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20 English Journal 103.1 (2013): 20–24 aybe she’s still playing the piano and enjoying it. Maybe not. But if she is, she and her mother probably have my oldest son to thank. He was back from the US Navy. He’d served his hitch as a musician, sometimes playing trom- bone in big bands, but more often playing acoustic bass or guitar in small combos, backing up touring entertainers. He hadn’t yet gone into the civil engineer- ing field and was picking up miscellaneous work ranging from carpentry to filling in at a local music store. He preferred the part-time store job, espe- cially giving music lessons. The pay was poor, but the satisfactions were great. The little girl came in trailing her mother by several steps. She had a book of beginner-level key- board exercises under her arm and a scowl on her face. The mother explained that, although she her- self wasn’t an accomplished pianist, playing had al- ways given her pleasure and she wanted that for her daughter. She had, however, about given up. Would someone at the store at least give it a try? “Sure,” said my son. He made some get- acquainted small talk with the seven-year-old, then took her hand and led her to a practice room. “Do you like that book under your arm?” “No,” she answered. “I didn’t think so. Want to pitch it?” my son asked. “Yes,” she said, brightening considerably. “OK. Put it over there, come sit beside me, and let’s try something. I’m going to play a chord— Marion Brady e Whole Is Greater an the Sum of the Parts Emphasizing the deficiencies of standardized assessments in measuring what counts for learners, the author highlights the complexity of assessment as well as the significance of the teacher- student relationship in learning. M hit a bunch of notes all at once. When I do, you fool around with one finger until you find a note that sounds good to you when you hear it with the notes I’m playing.” There was initial uncertainty, but she found a groove. After several minutes of this he said, “OK. Here’s what I want you to do this week. First, put your book in the bench at home and forget about it. Then, I want you to try to make up a little tune. Like this. Or this. Or this.” With one finger, he played three short, funky, unfamiliar little melodies. “When you have one you like, bring it back ready to play for me next week. Oh, and give your tune a name,” he added. “OK?” He told the mother not to let her spend more than 15 minutes a day at the piano. The mother said she couldn’t imagine that keeping her daugh- ter away from the keyboard would be difficult. Best Practices I wrote that little vignette ten or so years ago for one of my Knight-Ridder/Tribune columns. I wanted to explain, in simple language, several major prin- ciples of sound teaching: First, my son did an aptitude check. Watch- ing and listening as the little girl found notes that fit the chords he played, he settled to his own satis- faction that she didn’t have a tin ear. If he’d thought that, he’d have gently suggested to the mother that maybe her daughter’s talents lay elsewhere, maybe in dance or art or some other field.

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20 English Journal 103.1 (2013): 20–24

aybe she’s still playing the piano and enjoying it. Maybe not. But if she is, she and her mother probably have my oldest son to thank.

He was back from the US Navy. He’d served his hitch as a musician, sometimes playing trom-bone in big bands, but more often playing acoustic bass or guitar in small combos, backing up touring entertainers.

He hadn’t yet gone into the civil engineer-ing field and was picking up miscellaneous work ranging from carpentry to filling in at a local music store. He preferred the part- time store job, espe-cially giving music lessons. The pay was poor, but the satisfactions were great.

The little girl came in trailing her mother by several steps. She had a book of beginner- level key-board exercises under her arm and a scowl on her face. The mother explained that, although she her-self wasn’t an accomplished pianist, playing had al-ways given her pleasure and she wanted that for her daughter. She had, however, about given up. Would someone at the store at least give it a try?

“Sure,” said my son. He made some get- acquainted small talk with the seven- year- old, then took her hand and led her to a practice room.

“Do you like that book under your arm?” “No,” she answered.“I didn’t think so. Want to pitch it?” my son

asked.“Yes,” she said, brightening considerably.“OK. Put it over there, come sit beside me,

and let’s try something. I’m going to play a chord—

Marion Brady

The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

Emphasizing the deficiencies of standardized assessments in measuring what counts for learners, the author highlights the complexity of assessment as well as the significance of the teacher-student relationship in learning.

M hit a bunch of notes all at once. When I do, you fool around with one finger until you find a note that sounds good to you when you hear it with the notes I’m playing.”

There was initial uncertainty, but she found a groove. After several minutes of this he said, “OK. Here’s what I want you to do this week. First, put your book in the bench at home and forget about it. Then, I want you to try to make up a little tune. Like this. Or this. Or this.”

With one finger, he played three short, funky, unfamiliar little melodies.

“When you have one you like, bring it back ready to play for me next week. Oh, and give your tune a name,” he added. “OK?”

