teach, and organize schools, the counter-argument is often, "But what will happen when they get to college?  They'll be expected to listen to lectures and learn on their own."  Here's the thing: sticking 50-200 people in a room, lecturing at them (whether you use a PowerPoint presentation or not), and telling them to read textbooks in order to find additional information is not good teaching.  It's not the best way for people to learn.  I don't care how much people pay to subject themselves and their kids to that nonsense, it's still lousy pedagogy.  If colleges really cared about student learning and not their profit statements, they'd tailor their pedagogy to be more like kindergarten.  More play.  More investigation.  More collaboration.  More learning.
4. The difference in the restlessness of elementary students after changing the clocks for Daylight Savings Time in the spring is stark.  It's like they know they should be outside now.  After hearing John Medina explain during his ISTE keynote last summer how the human brain performs optimally outside, while the body is in motion, and in changing meteorological conditions, this restlessness makes a whole lot more sense.  
5. I've been lucky enough to be nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST) this year, and a whole lot of my energy has been spent the past few weeks preparing my application.  The application is extensive and overwhelming, but I'm benefitting a great deal from the reflection and introspection into my practices that is required.  Part of that reflection has made me re-realize how much I benefit from all of you out there in my PLN - on Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, and those who I connect with in the blogosphere.  I am sincerely grateful to all of you for helping me better myself and my teaching.   

Protecting My Children from Grading

Yesterday, Joe Bower put up a post on his blog entitled "Opting out of Grading" in which he listed his reasons for requesting of his child's future teachers that her "learning would never be reduced to a symbol." Here is the letter that he posted that he intends to give to his daughter's teachers:

Dear teacher, 

Kayley loves to learn and is very excited to start school this year.  

Because the case against grades has a wealth of anecdotal evidence and scientific research, I am requesting that Kayley's assessments and evaluations only include formative comments. This means that Kayley's learning would never be reduced to a symbol (such as a number or letter). This includes individual assignments, quizzes, tests and her report card.

As a family that plays an active role in Kayley's learning, the best feedback we can receive about Kayley's learning is to see her learning. No reductionist data is required.

 If you are interested in learning more about the case against grades, I would be happy to provide you with these resources, and if your school's assessment and reporting policies make this request problematic, I would like the opportunity to discuss this further. Feel free to e-mail me at joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com

I look forward to working with you to support Kayley's natural intrinsic desire to go on learning. 

Sincerely, 

Joe Bower

I've admired Joe's position and research on the harm that we do to students with our "assessment" and grading procedures.  I also can very much relate to the uneasy feeling that comes from worrying about your children having the intreage, wonder, and creativity educated out of them by our school system.  I worry about that for my own children often.  It's one of the reasons that I've started my 3rd grade daughter blogging about things she finds interesting.  She's a smart girl and gets very good grades, but I'm hoping to promote a love of learning for learning's sake instead of for the praise that comes from teachers and parents for getting an "A".  I've seen her creativity decrease as her desire to achieve good grades has increased. 

I love the idea of abolishing grading in my classroom.  I hate the fact that I have to reduce my students to a number on tests and report cards, and I clearly see how much more they benefit from meaningful feedback.  I love the idea of opting my children out of the grading system in our schools.  I haven't done either yet, although I give it much thought.

Kudos to Joe for having the moxy to do away with grades and having a plan for his own child.  I have great admiration for the way he follows his convictions and shares with the rest of us through his blog and his twitter feed.

Student Learning vs. Student Evaluation

Image: Paul Gooddy / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is it more important for us as educators to foster learning, or to evaluate our students?  I would bet that the majority of teachers would agree that our primary purpose is to promote learning.  I would hope that teachers prioritize teaching and learning over judging and evaluating, even if our current educational system doesn't.

For this reason, I am often perplexed by the push back on the idea of re-testing students.  I'd love to not give tests and focus on simply assessing student learning without grades, but that's not possible in our current system.  If a student doesn't learn something or tests poorly, isn't it my job to do what I can to remedy that?  Shouldn't I make sure that student learns?  Shouldn't I see this as a sign that I should give them more assistance, re-teach them, or get them some other sort of help?  Wouldn't it be beneficial to that student to have someone demand they actually learn instead of letting them go through school without doing so?

