“When I become a teacher, my students are going to look at my syllabus and say, ‘You expect us to do what now?’” my friend D. said. “I believe in the multiple-intelligences theory.”

We talk about the freedom that the Digital Age has given us for self-expression.

But has it really? The Internet is, largely, a text-based medium. Yes, we do have websites that are visual galleries but, for example, the website of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and even the galleries themselves — are filled with text.

Writing is becoming an ever more important skill. Kara Miller wrote an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, “Failure to communicate“, in which she discusses how weak are the writing skills of incoming college students.

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

–Kara Miller

I have thought about this problem myself as I pursue becoming a teacher. Robyn Jackson in her book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching suggested if students are weak on developing opening paragraphs for essays, give them assignments just on opening paragraphs; if they are weak on topic sentences, give them assignments on topic sentences; if they are weak on the structure of an entire essay, give them assignments to write entire essays. I think of the hundreds of students I will have and how long it will take just those shorter assignments.

I admire D. She’s very passionate about challenging her future students and encouraging them to think for themselves. I admire that she wants to use a portfolio system — requiring tests, essays, presentations, and class participation — rather relying solely on one channel. In fact, that is the kind of assessment system that I want to use. But I wonder how much of our time employing that is going to require.

I have thought about giving students two grades per paper. The first for their grammar and the second for their arguments. Reading Kara Miller’s op-ed article, I wonder if I can really separate the two. If the student does not clearly spell out what he or she meant to say, then the teacher is just guessing at the meaning.

D., by her own admission, did not get the best grades in high school. She was not interested in the history she was taught and only rarely in the books. Her interests were more attuned to what she’s now studying, philosophy and psychology. She did not feel engaged with the work and as such did not care about the assessments she was given.

“Middle and high schools do not teach critical thinking,” she asserts.

I remember feeling that way as well. Disagreeing with the teacher in an essay was often a recipe for a bad grade, even in honors and advanced placement classes. And this was before the institution of high stakes testing in Massachussetts.

How can the MCAS assess critical thinking?

It cannot, and we should not expect it to measure that. The MCAS presents the items as if everything can be categorized as right or wrong. We can agree that Shakespeare wrote sonnets and plays, that his works were written in iambic pentameter, often rhyming; we can agree that Thomas Hardy wrote novels and poetry, perhaps we can even agree that it was the poor reviews of critics of his poetry that pushed him to writing novels; and we can call facts forms in which authors wrote, works that are attributed to them.

But on the meaning of the work, on the interpretation of the works, there is plenty of room for disagreement. You may think this passage was parody, was an ironic comment on something; I may think the author meant it as stated. The author cannot tell us and, in truth, I wouldn’t want him or her to clarify.

Ambiguity is good for thought.

You May Also Like

• Testing, Assessment, and Feedback
• Children Left Behind: Statistics and Abstractions
• Knowing and Understanding

In This Essay

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson, Ph.D., with Lou Aronica

Alfred Binet, Wikipedia

Lewis Terman, Wikipedia

I have always been aware of ideas of intelligence and, therefore, ideas of Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.).

Unless you count a silly Internet test I took in college, I have never taken an I.Q. test. Often I have wondered what my I.Q. was, assuming as I did that I.Q. was a valid measure of intelligence. Since I did well in my scholastic subjects, I thought I would score high on an I.Q. test and I wanted in my insecurity about my own talents an objective verification of what I wanted to believe about myself but doubted.

When I moved to Ohio for college, I learned from friends that administering I.Q. tests is routine procedure in Ohio. I felt cheated then that Massachusetts did not do the same.

Now, however, having read more about the history of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, I am thankful not to have had my I.Q. measured in this way.

The Frenchman

Modern intelligence testing can trace back to some work done by a Frechman named Alfred Binet. Binet had no formal training in medicine or psychology, but was self-taught. He never held a post as a professor of psychology and this may contribute to his relative obscurity today.

His interest turned to developmental psychology after the birth of his daughters, Madeleine in 1885 and Alice two years later in 1887. His work my have influenced Jean Piaget, the famous child psychologist.

In 1899 Binet joined the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. Five years later, the French Government commissioned the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child to create a commission for the education of retarded children and develop a method for identifying developmentally challenged individuals so that they could be given additional educational support.

The result was the Binet-Simon Scale. The original test would not resemble what I think of when I think of an I.Q. test today. A facilitator would go through a series of thirty tasks, from a simple handshake to remembering a string of random digits to making judgments about situations from vague descriptions. At the end, a child’s mental age would be estimated. Binet had determined what tasks children of a certain age should be able to perform by taking a group of children identified as average by their teachers and using them to establish the baseline.

Binet acknowledged the limitations of his scale. His scale was only valid, he said, on children from similar backgrounds and was not intended as a universal scale. He believed that intelligence was not a simple quality and was influenced environment and educational opportunities. He worked for the rest of his life to refine the scale, publishing three versions before his relatively early death at 54.

