Two things have happened recently that have motivated me to return to my neglected blog. The first was a newspaper article I read about a week ago entitled Schools' standards get A-minus, results get D. The article was a report based on the latest Quality Counts study by Education Week magazine. (If you are interested, the full article by Reva Havner Philips can be found at al.com.) What bothered me was what our state received the highest praise for "...its curriculum standards; its extensive testing to measure student performance..." (emphasis mine). That's what we are praised for??? Extensive testing? What about the teaching? What about the learning? What are we doing to our students and our teachers? No wonder the results received a D.
Speaking of the teachers, last week, I was fortunate to have a student teacher from an area university begin working with me and my students. We talked several times through the week as he prepared to begin teaching. In the course of our conversations, he said, "You are the first teacher I have seen that didn't teach from the Teacher's Manual and just use the worksheets that went along with the lessons"! He apparently has had no experience with teachers that looked for interesting or creative ways to meet the needs of their individual students. Oh my, what a disservice we are doing to our young teachers coming up!
We are teaching from a box and keeping our students in a box. Our insidious and pervasive culture of testing, and teaching to the test is not only preventing us from allowing our current students to explore their own interests and cultivate their own strengths but is well on its way to causing the same for our future students!
It's time to free the students! And the student teachers!
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