I've heard the arguments against re-testing, and I am yet to hear one that makes sense to me.

Re-testing allows kids to be lazy.  If they failed it's because they didn't study.

Perhaps the student's poor initial grade was due to lack of studying.  I refuse to use their laziness as an excuse to not fullfil my mission as a teacher.  It is my job to help them learn, not to punish them for laziness.  Then again, maybe they weren't lazy.  Maybe they didn't study because they were wondering where their next meal was coming from.  Or whether Mom would come home drunk that night.  Or whether their Dad's parole hearing was going to go well.  Or whatever.  It is not my job to judge.  It is my job to promote learning.

There's no re-testing in the "real world"

Really?  You don't think that doctors learn from their mistakes?  Or that teachers don't have lessons that fail miserably?  Or that artists never create works that are less than their best?  Or that those who work in sales never have days where they don't close a deal?  Or that lawyers never lose a case?  Life is full of failure.  Learning from one's mistakes is much more important than avoiding failure.

If you allow a kid to re-test and they get a higher grade than one who doesn't, that's not fair.

As I said above, assessing learning is much more important to me than assigning a grade.  "Assessment" and "grading" are not interchangeable terms.  When we use them as such, we are implying to students that assigning a score to them is more important than what they've learned.  They start to jump through hoops to get praise and good grades instead of making connections because that's what we are training them to do. Sure, the practice of re-testing might make it harder for kids (or their parents) to feel superior to others because they are a "straight A student", but is that really a bad thing?  Maybe the school can save some money on the "My kid is an honor student and yours is dumb" bumper stickers.

There's no time to re-test.  I've got to cover X, Y and Z.  Plus, what would I do with all the other kids?

There's no doubt that having a classroom where you are meeting the needs of all the students is difficult. It can be done, though.  I've had many classes where I'm sitting with a small group of kids who need more help while other groups of kids who already have proven they understand the topic are recording a podcast about it, developing a narrated slide show, using web 2.0 apps to produce content for our wiki, or sharing their learning in other ways.  The best part is that the content being created by the groups who already understand can be used as a way to study for the kids in the group who need more help that night.  Had I not taken the extra time to re-teach and allow for re-testing, some of my students would have never learned what they needed to, and others would have never had the opportunity to teach it, which deepened their understanding.  To me, not doing this in order to "cover" other topics that my students may or may not learn before moving on to "cover" something else seems destined to leave gaps in understanding for most kids.  

I guess it all comes down to how you view teaching.  If we are the deliverers of instruction, and it is the students' responsibility to learn, then there is no reason to re-test kids.  It's a nice, convenient way to look at things because it takes all the responsibility for failing students and places it upon students and their parents.  

Of course, if my job is to teach students and make sure they learn, not re-teaching and re-testing doesn't make sense.  Sure, there will still be students who struggle.  Maybe there are factors outside of my control that are preventing them from learning.  But taking this point of view ensures that their struggles won't be because of me.

Friday's Five: Reasons You Shouldn't Grade Homework

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with others, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of the page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook Page with others.  Each post has a "Tweet" button on top and buttons on the bottom that allow you to share in several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.


For a few years I've been a member of our district's Assessment Committee, where we try and develop assessment policy and guidelines for teachers.  We've tried to come up with policies and guidelines that both lead to assessments in the classroom that guide the teaching of classroom teachers towards areas of need for students and standardize grading practices across the district.  In our meetings and other discussions on assessment I've been a part of there is no more debated topic than homework.

Flickr/Cayusa

Many argue that completion of homework should be graded because of the need for students to be responsible and accountable.  They often claim that responsibility is a skill that will be needed in the workplace, and that not counting homework completion as a part of students' grades would be akin to telling them that responsibility isn't important.

Anyone who has read a few of my blog posts knows how passionate I feel about the need to prepare our students for the world they will encounter when they pass from our schools.  I am in complete agreement that we need to foster a sense of responsibility in our students.  I don't agree, however, that grading homework is an effective way to do it.

In today's post, I'm going to list five reasons that homework completion should not be graded.  I'd love to hear your thoughts afterward, whether you agree or disagree, so please leave a comment.  Intelligent discussion and debate are tools for progress.