And the American

The man who is responsible for developing intelligence testing in the United States, who started from the work of Alfred Binet, was Lewis Terman. He took the Binet-Simon Scale as a starting point and adapted it, becoming known as the Stanford-Binet Scale because he was a professor at Stanford at the time he published his work on the Binet-Simon Scale, The Stanford Revision to the Binet-Simon Scale.

Reading about the beliefs of Binet and Terman, I cannot imagine they would have agreed about anything. Terman believed that intelligence was a fixed quality that could atrophy with inadequately stimulating environments or with disuse, but could never be developed beyond an inborn natural limit.

What I find most unsettling in reading about Terman is that he believed in eugenics. He believed that humans should engage in selective breeding for the betterment of the human race. One stated goal for testing was the “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency,” (Lewis Terman et al qtd in Wikipedia).

Although he used Binet’s work as a starting point, Terman did not heed Binet’s acknowledgment of limitations of his own scale. While Binet said that results of his test were only valid if they were used on children with comparable backgrounds, Terman sought to write an universal test. After developing his test he administered it to native speakers of Spanish and poor blacks. Rather than use the results to refine his test, to see if the test accurately assessed the intelligence of his non-white subjects, he assumed his test was valid using the results to condemn the intellectual capacity of whole ethnic groups. Terman judged his Hispanic and Black subjects to be mentally inferior and more prone to crime.

Categorizing People: A Cautionary Tale

Terman took Binet’s work, which sought to assess children in order make sure they were all given appropriate instruction so that they could all receive an education, and perverted it. He wrote that the Hispanic and the Black children,

should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master [abstractions] but they can often be made effecient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

–Lewis Terman quoted in The Element, pages 39-40.

I am afraid to think of how persistent this idea still is.

If you doubt that this idea persists, consider the following: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, claims to predict preparedness for college. The SAT, which Ken Robinson points out was also developed by a eugenicist (The Element, page 41), has challenged as being unfair to black students, yet it continues to be used. The claims that it can predict success in college have received mixed reviews. Yet it continues to determine who gets into college.

The Lesson

I don’t believe in fixed quotients of intelligence. Evidence shows that with study and practice, individuals can change how they score on standardized tests. But I think that there is an undercurrent of testing not as a tool for assessment and course correction, but rather as an immutable ranking system.

In developing tests and thinking about using tests, we should make sure that we are using them to guide us, that we try to develop them so that they are fair, that we periodically test our tests and question our assumptions and that we recognize the limitations of testing.

Otherwise, we could be snuffing out whole constellations of bright stars.

I am ambivalent when there are too many good things over the course of a week.

My attention is caught among trying to sift through all these different news articles and bring you some of the best that I can find. I want to share all the interesting things that I found but if my attention is strained trying to find them, your attention is just as strained because of the information with which you are trying to keep up yourself.

I hope that you will enjoy the articles that I have included here.

Do you have suggestions on how I can make the Weekly Review more interesting or more useful? Please comment below. I want you to enjoy the Weekly Review and get something out of it. I don’t want to be another aggregator that you ignore.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Ready for Take-Off!
• School Reforms
• How to Think
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians
• On Whose Merit?

Ready for Take-Off!

• For Octogenarian Pilot, Sky Is The Limit: an Interview of Anne Osmer by Melissa Block, All Things Considered, NPR

Anything is possible, and you are never too old. If you don’t believe me, ask Anne Osmer. She began taking flying lessons after she turned 80. Yes, you read that right she began flying lessons after 80. She’s now 83 years old and took her first solo flight.

Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

School Reforms

• Why Tests Make Me So Angry by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Ban Homework and Lengthen School Days by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

The other night, I sat out a dance to talk with Erin, a teacher’s aide for the deaf, who I met recently. We talked about school reforms and she had some interesting insights. She suggested, since we are no longer a predominantly agrarian society, that we should eliminate summers and instead institute six weeks of school followed by two weeks of break, or some similar rotation. After each six week segment, kids who did not fully understand the concepts could receive remediation — literally, a remedy for their misunderstanding — much sooner than having to wait until summer school an having failed once.

My friend John Spencer writes in these two essays about what he sees wrong with education. I don’t agree with everything that he says. For example, he thinks that we should lengthen the school day but I disagree. I’m more inclined to agree with Erin about altering the school year and keeping the days short. I remember seeing an article a while back that said the schools in the foreign countries that we are constantly pointing to as beating our students have a different schedule for breaks but less hours each day.

The human brain is like a muscle. Repeated practice of certain skills strengthens those areas of the brain. But, the brain can also suffer fatigue which makes its attempts to retain less effective. We need to make sure we take a balanced approach.

I just picked up two more books by Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation. Perhaps after I read them I will have a few more ideas on school reform myself.

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How to Think

• Critical thinking? You need knowledge by Diane Ravitch, The Boston Globe
• 10 Surprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing by Demian Farnworth, Copyblogger
• How to Read by Brian Clark, Copyblogger
• Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’ by Jon Hamilton, All Things Considered, NPR

While I thought I would find information relevant to improving my blog on Copyblogger.com, I did not think that I would find articles applicable to a classroom.