He told the mother not to let her spend more than 15 minutes a day at the piano. The mother said she couldn’t imagine that keeping her daugh-ter away from the keyboard would be difficult.

Best Practices

I wrote that little vignette ten or so years ago for one of my Knight- Ridder/Tribune columns. I wanted to explain, in simple language, several major prin-ciples of sound teaching:

First, my son did an aptitude check. Watch-ing and listening as the little girl found notes that fit the chords he played, he settled to his own satis-faction that she didn’t have a tin ear. If he’d thought that, he’d have gently suggested to the mother that maybe her daughter’s talents lay elsewhere, maybe in dance or art or some other field.

EJ_Sept2013_B.indd 20 8/28/13 4:22 PM

selson
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Copyright © 2013 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

21English Journal

Marion Brady

and a blank sheet of paper or useless “certificate of completion.”

Problems and Possibilities

“How it is in America’s schools” is far from where it should, and could, be. In a contest to design a dysfunctional system for educating the young, the status quo would surely walk away with honors. We have an organizational structure borrowed from the Prussian military. We have a teaching tool—a curriculum—designed in the 19th century. We’ve clung stubbornly to the idea that an appropriate model for classroom instruction is a traditional Sunday morning religious service—The Word de-livered by an authority to a passive congregation.

We’ve put major policy decisions in the hands of state and federal legislators with no teach-ing experience, no respect for those who have it, and no apparent interest in re-search. We’ve failed to de-vise a system for effectively communicating the lessons of history and the insights of experience. We’ve stood aside as the institution was taken over by leaders of business and industry, some seeing it as a cash cow, some wanting taxpayers to pick up the tab for training their employees, some worshiping at the altar of privatization.

The whole institution needs rethinking. The logical place to start meaningful reform

is with something the institution has never had—a clear, concrete, agreed- on aim and a curriculum consistent with that aim. But formulating one isn’t going to happen. Bureaucratic inertia and hubris will see to that. The conceptions of educating of those now in charge are too limited, their knowl-edge of alternatives too narrow, their understanding of the field too meager, to break with the past and start fresh.

There is, however, a relatively recent develop-ment that, properly exploited, might open a door to meaningful change. In their enthusiasm for “running schools like a business,” those who began shoving educators aside about 20 years ago and taking control of the institution have overreached.

That’s not how it is in America’s schools. Ap-titude or lack of it is irrelevant. There’s a required curriculum. If you want to graduate, you have to pass, for example, algebra. Period.

Second, he individualized the instructional material. The little girl’s tune, not those in her book, was the focus.

That’s not how it is in America’s schools. Text-books are the primary tool of instruction—second-hand, pre- processed content assembled by publishers with an eye on what they think will sell in their two biggest markets, Texas and California. Creativity, steadily declining as the “standards and accountabil-ity” reform fad progresses, is given short shrift.

Third, he moved her gradually through in-creasing levels of complexity based on his percep-tion of how fast she was learning. When she came back the next week, he wrote out her tune on large manuscript paper, with the title she’d chosen at the top. As the weeks passed, her little tune was elabo-rated. The single line of melody became a progres-sion of chords—a composition.

That’s not how it is in America’s schools. The curriculum is a confused mix of random, special-ized, disconnected, or poorly connected subjects sharing no overarching aim, no coherent conceptual structure, and no organized sequence of experiences of increasing complexity. Students are pushed along at a standard rate, covering standard material, pre-paring for a standard exam.

Fourth, there were no grades, no gold stars. He relied on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motiva-tion. This was her tune and her elaboration of it, with all the satisfactions accompanying creativity and ownership. She wasn’t just taking piano les-sons, she was writing music. She was a composer!

That’s not how it is in America’s schools. Rigor is a favorite theme of today’s corporately ori-ented education reformers—rigor, because it’s as-sumed that learning is a tough grind at odds with human nature. The “sit down, shut up, face front, read and listen, or suffer consequences” regimen runs deep in American schooling.

Fifth, there was no high- stakes test, no final exam, no do- or- die act.

That’s not how it is in America’s schools. Have one bad day, read a couple of questions wrong, fail one test, and the walk across the stage that marks the end of years of schooling may yield a handshake

The conceptions of

educating of those now in

charge are too limited, their

knowledge of alternatives

too narrow, their

understanding of the field

too meager, to break with

the past and start fresh.

EJ_Sept2013_B.indd 21 8/28/13 4:22 PM

The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

22 September 2013

class, with attitudes and beliefs to match. It was relevant that at the time, my son was 22, trim, good- looking, and outgoing. It was relevant that the student was a seven- year- old girl, relevant that entering the store, she trailed her mother by several steps, that she was scowling, that he engaged her in relationship- building small talk (not adult- to- kid, but adult- to- adult small talk), that he took her hand, that he demonstrated empathy with his ques-tion about the book she was carrying.

