Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Assessment

Assessing the Skeletons in My Closet

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Pssst…come closer.  I have a secret to tell you.

When I was a high school senior, I had grand aspirations of getting into a great college.  As part of the college bound set, I knew that part of my fate rested with my performance on the SAT and had adopted the following reasoning with regard to test scores:

Twelve hundred and above means I am smart. Every college on my radar would be interested in me.

Between a thousand and 1199 means I am average to slightly above.  My dream schools would still be within reach.

Anything below a thousand…well…I could set my sights on community college because only dumb kids got scores like that.

I was set to graduate third in my class. That made me at the very least average, if not slightly above, right? I didn’t even entertain the possibility that I’d get anything less than an 1100.

So, like every college bound high school senior, I took the SAT early in my senior year. When the results came back, I had scored a 980. As you can imagine, not even breaking my threshold for “average”  shook my confidence; however, it didn’t crush me.  I attributed it to a bad day and signed up to retake it the next time it was offered.  I knew I’d do better the second time because, after all, I would be more prepared.  I would understand the format better, and I could even study the parts I did poorly on and work harder to improve.  So, you can imagine the shock…and horror…I felt when I got my results from the second test and discovered that, not only had I not done better,  I scored 90 points lower than I did the first time! This time there were no excuses.  These scores could be attributed to one thing and one thing only: I was dumb. The people at ETS told me so. As a college bound, high school senior, they were obligated to tell prospective colleges just how dumb I was.

The weight of the shame was unbearable. In fact, it has been twenty-four years since I took the SAT and I still cannot talk about it without painful feelings of humiliation and self-doubt.  My husband wonders why it still bothers me after all these years.  He reminds me that I was a successful college student and am successful in my career, but still I can’t help but wonder if other people will wonder what business a woman who couldn’t break 500 on the verbal section of the SAT has teaching others how to comprehend better and build vocabulary? Part of me wonders if I do this work because I need to prove that I can read and I can understand and I do know lots of words. Either way, it is a burden that I bear to this day and it stands as a cautionary tale of the lasting impact that standardized testing can have on an impressionable psyche.

When I took the SAT the first time, I maintained a dynamic mind set.  I believed that my results could change with hard work and effort.  When I took it the second time and did worse, I adopted a fixed mindset.  As Peter Johnston says in Opening Minds, “…in this world, simple events, like mistakes or unsuccessful attempts, are indicators of fixed characteristics” (p.10).  In my mind, my failure was not an indication of what I hadn’t learned yet, it was a reflection of who I was and who I would be forever—someone who wasn’t very smart.

We are steeped in a culture of high-stakes testing.  Year after year, children take Language Arts  assessments and get scores that tell them who they are as readers.  A four tells them that they are smart and that they are a really great reader.  A three says they are average and a pretty good reader.  Anything less than a three is a painful reminder of their reading inadequacies.  This test used to happen once a year but now, because we need better measures of growth, we are testing students at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and in some districts there’s a whole lot more testing in-between as well. Surely, our “threes” and “fours” will enjoy validation that they are “smart,” but what about the students for whom their scores reinforce that they are not? How long will they maintain a mindset that recognizes that the test score is not who they are and that they can change their scores if they work harder? I quit believing after my second failure and I can’t help but wonder if, in our haste to test, test, test so that we can measure, measure, measure, we have created a culture that perpetuates a cycle of devastating self-fulfilling prophecy.  Even the best teachers providing the best instruction face an uphill battle when legions of students believe they can’t.

Change Happens

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As recently as 2007, email was a very small part of my life. I’d check in every third day or so to clear the spam and read the occasional note I’d get. But then it started to happen in my work life that people would say, “Did you get the email I sent you?” Shamefully, I didn’t and I realized I’d better start checking a bit more frequently.

Next, I started checking my email at the end of each day. By and large, I was keeping up with the updates people would send me and I was feeling pretty in the loop…until, I started missing the things people would jot off in the morning that I needed to know for that day.

From that point on, I checked my email morning and night. In fact, I now have a Blackberry so I can check it between classes and during lunch too. Never will I be out of the loop again.

The issue of assessment keeps coming up in the conversations I have been having with teachers.
They are jazzed up and excited about new ways to get students thinking and talking and responding thoughtfully in reading and writing but yet, they are afraid. They wonder, “How will I assess this? Our report card asks for letter grades or numerical percentages.”

And so, they retreat from good teaching practices because they cannot reconcile how to make their teaching match their report card.

I have begun thinking that assessment is a lot like me and email. At first, it was what it was. I didn’t have a lot of reason to change. It worked for me the way I needed it to work. And then it didn’t, so I tweaked it and it was working again. Then it wasn’t working, so I changed it a lot and now it runs like a well-oiled machine.

The same thing has to happen with assessment. It is important to remember that report cards and assessment practices are no more than ink on paper. They derive from conversations that have happened at some point in the past by some group of thoughtful professionals. When things aren’t working, it’s time to start having conversations to think about what is working and what isn’t working. Granted, the change may happen slowly, but change happens.

And most of the time, change is for the better.

Good vs. Great Instruction

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This week when I visited a teacher to do a demonstration lesson in reading workshop, the teacher said, “I love it when you come in because it gives me time to watch my students. When you teach, I notice things about how they respond and how they think that I never noticed before.”

This conversation continued and we talked about how those noticings influence our teaching decisions. Who needs to learn what? How should I group them? Who’s getting it? Who needs follow-up?

Our jobs as teachers demand a lot from us. At the end of each day, we are all worn pretty thin from teaching seven different lessons, managing behavior, and ushering students to and from the far corners of the buildings we work in. There barely seems to be enough time to get through the plans we made for our immediate day let alone making time to reflect on them.

But I can’t help but remember what my colleague said, “I notice things about how they respond and think.” These revelations help us to plan instruction that makes a difference in children’s learning. Granted, it is easier to turn to the teacher manual and deliver the lesson that comes up next in the program but can we neglect to factor in what our observations and experiences tell us about what children need to know?

Teaching is a frenetic business and while I hate to add one more thing to an already full plate of things to do, I ask you to think about making time to reflect. What we learn might be the difference between good and great instruction.

Our lives as teachers are busy. Very busy. We know that good instruction relies on us reflecting on what our students need as readers and writers; however, when do we do that? On our prep? During lunch? In the car on the way to and from school? It seems like everything needs to fit into the cracks if it is going to get a check on the list of things to do.