I am glad that I was wrong.

In “10 Suprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing,” Demian Farnsworth mentions one of my favorite books, Letters to the Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and another I’ve wanted to pick up, The Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace. Some of the other books on the list are the kind of business books that you would expect to find on a site about blogging and turning a profit from your blog.

At the end of the article, Farnsworth writes

The more you have in your brain — both from study and from direct experience — the more fresh, new, killer ideas you’ll come up with.

And that reminded me of an article I read back in September in the Boston Globe, which I linked to in one of my longer posts, Children Left Behind in which I tried to cover too much and everything got diluted. But Ms. Ravitch reminds us “Critical thinking? You need knowledge,” that the ability to draw conclusions requires us to synthesize our direct experience alongside our indirect experience to what currently analyzing.

Have you ever met someone who knows everything about a particular topic, the minutest of details, stuff that only real adherents would know, but who knows nothing else? Those people are a little boring, aren’t they? They also cannot see beyond the scope of their interest.

Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians

• The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston, an exhibit at the Boston Public Library
• Claiming Poe: An Interview with Paul Lewis by Kathleen Burge, boston.com
• The Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Robin Young, Here&Now, NPR
• Quoth the Poet by June Wulff, The Boston Globe
• Embracing Poe by Jan Gardner, Shelf Life, boston.com

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. He would not have been happy to admit it.

For a long time we Bostonians have not wanted to admit he was a son of Boston. I think we are still upset that he called us “frogpondians,” after the Frog Pond in the center of the Boston Common.

Dr. Paul Lewis, curator of the exhibit “The Raven in the Frog Pond,” thinks that Poe was referring to the writers and publishers around Boston when Poe spoke of “frogpondians.” Dr. Lewis conjectures that

…when he thought about those writers, he thought that they were cause-driven in their writing. So they were constantly croaking out in defense of their causes.
–Dr. Paul Lewis quoted in “Claiming Poe” in The Boston Globe

Now, 160 years after the author’s death, Boston is trying reclaim Poe as their own. With the talk of Boston Noir that I’ve seen in the pages of the Boston Globe — a new genre name for Boston’s rough and tumble, tragic stories of working class city dwellers that includes work such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed — I can understand why we would be giving Poe a second look.

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On Whose Merit?

• In AP effort, students soar – and teachers unions flunk, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• It takes a village to educate a child by William Irvin, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay unfair and divisive by Anne Wass, President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• why merit pay is the wrong way by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Obama Administration Pushes Merit Pay by Claudio Sanchez, All Things Considered, NPR
• Compromise can compensate for misguided merit-pay ruling, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay forgets some factors by Bill Bell, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Whose needs come first in schools? by Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe

I have written about my disagreement with merit pay for teachers previously. This will be a contentious issue for some time.

The issue has been in the news a lot around Boston since August. A non-profit in Massachusetts won a grant from ExxonMobil to reward teachers for their students’ performance on Advance Placement exams. The Massachusetts Teachers Association said that the payments violated the terms of the teachers’ contracts and they could not take them.

I am on the side of the Massachusetts Teachers Assocation. I have read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and I have worked two sales jobs in which I could earn bonuses. The incentive of earning bonuses did not motivate me to work harder. And I have seen it cause co-workers to consider compromising on their ethics to earn the extra money.

I cannot more elegantly summarize why merit pay is a horrible idea than by recommending you watch this TED Lecture, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

Here’s the big secret. All of our social science proves that incentives only work on clearly defined tasks. So, if the task is to get a student to pass a test, incentives would motivate the teachers to teach to the test.

If the task is to raise intellectually curious, independent minded, responsible adults, then incentives will not work.

Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

In This Essay

“No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education”, Why School? by Mike Rose

Monday Metaphor: Growth, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“MCAS scores fall shy of target”, Boston Globe, by James Vaznis

“Charter schools see more attrition”, Boston Globe by James Vaznis

“The next chapter on education reform”, Boston Globe by Gov. Deval Patrick

“Critical thinking? You need knowledge”, Boston Globe by Diane Ravitch

“These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”, Boston Globe

Ideals and Realities

I had some great conversations about education and public policy with a friend. She would take the pragmatic side of the argument while I would take the idealistic side. While I would speak of sweeping visions of what education should be, she would want specific plans on implementation.

Our arguments usually ended with me saying that so much depended on implementation, that what I thought could really have a great impact, and her saying that no implementation would be perfect and I needed to get my head out of the clouds.

Implementing High Stakes Testing

Last week saw the publication of the test scores for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Part of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, this standardized test fulfills the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Even before the test results were released, I have been thinking about testing and No Child Left Behind as evidenced by my past posts. John Spencer’s video post, Monday Metaphor: Growth was one thing rolling around in my head a few days before the MCAS release.

His next post but one, “Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, published the day after the MCAS results, the same day I was in the midst of rereading “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, ramped up my thinking even more:

• Do we have reasonable expectations for children’s achievement?
• Where do our expectations of academic achievement come from?
• Are the tests we are using sufficient to gauge academic achievement?
• Are there better ways to gauge academic achievement?