1. A homework grade punishes those who need the most support. - We know that a great many of our students face difficulties at home.  Those difficulties often make homework a low priority.  Put yourself in the place of one of your students that you know has a rough time at home.  Imagine how much you'd care about getting your homework done, or even if you'd be able to get that work completed, when returning to that home situation from school.  Think about how much parental support you'd get.  Now imagine that you were being punished in your grades because you didn't get the work done.  These students need us to support them, not punish them.
2. A homework grade doesn't show what the student has learned. - If a student receives a 90%, shouldn't that mean that the student learned 90% of what they were supposed to in that course?  When you begin to count homework completion as part of that grade it becomes impossible for parents, students, colleges, or anyone else to determine what a student's grade means.  A child who passed all of his/her tests and quizzes can still fail the course if they didn't do their homework, and a student who couldn't pass any test or quiz can can pass the course if they did the homework.  That doesn't make any sense, and leads to grades becoming totally meaningless.
3. Grading homework doesn't teach responsibility. - I've yet to encounter a student who was lacking responsibility and started becoming responsible because their homework was going to be graded.  Ask most high school teachers, and they'll tell you that the majority of students aren't motivated by grades, anyway.  The students who are responsible already are going to do their homework, and those that aren't are not.  Chances are, grading it won't make a bit of difference.  
4. If you want students to care about homework (and schoolwork for that matter), make it relevant. - This is really the heart of the problem, isn't it?  Students don't care about school because school doesn't matter to them.  Getting a good grade isn't a guarantee of future success nearly as much as it used to be, and the lack of frontal lobe formation in teenagers prevents them from understanding the long term consequences of poor grades.  If you want students to do work, you need to get them emotionally invested in what they are doing.  Maybe this means that they are going to use what they are learning in your class to solve a problem in the community, help their neighbors, follow their passion, or to create something they'd be excited to show off to their friends.  If they are working toward something they are passionate about, they will be more likely to invest their time on it.  
5. There's rarely an educational reason for every student in your class to complete the same homework assignment.  - If 40% of your students have mastered a concept, does it really make sense to give an assignment to the whole class and then grade whether they have completed the assignment?  If one of the students who mastered the concept doesn't complete the assignment, is it really fair or logical to reduce their grade because they (rightfully) believed that the assignment was a waste of their time.  If you've ever complained about your boss making you do tasks that you know to be useless and a waste of time, you know how those students feel.  

Now it's your turn.  What's your opinion on grading homework?  Do you agree with my reasoning for discontinuing the practice of homework grading, or have I missed something?  What's your school's policy when it comes to homework?  We'd love to hear as many different opinions as we can, so please pass the post on to other educators, parents, students, or anyone who may have strong feelings on the topic by sharing on Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus.

What I Hope My Students Learned

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Today is the first day of June.  The school year is winding down, and in a week or two the state assessment scores will come back.  We'll look at the data and determine which students learned math, which were proficient in reading, and which students are good at "being students."

To tell you the truth, though, I really don't care all that much.  To start with, I'm pretty confident that my students learned the content they were supposed to this year.  I don't need a standardized test to tell me that.  The formative assessments that I build into my lessons give me that data all year long.  There's a bigger reason that I'm a bit apathetic about the results, though.

The most important things I want my students to have learned this year weren't on those tests.  These things can't be measured by filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil.

I hope my students learned that learning isn't something that happens only in school, but is something that can and should happen all the time.  I hope they learned the habit of learning.

I hope my students learned that being right isn't as important as being able to think.  Our history books are full of individuals who failed many times and still rose to greatness.

I hope that my students learned to question the validity and bias of all information that is being sold to them, even if a teacher is the one selling it.  I hope they continue to ask "why?"

I hope that my students learned to seek their passion when choosing a career path.  5th grade is not too early to start thinking about your future, and doing what you love and what is rewarding to you is worth more than all the money in the world. 

Most of all, I hope that my students learned that the score that comes back on that state test, whether high or low, doesn't define them any more than their height or eye color.  It's what they do with their given talents that will be their legacy.

Accountability and Teacher Evaluation

Like other parts of the country, New York City is having problems with obesity.  According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, childhood obesity is an epidemic, and 1 in 5 New York City kindergarten students are obese.
 

