Written by Guest Blogger Justin Chapman, English Teacher at CVUHS
I
move around the room handing back a batch of “summative” assessments, as we’ve
now learned to call them. Each of
these has a cover sheet that lists the skills we’ve targeted for this
particular unit – and since I teach English, these skills are always centered
on communication, critical thinking, and creative problem solving. I give the usual schpiel: these are
individual assessments... please focus on your own... we all have our strengths
and weaknesses… Each student is invited to revise her work, so these
scores are malleable, a snapshot of the process, not something etched in
marble. Each skill is measured on a four point scale, and each level
comes with a brief descriptor, what that skill should look like when executed.
A “3” is the grade-level “target” – the level at which we expect
sophomores to perform. Still, when I hand back these assessments, some of
these students are busily converting their 3s into percentages: 75%, a C.
I can feel the collective angst. Seems we can’t shake the old 100
point scale.
And
it’s no wonder. We’ve been working with essentially the same educational
system since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, our school has begun
the shift to standards-based learning (SBL) and standards based grading (SBG) –
different sides of the same coin. SBG means a lot of things, not least
that we don’t average numbers. Rather, we take the latest performance as
the measure of a student’s progress on a skill. One of the biggest
differences between SBG and traditional system is that we don’t count homework,
we don’t give (or average) zeroes, and we don’t factor students’ “habits” into
a grade. This means that no matter how much I like a kid, and no matter
how hard she works, I measure the skill, not the student’s ebullient
personality. There is no easy way to institute systemic and institutional
change – but after almost two years of standards-based education, I am
convinced that we have to try.
Change
is hard for any human. I’ve been teaching high school for almost twenty
years, the first seventeen in the traditional sense, with the traditional
grading system. For most of my educational life, I’ve been subject to and
subjected kids to the currency system that is the 100 point scale, where grades
are dispensed like cash in return for effort. I am convinced, however,
that SBL is more humane, more accurate, and ultimately better for students’
(and teachers’) souls. But there’s a certain type of student particularly
ill-adapted to this system. This type needs constant external validation
in the form of A’s. I’ve started calling this the “A-fix” – and the A,
for a certain type of kid, is as strong a drug as heroin. They need to be
told, in very clear terms, how exactly to get an A. And if you don’t tell
them, they can get pretty surly about it.
I
understand where this pressure comes from. Students, particularly in our
affluent district, are driven to succeed. They have successful parents,
aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings. They equate placement at an elite
college (whatever that means) with future success. They are often
intelligent and affable – yet quite uncomfortable with 3s, especially the kids
who’ve been able to game the system up until now. Worse, they are
uncomfortable with collaboration and open-ended assignments which require
creative problem-solving. Rather, they
tend to like black and white assignments with right and wrong answers.
The
biggest problem with that attitude is that college is no longer a guarantee of
future success, like it was for decades, right up until I went in the early
90s. Worse perhaps, we don’t really know what students will need to know
in the future. While the factory model
has served us well (enough) to this point, technology has changed the game
immensely. These issues are outlined clearly and succinctly in the new
film Most Likely to Succeed by Greg Whiteley (mltsfilm.org), which
should be required viewing for any educator at just about any level – and maybe
any American who pays taxes for education. The movie confirms what many
of us in secondary education, and particularly the humanities, have been
working toward for years: an emphasis on critical thinking, collaboration, and
creative problem solving. The film reinforces the idea that depth is more
important than breadth.
The antithesis of this idea are AP (Advanced Placement) courses, and its purveyor The College Board -- two of the most negative forces in education today. I see the College Board as that creepy guy in the van trying to get the kids to try candy– except that they peddle success. Success for
the College Board still means competing for seemingly rare spaces at elite
colleges. Competition, to my mind, has no place in a good education
system. Education should not run like a
business, and A’s are not some precious treasure to sit on and guard. Along with manufacturing a sense of
competition, AP courses, by design, emphasize rote memorization and breadth of
“knowledge” rather than depth. Not surprisingly retention of the “facts”,
even just 30 days after AP tests is dismal.
Kids often take AP courses just to pad their resumes, because it looks
good on their transcripts – and that transcript is the ticket to the next level
of the game. This suggests that the only selling point for AP courses is
that they’re a rung on the ladder to success. And students and parents
have bought the snake oil for decades.
 |
| Are we emphasizing the right things in schools? |
For
me, the biggest issue with this type of student is their abject fear of
failure. They need the A-fix, and they need it often to be validated as
people. Consequently, they are often unwilling to take risks or to be
creative. Matthew Syed outlines this idea in an op/ed piece for the BBC
called “How Creativity is Helped by Failure.” He examines several
successful organizations and how each cultivates a community where failure is a
part of the process on the way to success. “Organisations [sic] like
Google… and Pixar have developed cultures that, in their different ways create
the conditions for empowering failure. They have become living ecosystems
of the imagination.” Without testing ideas and examining their flaws, he
argues, we cannot develop innovative solutions to problems. When we don’t
allow students to struggle through a difficult problem-solving task, we stifle
creativity. While we don’t know what the
workplace will look like in ten or twenty years, we do know that critical
thinking and creativity will be essential skills to develop.
Last year, one of my students wrote on his final reflection, “SBL
is OK once I figured out how to get the A.” While this is annoying, it’s
also understandable. At present, our system is a hybrid of old and
new. We still convert SBG assessments to
traditional grades. Colleges still want the old ACT/SAT scores. No
cultural shift takes place overnight, but I am excited about the possibilities.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s not the kids’
fault that they want As – it’s the system and the culture around it. The
more we envision a system where students and teachers collaborate for success
and mastery of particular skills, where content doesn’t necessarily drive the
course but skills do, where we seek to make interdisciplinary connections and
to foster collaboration – and the more we see that college is not the single
determinant of one’s success in life, the more we have to conceive of our
educational systems, not as a factory, but as a functioning ecosystem of the
imagination.
Images from:
- Most Likely to Succeed Trailer: mltsfilm.com
- Schleicher, Andreas. "Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World"