My statement that was the end all to that twitter discussion and happily retweeted with agreement from my network was: “TEACH STUDENTS HOW TO THINK….THE TEST WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF!”

So is the test the problem or our teaching methods. Are we afraid to express ourselves in fear of making waves.

Next question: Do you teach your children to express their thoughts? Do you teach them to say no to peer pressure? Do you teach them to be a follower or a leader?

STUDENTS LEARN FROM POSITIVE ROLE MODELS! THEY LEARN BY EXAMPLE!

I ask you to reflect before you answer my last question defensively.

ARE YOU SETTING THE BEST EXAMPLE OF LEADERSHIP, COOPERATION, COURAGE, AND INDEPENDENCE AS AN EDUCATOR?

If yes, great. If not, what are you going to do about it.

Your post is awesome and reflects the change needed. Yeah for you!

I applaud you for continuing to be a lightning rod of great discussions. I also appreciate the way your mind works, creatively trying to improve things, no matter how poor the soil you start with is.

Without re-reading Chad’s reply (leaving myself room to discover something later), I agree with him. Standardized testing needs to go. I have found that when there is a healthy mentor relationship in place (aka teacher-student) that there is enough information to create the feedback loop you want to get out of this revised testing system.

As human beings grow we have a strong sense of what is that we need to learn next. As our visions of ourselves evolve, we have some sense of what the knowledge and skills are that we need to gain to become who we see ourselves as. When we have the mirror of a skilled mentor, not only can we aptly identify those things for ourselves, but s/he can help us connect what we already know and what we might not be aware of that we need to learn. And as Chad said, the important measure becomes did the student get what s/he wanted from the learning experience.

I can not imagine being able to make use of a test score that is supposed to inform me of how well I am critically thinking or transferring knowledge. I just don’t think any scan-tron or rubric can provide that feedback. I think it puts an unnecessary task in between the important relationship that needs to be had between teacher and students. I think using a test in this manner says, “I don’t trust myself.”

In the end, I am not complaining. My alternative here is to “opt-out.” There are more accurate and useful ways to accomplish what your aims are for me, and I think that is the relationship you speak of, the consultation that occurs with the student and family. If you have some method of demonstrating how a student is or isn’t critically thinking, connecting or transferring knowledge that resembles a test, then you use it. But that’s not how I am going to do it, and that’s why it shouldn’t be standardized. That would be a part of your style of relationship and feedback. I have a conversational and relational style that works for me.

Thanks again for holding the space for these conversations, Aaron.

-Adam

I am not in favor of continuing with standardized testing. Right now in education there is a critical lack of student input. Outside of outlier inquiry and PBL classrooms (thank you students and educators making these models work) students do not have a voice in education. The compromises we make as adults to align our work – not with standards or expectations – but with testing an testing windows – impair us from every recreating school as a customizable experience that asks the student, “What do you want to do?” I’m not suggesting we put all of the responsibility for teaching and learning on students who are not ready for it, but I’m arguing that we’ll never have students ready to learn on their own or to set and meet their own goals so long as we do that for them and think of a standardized curriculum, data set, or student as our end product. Students are customers, not products.

Standardized tests are an obstacle to creating relevance for students. The tests and their results determine the allocation of our resources, further taking away from our capacity to customize learning. They can go and we can benchmark student progress against personally meaningful goals beginning with caching kids to set goals and self-assess by asking, “Did your work get you what you wanted?”

Disconnect the term “standardized testing” from the system currently in place, and I’m still not sold.

I’ll continue to compromise with testing so I can continue to work on solutions to it and to serve students, but I won’t be sorry to see standardized testing go. We can improve standardized assessments and gather all the data we want, but the fundamental problem remains our insistence that all students, teachers, and schools must learn the same things and be judged the same way to be citizens of a democracy.

Cui bono? Not students; not us. A standardized electorate does not a democracy make. A standardized education does not an information-age skilled-worker, innovator, or entrepreneur make. Standardization favors replication over innovation. So here we are in a Toyota world. How long before the accelerators and brakes of the standards movement fail? What will be the cost to our students, ourselves, and our country then? The more we insist on kids being the same or being judged the same way, the more blind we become to problems AND opportunities outside the scope of our standardized window of attention. As difficult as it is to recall and fix thousands and thousands of cars, it’s more difficult to recall and re-educate thousands and thousands of people to retrain them for the jobs and lives for which a standardized education did not prepare them

I’m not saying let’s water-down standards or expectations. I’m saying let’s set high expectations according to what it is students want to do with their lives. Let’s help students use the skills you rightly champion to set courses for their lives that they value.

This will be hard work. It will require a redesign of schools and classrooms and ratios and roles. This will be hard work. It will ask us to value students as never before and cede our control of teaching to their control of learning. This will be hard work. It will not have standardized solutions or help us “manage” students better. This will be hard work, but I would argue for it.

The entire crux of my plan is based around Problem-Based Learning. I also don’t think it is homogonizing teaching if we are offering students specific areas that they can grow in critical thinking capacity. In addition, this type of assessment mirrors the world that you are describing by requiring transfer of knowledge across disciplines. In fact, this type of testing would probably be the most authentic experience that students have throughout their years of schooling. I also don’t see how this type of loosely-structured assessment would be “a death blow to student creativity, achievement, and passion.” The reality is that developing these types of critical thinking skills and solving problems in a creative way would have to be front and center in order for this model to work.

You aren’t the only one who can tell what your kids weaknesses are without slapping standardized tests on them. In fact, I think you are one of the individuals I talk about in my first paragraph who can’t seperate the model of current standardized testing with that of what I articulate throughout my post. Otherwise, you would see how many of your comments above align directly to my proposition.

The educational world can continue to fight some form of standardized assessment all they want, but the reality is, until we bring solutions to the table, political pundits will continue to get their way and believe that the current model of testing truly says something about student learning.

Thanks for your comment.

If we stopped teaching in a standardized one size fits all method and employed more methods such as PBL, or UDL, it would allow more individual success. We are moving into a world in which there will be no standardization of knowledge, skills, or even the meaning of success. Standardized testing will only fit into schools or classrooms that wish to control student growth and learning. Schools that start seeking to empower and give their students responsibility for learning will create environments which lead to non-standardized of learning on various timetables–they simply can’t use standardized tests…to do so would be a death blow to student creativity, achievement, and passion.

I can’t be the only one who can tell what my kids weaknesses are without slapping standardized test on them…am I?

I am satisfied with the ACT, SAT, GRE… etc. These tests demonstrate achievement using a number and can be used to quickly assess strengths and weaknesses.

For a more thorough assessment, tests must be given in smaller increments, more often, and be repeatable. When these are accomplished, STUDENTS should be held accountable for their learning.

Most importantly, these once-per-year tests are not a complete picture of any student or person’s ability. Standardized tests for students also do little to effectively evaluate teachers. They are even less able to evaluate administration.

Your conclusion calls out to teachers to take such an initiative. But to “put something out” is to await the approval of others. Teaches should try to find a solution that works for them and not worry of this approach will suit others. That way, when it works they shall lead by example and not by persuasion.