Single Modalities, Multiple Modalities

The assessment system being implemented at Mr. Spencer’s school is going to be single modality: a multiple choice test. Those tests are easy to write and easy to administer and easy to analyze. But what kind of feedback do such tests give us about student achievement? These tests only provide an assessment of one type of intellectual and cognitive capacities.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is a grandiose name. So many years have passed since I took one of the proto-types that I had forgotten its structure. I had assumed it was a simple, straight-forward multiple choice test just like I remember the SATs. But comprehensive may not be ironic in the title. The MCAS uses the following forms of assessment:

• multiple-choice questions
• mathematical short answer questions
• short open-response questions
• long open-response compositions

Unlike straight objective tests, the MCAS in the ideal assesses recall, recognition and synthesis. In reality, the recall and recognition sections also assess the ability of students to form educated guesses.

More of a child’s abilities are measured on tests like these. Think of an analogy to the physical body. Just as you cannot get a complete picture of someone’s fitness and health by testing only their upper body strength, you cannot get a full picture of a child’s academic and intellectual fitness by testing only their ability to recall and recognize and guess.

Asking the Right Questions

“But there are, in fact, a host of procedural and technical problems in developing, administering, scoring, and interpreting such tests. (And there are also concerns about how schools and districts can manipulate them.) ‘In most cases,’ writes measurement specialist Robert Linn, ‘the instruments and technology have not been up to the demands placed on them by high-stakes accountability.’ No wonder, then, that there is a robust debate among testing experts about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a school’s achievement.”
– Mike Rose from “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, pages 45-46.

Are we asking the right questions? I don’t think we are. Much like the recent Town Hall Meetings, if we can even call them that, there is a lot of shouting without a lot of discussion. Rather than delve into the deep, complex questions we are looking for simple solutions.

I applaud the editors of the Boston Globe for their recent editorial “These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”. They argue that if the MCAS shows we fail to make the No Child Left Behind’s mandate for adequate yearly progress, it is because the test has integrity and has not been dumbed down to artificially inflate our success rate. I hope that this is true. By 2014, No Child Left Behind requires that 100% of students — including 100% of vulnerable populations, English language learners, and special needs students — will be expected to achieve “proficiency” the MCAS.

Is expecting every student to pass really a useful metric? Won’t some critics cry out that if every student passes the test was too easy?

Since we are going to continue to use high-stakes testing, I hope that our government can look at the scores, include the subsets of vulnerable populations, and allocate resources to help boost achievement. Use the MCAS as an assessment of the health of our education system, like a CAT scan so that we know where to focus in and where the illness is most severe.

But at the end of the day, a test score remains a statistical abstraction. If the MCAS is used to gather statistics, then it is an opportunity wasted.

Implementing Charter Schools

Talking about high stakes testing and the performance of our public schools often leads to a discussion of charter schools.

There is a lot of controversy around charter schools in this country. You cannot deny that they take resources away from public schools: even if they don’t take the cream of the crop, which many people including myself believe they do, tax money is taken from the public schools for each student enrolled in a charter school.

I am very confused by the claims about the success of charter schools. Neither side agrees: proponents say that charter schools are an undeniable success; opponents say that charter schools are no better than public schools. I heard of one study that said charter schools performed no better, and in some cases performed worse, than Boston’s public schools. I saw news articles about charter schools outperforming Boston’s public schools.

Gaming the System?

But are we using the correct metrics? Are we looking at only the students that graduate from the schools?

An article in the Boston Globe struck me. James Vaznis tells us that “Fewer than half of the students who enrolled in Boston charter high schools as freshmen over the past five years made it through to graduation, usually departing for other schools, according to a new study,” that was published on September 17.

Many students who left the charter schools re-enrolled in Boston public schools. Critics may claim that the students who left wanted to get an easier diploma. That is possible. That needs to be investigated.

Can a charter school like MATCH Charter Schools really judge itself successful when 25% of its seniors left during the academic year, with “some students [transferring to Boston public schools] just a few weeks before graduation”? What does it mean when a charter school publishes its graduating class’s college acceptance rate if 25% of its seniors dropped out?

Just as we need to be sure that we are using the correct metrics when we are evaluating a child’s achievement, we need to be using the correct metrics in our discussions of public schools versus charter schools. Especially when their is so much talk of expanding the role of charter schools. What if we were to eliminate public schools and look at the statistics of a world of charter schools? We might just find that they perform no better than the system we have now.

With all the controversy swirling around President Obama’s Address to Students, I was curious to see what he would say yesterday.

I wanted to form my own opinion of the address. I had avoided reading all of the advance press that I could. I knew there was talk of school boards voting to prevent its presentation in school; I knew conservative talking heads and shouting mouths had condemned the very idea without any advanced copy, had dismissed a political tradition; I knew there were parents who were thinking of keeping their children home as a boycott.