And so on, minute by minute. He read facial expressions and body language, listened to what was said and how it was said, tried to discern lev-els of comfort and discomfort, interest and bore-dom, uncertainty and self- confidence, distaste and enthusiasm.

That’s what effective teachers do that stan-dardized tests can’t do.

Where’s the standardized test that can capture and attach meaningful numbers to what was hap-pening between my son and the little girl? Who would set the test’s pass- fail cut score? Using what criteria? Would the fact that the girl was still play-ing the piano and enjoying it years later, or that she quit when the lessons were over, be relevant? If so, how could that long- term outcome be predicted? If she stopped playing, would that mean she failed the test, that the composition she created, the new ideas she learned, the skills she developed, the emo-tional highs and lows she experienced, were of no significance?

Those are complex, difficult questions. It’s surely ludicrous to suppose that someone in a test manufacturer’s cubicle far removed from the music store could write a test that disclosed even a frac-tion of what my son knew about the little girl’s re-lationship to the piano.

Change the one girl to 10, 20, 30 or more kids, change the piano to math, history, chemistry, or some other school subject, and the difficulties of assessment increase exponentially. There’s simply no getting around the fact that what happens in teacher- learner interactions lies far beyond the ca-pabilities of so- called objective standardized tests to adequately evaluate performance.

The central role assessment plays in educa-tion, and the central role education plays in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, call for ex-tended, thoughtful dialogue to “get it right.”

Assuming that educating is primarily a matter of transferring information from those who know to those who don’t, and believing that assessing performance is a simple matter of measuring the amount of information transferred, they launched the present standardized testing frenzy.

Given the money, power, and momentum pushing that frenzy, it may continue, but the back-lash appears to be growing. More and more parents and concerned citizens are realizing that constant testing creates negative student attitudes toward schooling, perpetuates the artificial compartmental-izing of knowledge, ignores the creative potential of human variability, blocks innovation that can’t be evaluated by machines, rewards short- term memory at the expense of other thought processes, narrows the curriculum, undermines the democratic princi-ple that those closest to problems are best positioned to deal with them, allows corporate interests to con-trol the institution, and costs a lot of money—just to begin a list of standardized test–related problems.

Evaluating Performance Responsibly

The frustration and anger of students, parents, grandparents, concerned citizens, and taxpayers—once they realize that they’re being abused by a misused assessment tool—offer the best hope for release from the tyranny of testing.

Accountability is essential, but standardized tests are among the poorest means to that end. Be-fore the corporate attack on teacher integrity began, teacher ability to judge student performance was taken for granted. Ironically, the middle- aged and older individuals now leading the charge against teacher- led assessments were themselves routinely assessed by teachers. That arrangement worked well enough to help make America’s schools the envy of the world, and could do so again.

To the end of establishing that experienced teachers—and only experienced teachers—are in a position to assess learner performance, walk back with me through the little vignette with which I began. It’s a description of teaching and learning writ small, but it models schooling well enough to allow attention to be drawn to factors relevant to the process and its evaluation.

It was relevant that the mother and daugh-ter were almost certainly middle or upper- middle

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23English Journal

Marion Brady

ary study isn’t the answer. The disciplines didn’t begin life as parts of a coherent whole, and they can’t now be hammered together in any kind of in-tellectually manageable way. There is, however, an easy solution to the problem—project learning—making a fragment of the real world the focus of di-rect, hands- on study, using the academic disciplines as tools.

The optimum project: the learner’s school and its immediate environment.

Whether that school is large or small, rich or poor, rural or urban, functional or dysfunctional, makes no difference. Every school models in min-iature the world outside its boundaries in all its physical, biological, and sociological complexity. Designing and applying quantitative and qualita-tive analytical strategies and procedures, then orga-nizing, recording, and interpreting the information thus generated, has learners refining what every human does every waking moment—trying to an-swer the question “What’s going on here, and what should I therefore do?”

Study of immediate, here- and- now experi-ence using the school as “textbook” will make di-rect use of every art, every science, every academic discipline the study of which belongs in the general education curriculum. The aim—making sense of ex-perience—is simple, clear, and easily understood by every learner. Learning by doing replaces passively ab-sorbed and soon- forgotten secondhand knowledge. Individual differences be-come assets to be explored and exploited rather than creating problems of pacing. The work auto-matically adjusts to varying ability levels. Routine use is made of every thought process. Locally avail-able expertise, community resources, and the Inter-net become easily utilized resources.