Photo: Flickr, Citizenactionny


Because of this, New York City is seriously looking at the lack of performance by city doctors, and demanding accountability.  A new test is being developed that will be taken by patients that will measure doctor effectiveness, and allow the city to get rid of the worst performing doctors.  These tests are meant to both evaluate doctors and create a system of accountability which will force doctors to do their jobs better. 

Every year patients will be given a Body Mass Index (BMI) test to determine how healthy they are.  At the end of the year, patients will be given the same test to see if their doctor has been effective in making them healthier.  Doctors who do well on the evaluations will be given bonus checks.  Doctors who have patients who score poorly on the evaluation for two years in a row will be banned from practicing in New York City, since they have proven to be ineffective.

If you haven't noticed by now, the above two paragraphs are total fabrication.  The very premise that we would evaluate doctors based on such tests is absurd.  To start with, the tests would define "health" in a ridiculously narrow way (only using BMI).  There are many factors that are out of the doctors' control when it comes to their patients' progress in staying healthy.  It would force the best doctors to ignore the patients who need them the most, since bad evaluations would mean less money and less job security.  Many doctors would choose to practice somewhere outside the city.  In all ways, this would be a terrible idea, and lead to a worse health care system for the city. 

Photo: Comstock/Thinkstock

Yet, this is exactly what New York City is proposing to do to evaluate teachers. 

If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher, evaluate their teaching.  I've heard the arguments against this:  it's too costly, administrators don't do a very good job at evaluating teachers, there's no way to hold teachers accountable if we don't in some way quantify their effectiveness with a number.  These are all hollow arguments.

If you want to get data cheaply, you get cheap data.  We should be using the best data to drive our instruction, not the cheapest and/or easiest to obtain. 

If administrators are doing a lousy job of identifying teachers who are using best practices, that's a good reason to put pressure on administrators to do a better job of evaluating teaching.  It's not a good reason to take away more learning time for our students to take tests and prepare for them. 

Some jobs do not relate well to the business world, and can't be quantified easily.  You can't judge the effectiveness of police officers by the number of arrests they make.  You've got to look at how well they deal with situations they face.  You can't judge the effectiveness of firefighters by how many fires they put out.  You've got to look at how well they fight the fires with which they are faced.  You can't judge teachers by how well their students do on standardized tests.  You've got to look at how well they teach the students that they are given.  Those students come with a variety of home situations, emotional issues, economic issues, and a plethora of other baggage that may affect how they score on tests.

The most important things we do in school can't be measured on a test.  Show me someone who disagrees, and I'll show you someone who doesn't know what's important.

Does Grading Impede Learning?

This morning, a colleague came to me for help.  She had an assignment for a graduate ed-tech course in which she needed to create a podcast that included background music using Audacity. 

I've worked with this teacher before on using technology in her classroom.  She took the 3-credit non-graded Ed-tech course that I offered in the winter.  I've seen her explore new technologies, experiment with sites in which she had no experience, and try new things in her classroom.

This morning, though, she was very nervous about using Audacity, even though she had been exposed to it before.  She even described to me her Friday afternoon, when her anxiety over creating the podcast brought her to tears.  I was wondering why she was having such a tough time until she made the following statement to me: 

"I always get this nervous when the assignment is graded."

How many of our students feel the same way? 

Sometimes, as educators, I think that we get confused into thinking our purpose is to evaluate our students rather than foster their learning.  It's a natural pitfall that's built into our educational system.  We evaluate students to determine who makes the honor roll.  We rank students' GPA for colleges and awards.  We assess children to the point of lunacy in order to measure the success of teachers, schools, and districts. 

I'm not advocating that we eliminate grades.  I'm just wondering if there's a way to take the focus off the grades and get it back on the learning. 

My son is finishing his last year of pre-school in a few weeks.  I'm amazed by how the majority of the kids in his pre-school class love to learn in that classroom.  Unfortunately, something happens between pre-school and high school which changes that.

When I think about some of the students in my class that are toughest to motivate, I can recall many times when they've come up to me with something they found interesting on the History Channel, or the internet, or something their father told them at his shop.  I'm forced to conclude that they haven't lost the motivation to learn.  They've lost the motivation to learn at school. 

There are probably many reasons for that loss of motivation.  How much of a factor is our current focus on grading?  How can we keep the natural wonder that most kids have in pre-school from vanishing as they progress through our schools?