As much as I had anticipated the speech, I was disappointed by his speech. More than disappointed, in fact: the President’s speech made me angry.

To Boycotting Parents

Before I discuss my own reaction to the address, I would like to address any dissenting parents who may be reading this. The act of boycotting this speech I find particularly baffling.

What an opportunity you missed! Let your children watch the speech in school, watch the speech for yourselves after work, and then over dinner sit down — or make the time, as Obama’s mother made for him — and discuss with your children what they heard, what they took away, and how you disagree. Show your kids that you respect and value them.

If you disagree with what the President said, explain to your children why and make an argument for an alternative. If you found that the President’s address was full of propaganda, find instances of it in the speech and point them out to your children. Your children are going to need to think critically in the future and this was an excellent opportunity to help them exercise that skill.

Why School? and the President’s Address

“When was the last time you were moved by a high-level speech about education? I don’t mean by the personal testimonials we hear at graduations or award ceremonies, but by a policy or political speech.”
– Mike Rose from “In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling” in Why School?, page 25.

As I mentioned in The Marketplace and Ideas, I have been thinking of the purpose of school lately.

Inspired by an interview on Marketplace, I read Mike Rose’s book Why School?, which I intend to review soon. The book questions of the way we think about and discuss schools and the purpose of public education. I have begun rereading it and I continue to think about the purpose of public education.

I agree with Mr. Rose that a robust, healthy public education system is vital to our nation. In fact, I think public education is a civil right. At its best, our school system is our strongest public institution, one with the greatest chance of actually furthering an informed and civil democracy.

My Hope for the Speech

“We need public talk that links education to a more decent, thoughtful, open society. Talk that raises in us as a people the appreciation for deliberation and reflection, or for taking intellectual risks and thinking widely–for the sheer power and pleasure of using our minds, alone or in concert with others. We need a discourse that inspires young people to think gracefully and moves young adults to become teachers and foster such development.”
– Mike Rose, from “In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling” in Why School?, page 29.

While some elements of that were there in the speech, I found the overall speech weak. The President’s words seemed so divorced from reality; it was simply a high-level policy speech.

A Weak Presence

His words did not light a fire under the students. The only cheer from the crowd that I remember was when Obama asked the crowd to give a round of applause to the Senior Class President who had introduced him.

He did not work the narratives of any student into the body of the speech. Although he dropped the names of three students who struggled against difficult conditions to succeed, that’s all they were, name-dropping in an effort to create the appearance of inspiration. The three students were listed, one after another, in a formulaic way: “I am thinking of {student’s name here} from {town here} who rose above, who overcame {insert challenge here} and who is now going onto college!” He gave more time to J.K. Rowling and Michael Jordan.

Talking about Jordan was effective for me and I imagine for the parents of the students. Michael Jordan does offer an inspiring quote — Jordan said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed.” — but his career with the Chicago Bulls spanned 1984 through 1998. Most high school seniors were only 6 or 7 when Jordan retired from the Bulls.

Is it OK to Fail? Or Not?

“These people succeeded because they understood that you can’t let your failures define you — you have to let your failures teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently the next time. So if you get into trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act right. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Students, September 8, 2009

What angered me most about Obama’s speech was rhetoric about learning from failures. In this age of high-stakes testing, this age of “objective” metrics, this age of No Child Left Behind, where that schools fail to meet certain metrics are punished by having their resources reduced, there is not space enough to let a child fail. In this age of 25 to 30 kids to a classroom, there is not time enough for a teacher to give a struggling student individual attention.

It is grand to tell a child to take responsibility for his or her education. But how do you expect a child to do that? What skills do the children have to take responsibility for their own education if they have never learned study skills?

Mike Rose points out:

“No one, no one, develops free of local and broader-scale institutions (from sports clinic to the military), social networks, government projects and programs (from transportation infrastructure to school loans), and so on. …it does not diminish the important of individual commitment and effort also to acknowledge the tremendous role played in achievement by the kind, distribution, and accessibility of institutions, programs, and other resources. And these resources, as everybody knows, are not equally available.”
– Mike Rose from “Introduction” in Why School?, page 10.

When I was in high school, my grade was a test grade for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Our results did not matter and even if we failed all of the subjects, we would receive our diplomas.

Now students who repeatedly fail the MCAS are granted not a diploma but a certificate of attendance. What if the MCAS were actually an assessment system, a test administered to judge what needed to be reinforced, what areas students had not achieve competence or mastery but that just offered an assessment of the schools? I think that kids would be able to take more intellectual risks, the type the President thinks we should be taking.

When I went to college, I wanted to double major in the Humanities and the Fine Arts. Although I had no technical training in high school, I could have enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts specialty degree. I received a lot of Bs and Cs in my studio art classes and often heard, “You’ve got good, solid ideas that are worth pursuing but your technical skills in drawing or sculpting are weak.”

Because I was afraid of losing my scholarship, I gave up my art classes. I was afraid to take the risk to become the artist I wanted to become. Despite options that I had, I decided to make an economic decision and change course to be less of a drag on my family. And, I’ll admit, seeing those Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs in art bruised my ego.