Perhaps most importantly, the inherent com-plexity of the task makes clear the inadequacy of commercially produced standardized tests in evalu-ating learner performance.

And, because the school is unfailingly rele-vant (even for those who hate it or are utterly bored by it) the emotions without which learning never happens are dependably close. Look kids in their eyes, give them a genuinely difficult task—ask

Unfortunately, at the moment, getting it right may have little or nothing to do with the matter. If the wealthy philanthropists, the leaders of business and industry, the big- city mayors, and state and federal politicians now shaping the institution have other agendas, it follows that what’s good for the young, what’s good for the institution of public education, what’s good for America, will be irrelevant.

That’s unacceptable, so hope lies in citi-zen awareness and action. Congressional paralysis on education policy, the willingness of increasing numbers of once- silent administrators and teachers to speak out, the long list of school boards and other organizations signing the National Resolution on High- Stakes Testing (http://timeoutfromtesting .org/nationalresolution/)—all are hopeful signs of a growing awareness of the misguided, reactionary nature of current education “reforms.”

A Way Ahead

It needs to be admitted: The never- ending call for education reform is evidence of a fundamental insti-tutional problem. To a particular one of those prob-lems dozens of scholars have called attention, but educators—unwilling or unable to think beyond the confines of their chosen disciplines—have failed to address it. There will be no significant improve-ment in the quality of education until the problem is recognized and addressed.

Alfred North Whitehead, in his 1916 Presi-dential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, called attention to it. Educators must, he said, “eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum.”

John I. Goodlad, concluding a massive study of American high schools, in a 1984 report titled A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future, wrote, “The division into subjects and periods encour-ages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly arti-ficial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect” (266).

The reality schooling seeks to explore and explain can’t be adequately understood by frag-menting it and turning the fragments into school subjects. It’s absolutely essential to know how the fragments fit together and interact. Interdisciplin-

The never-ending

call for education

reform is evidence of a

fundamental institutional

problem.

EJ_Sept2013_B.indd 23 8/28/13 4:22 PM

The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

24 September 2013

Works Cited

Goodlad, John I. A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future. New York: McGraw, 1984. Print.

Whitehead, Alfred North. “The Aims of Education.” Edu-cation in the Age of Science. Ed. Bland Blanshard. New York: Basic, 1959. Web. 17 June 2013.

them to thoroughly understand their school and use that understanding to improve it—and mean what you say, and they’ll create learning commu-nities that, finally, justify societies’ investment in education.

Student Voices

What Kinds of Traditional Assessments and Nontraditional Assessments Are the Best Measures of What You Have Learned?

When it comes down to measuring what I learned, purely in terms of classroom content, tests are the best mea-sure. On math tests, it may mean showing that I have understood the concepts and memorized the formulas. On an En glish test, it may mean showing that I understood vocabulary words, remembered a detail in a story, or picked up on a recurring theme through a novel. All in all, a standard test that asks me to regurgitate what the teacher and the textbook has told me is most representative of my knowledge on the content of the course.

What is not measured by traditional assessments as much, however, is what I have learned to do with the content I have learned. These tests do not test me beyond basic comprehension or memorization. They merely measure what I picked up from passively listening or from cramming the night before. It takes the nontraditional assessments, those that go beyond regurgitation into the realm of invention and creation, in which I must know not only the material, but also how to synthesize my knowledge across various dis-ciplines. In En glish class, for example, it may take the form of a debate. We may learn all year the various vocabulary words, history, and concepts of rhetoric and debate, and I may recognize the material well enough to pass tests. But it is the debate itself that forces me to understand the material as it relates to me: it makes me utilize my knowledge and combine it with my own experiences and abilities to create something new. It makes me apply my knowledge. It tests for what I have learned in the context of the real world, where cre-ation, application, and invention are the focus, rather than regurgitation and multiple- choice tests.

Joseph LinState College Area High School

State College, Pennsylvania

Marion Brady is a retired teacher, county- level school administrator, newspaper columnist, and author of text and profes-sional books. His work can be seen at www.MarionBrady.com; email him at [email protected].

READWRITETHINK CONNECTION Lisa Storm Fink, RWT

When we intentionally respond to the diverse needs of our students, we are differentiating the product, process, or content of learning according to the learning style, interest, or readiness of students. A wealth of research suggests that by framing learning with student interests in mind, teachers can increase student motivation and learning. With a keen eye, we can observe the interests and strengths of our students and, when possible, we can consider these to plan learning opportunities for students. By providing choice and respectful tasks, we can provide mean-ingful literacy experiences as described in the ReadWriteThink.org Strategy Guide “Assessing Student Interests and Strengths.” http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/assessing-student-interests-strengths-30100.html

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