And I am sure students in middle school and high school hesitate and refuse to take risks for a host of reasons, gentle egos and many others. I think of one of the first essays I wrote here, Testing, Assessment, and Feedback. Students failing should not result in stigma and sorting them to the bottom of the pile. If a failure is accompanied by strong feedback and guidance, a person can roar back.

Life Circumstances Don’t Matter

“But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Students, September 8, 2009

Poverty and illness, violence in the home and in the neighborhood, working parents or neglect, and even homelessness. These are realities for many people in our nation. These are real challenges. President Obama pays lip service to these challenges being “no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”

Each person’s life has its own hardships. And challenges do need to be overcome but some challenges are much greater than others. But simply stating, “Stay in school because you’re letting yourself and your country down,” is not enough. Obama knows the power of story and narrative, but this speech was lacking in it.

As I said above, he mentioned three students who were college-bound despite their hardship in a formulaic, abstract way. Why didn’t he pull together a grand narrative or interweave a small number of narratives?

Parental and Adult Involvement

I want to get into teaching to help kids learn, to help them learn to think independently, and to turn them on to power of literature to allow them to enter the thoughts and experiences of others and to offer them a vocabulary to talk about their own thoughts and experiences. But I am daunted by the idea that I will have five or six sets of 25, 30, or even 35 kids sitting in my classroom, all with different levels of achievement in reading and writing that I will have to help guide. It is a challenge that I will not shy away from and that I look forward to.

When I told my co-worker, Bill, that I wanted to be a teacher, his memory of Mr. K– jumped to his mind. As I listened to him recall Mr. K–, I thought that I could be and hope to be Mr. K– for someone some day. I’ve at least got the right initial. I could see that this man had really moved him.

“I remember,” he said and his eyes lit up, “one history teacher that I had in high school, Mr. K–. He was like a father to me: I fixed him in my memory, the age he was when he was my teacher. I bawled when I learned that he died.”

What Bill said next stunned me.

“I’ll never forget what he said to us.” Bill paused and shook his head. He shifted in his seat and it I could see him calling up the way Mr. K– had carried himself. “Mr. K– looked at us and said, ‘You want to be sponges!’ he said, ‘You want to sit there, receive knowledge as if it were water, and wait for me to squeeze it out of you with some test! C’mon guys, you need to think for yourselves.’”

How relevant in our climate of high-stakes testing and teaching-to-the-test.

This evening, on my ride home from a long day at work, I was listening to NPR, as I often do and as my first essays Limiting Literature and Sinking a “Lifeboat”… prove.

Although, right now, I work at a bank and get little bits of economic news all day, I occasionally enjoy listening to Marketplace and decided to tune in. Their presentation of economic and financial news is more even handed and thoughtful than other media who often seem like frustrated ad men rather than journalist.

Today, though, they had an interview that startled me.

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The Next Generation of Worker

And now education has become a part of that narrative.

We hear our politicians talk about schools preparing students for twenty-first century jobs and the knowledge economy. We hear the statistics from the news about the insufficient number of Americans becoming computer programmers and engineers, about how Americans are losing our collective footing in the race to advance science. We hear the conversation about how all the high paying jobs are in technology and applied science.

So now we need to push our children into the science and technical fields if we hope for them to advance. We need to reorient our education system to give our children the skills they will need when they become workers.

Now the Obama administration, not taking any lessons from the failure that was No Child Left Behind, is discussing plans to test to make sure our school districts are focusing on science and math.

Why School?

Professor Rose questions if we are too narrowly focused on the economy and what the very purpose of education is.

True North

What is the purpose of education? Do we want to create workers or citizens? We talk about “workers” and “taxpayers” but we don’t talk about “citizens” anymore.

I am tired of being a “taxpayer” most of the year and a “voter” during an election cycle. The distinction is important because a “taxpayer” is passive but a “citizen” is active. A citizen has thoughts and opinions.

If you think I am busy making nice distinctions, remember that the many people in marketing and advertising have degrees in psychology. Remember, too, that marketing firms spend large parts of their budgets on focus groups to find what phrasing is most effective.

Reflective citizens will certainly work and will work many of the jobs we have now. I like to think that they will perhaps work more thoughtfully and will take a wider view of work and long term projects, rather than on restrict their focus to the quarter to quarter myopia that has been at fault in these booms and busts.

A knowledge of history allows people to analyze the causes of past events and think about how people solved problems and look for analogies to their current situation. Perhaps if we had had a better knowledge of history, we could have seen the most recent crash approaching or perhaps not. But without any recourse to history, we need to relearn every lesson for ourselves.

Outside the Box

Now here’s an irony, Tess, that has struck me. The business community, time after time in position papers and opinion pieces, tells us that it needs people who can make frontline decisions, who communicate well, who are creative, who think outside the box. And again, if you have a curriculum that doesn’t generate and encourage that kind of thinking and learning, then you’re not going to produce those kinds of folks.

If we limit literacy skills to reading technical documents and economic reports, we are doing a disservice to our future citizen business leaders.

If we cut music education and arts education, both of which have been shown to improve intelligence and creative thinking, we are doing a disservice to our future citizen business leaders.

If we focus on testing because it is easy to tool with which to measure, we are doing our future citizen business leaders a grave disservice. A written, multiple-choice high stakes test does not allow students to demonstrate their decision-making skills nor their creativity.

All standardize tests demonstrate is how well the student takes standardized tests.

I am looking forward to reading Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us and seeing what additional arguments Professor Rose outlines.

“A hunter left his cabin and hiked two miles south, turned and hiked two miles west, shot a bear, and hiked two miles north back to his cabin. What color was the bear?”

If you answered, “White,” you gave the right answer. But how did you arrive at the answer?

Educators need to concern themselves as much with how their students arrived at the answer as they concern themselves whether the answer was correct.

What a Trivia Night Can Teach Us about Teaching

Everyone wanted to know how Justin knew the answer.

“Well,” Justin began shyly, “I noticed that all of the numbers in the problem were the number two.”

“Go on,” we prodded.

“And, on a job application, when they ask you about your race, white is usually the second option. So, I figured the bear must be white.”

Of course that wasn’t the explanation the brain teaser game provided. The real explanation had something to do with the fact that the only place on earth where you could walk in that pattern and end up back where you started was on the north pole and the only bears on the north pole were polar bears. But, Justin hadn’t used any of that reasoning. He got the answer right, but he didn’t really understand the problem.
– From Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Dr. Robyn Jackson, page 112.

Without asking Justin how he arrived at the correct answer, the other contestants would never have figured out that Justin had won through false reasoning. Teachers need to engage their students and solicit this kind of feedback in their classrooms, as I discussed in my post Testing, Assessment, and Feedback, to insure their students aren’t winning through false reasoning.

If he had been asked, “Do you get why that’s the right answer?”, I hope that Justin would have said, “No, not really. I was kind of lucky.”

And we need to hope that our students will be able to say the same.

Do you understand me?

At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.
– Socrates in Plato’s Apologia, from The Complete Dialogues of Plato (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds.), pages 7-8.

What do we mean when we say, “I know it” or “I understand it” or “I got it”? And how can we be sure that we really do?

Cognitive scientist Dr. Daniel Willingham writes about how to improve teaching by employing applicable knowledge from the neuro- and cognitive sciences. In his essay, “Why Students Think They Understand–When They Don’t”, he discusses two heuristics that we employ that can trick us into believing we know something whether we actually do or not: “familiarity” and “partial access.”

Familiarity
Each of us is busy and each of us is dealing with a steady stream of information flowing at us and over us. We need to employ heuristics, methods of screening information to make sure we are assimilating everything we need to accomplish our tasks.

When we are familiar with something, when something has been primed for us (to use another cognitive science expression), we are more likely to discount the amount of attention that it needs and focus on what is new.

In high school and college, preparing for tests meant skimming through my notes. Often I would find myself seeing a familiar phrase or word and, in my head, check a little box, saying to myself, “Yep, I know that. And I know that. Hey, and that too!” If I came across something I had forgotten or that seemed unfamiliar, I would spend time on that. This probably was not the most effective studying method.

And, of course, there were times when I misread a question while taking the test because I was familiar with part of it in one context and did not read the whole question closely.

Perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt.

Partial Access
I have embarrassed myself, as I think we all have, by overstating my knowledge. I thought because I knew something about something related to what was being sought that I could drill down to the correct knowledge. The instances that I haven’t been able to remind me to laugh at myself.

Partial access is that feeling we get that the answer is right on the tip of our tongues. We may know things related to the right answer and as we toss about in our memories we may find we are unable to come to the right answer. Because we know things related to the right answer and have encountered the right answer in context related to those things we are able to recall, we can fool ourselves into thinking we know the right answer.

Now that we know this, what do we do with it?

While recall is foundational to knowledge, it is a function of memory. Knowledge is the ability to manipulate, to integrate, or to apply, or a combination of those operations, the facts and figures stored in your memory towards some end.

Teachers can provide students with assessments and self-tests that they can use to judge the depth of their own knowledge. An educator’s job is to help train the student how to effectively and efficiently learn the material and assess for themselves where the gaps are that they need to fill, to teach their students to be wise and not to think they know what they do not know.

When designing curricula and tests, teachers who are aware of the effects of familiarity and partial access will be able to design their classes in such a way as to insure that students understand why an answer is correct and explain how they know something. Then the teacher will know whether the students understood the lesson.

When I was in middle and high school, perhaps even before starting with elementary school, I was a smart kid. Being smart was a major component in my identity.

Even now I can hear the voices of my mother and father praising me, “You’re so smart, Matthew.” My teachers too would tell me that I was “bright” or “smart”, one or two went so far as to say that I was “gifted.”

What if all those well meaning adults were doing me a disservice by offering me the praise that they did?

Self-definition and self-narrative

Early I learned that the purpose of education was to expand the mind and to build character. I studied because I was curious about the world. Of course I recognized that achieving high scores would open doors to me. But I realized that the doors would open to further learning and deeper understandings. I sought to earn good grades so that I would have opportunities to continue to advance my education.

Even going through school, I noticed that many of my peers looked not at their education but at their grades. Some of my formative experiences gave me a flexibility that perhaps some of my peers lacked.

In good company

There were things I could not physically accomplish with my left foot. But I wanted to achieve, so I worked and worked. My parents praised my dedication. My teachers praised my drive. My private instructors praised my work ethic, taking private lessons to reach my goals.

In school, I was praised for my mind and how easily things came to me. At taekwondo, I was praised for my effort. The favorite saying of the head of my dojang, Mr. James Kenney, was, “It is not practice that makes perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” I took this saying to heart.

The nitty gritty

Jonah Lerner reminds us that our myth of the genius, using the example of Isaac Newton and the story of the apple, is just that a myth. Newton began thinking seriously about gravity in 1666 but did not publish his theories on gravity until 1687, twenty-one years later. “Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles,” Lerner writes, “to stick with the same stubborn mystery – why did the apple fall, but the moon remain in the sky? – until he found the answer.”

Imagine, for a moment, two people of equal intelligence. One of these people continues in the face of adversity while the other is a shrinking violet. Which do you think is going to accomplish more?

In praising intellect alone, we are doing the people we seek to praise a disservice. Alfie Kohn speaks at length of praise as a reward and the demotivating effect of praise on learning in his book Punished by Rewards. Hidden in praise of intellect — “You’re so smart!”, for example — is an assumption that for smart people, effort and work are not required. With this praise we communicate to our children an idea of intelligence called, among other things, “fixed intelligence” or “innate intelligence,” the idea that there is a fixed quotient of intelligence that remains fundamentally constant throughout life.

The perils of praise

Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit. For much of the last decade, Dweck and her colleagues have tracked hundreds of fifth-graders in 12 different New York City schools. The children were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which took an age-appropriate version of the IQ test. After taking the test, one group was praised for their intelligence – “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said – while the other group was praised for their effort and told they “must have worked really hard.”

Dweck then gave the same fifth-graders another test. This test was designed to be extremely difficult – it was an intelligence test for eighth-graders – but Dweck wanted to see how they would respond to the challenge. The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, quickly became discouraged.

The final round of intelligence tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test. The students who had been praised for their effort raised their score, on average, by 30 percent. This result was even more impressive when compared to the students who had been praised for their intelligence: their scores on the final test dropped by nearly 20 percent. A big part of success, Dweck says, stems from our beliefs about what leads to success.
– “The truth about grit,” in The Boston Sunday Globe, August 2nd, 2009, by Jonah Lerner (emphasis mine)

Read the findings again:

• Fifth-graders who were praised for their intelligence after taking a fifth-grade age-appropriate IQ test, gave up more quickly on the more challenging IQ test designed for eight-graders. Then, when given a second fifth-grade age-appropriate IQ test, their scores declined by nearly 20%.
• Fifth-graders praised for their effort on the fifth-grade IQ test persisted in the face of the eighth-grade IQ test and then their scores on the second fifth-grade IQ test increased by 30%.

Children learn young to detect sincere versus insincere praise as well as sincere versus insincere criticism. The way that praise is used now carries a social stigma with it, in fact: children believe that teachers praise only when a student has reached the limits of his or her ability and need outside help. In fact, children believe that someone offering sincere, critical appraisals of their performances that include what was done well and what needs improvement, is someone offering belief in the children’s ability.

Praise as unconditional love

He speaks right to the reasons many offer universal, blanket praise to their children:

…I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.
– “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise,” in New York Magazine, February 12, 2007 by Po Bronson

But, as Kohn so forcefully argues and as Bronson himself came to understand, in reaching for universal and generic praise, we ignore the individuality of our children. Although we want to express, “I love you always,” I believe that what we often demonstrate is, “I don’t know you well enough to praise anything specific about you.”

Reclaiming praise

In This Essay

Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn

“Feedback as Assessment” by Grant Wiggins

In order to begin sailing at Community Boating, a member needs to earn the Solo Rating. To earn that members need to demonstrate:

• that they can rig the mainsail on a Cape Cod Mercury by rigging a boat in the slip;
• and that they have an understanding of how boats move and of the right of way rules by passing an oral quiz, the Solo Test.

Everything one needs to learn to pass the Solo Test is taught in Shore School.

Shore School is a one hour lecture on sailing. A classroom lecture. On land. With a whiteboard. In a bay with wide garage doors that open onto the Charles River and the fleet of boats and, at least we hope, sunshine. Shore School is considered one of the more difficult courses to teach.

Last Thursday, July 23rd, I attended a seminar, “Classroom Management/Learning Styles” at Community Boating so that I can teach Shore School as well as Rigging. Marcin, the seminar presenter, spoke about the teaching style of several of Community Boating’s Shore School teachers. One stood out.

Do you get it?

How are we to view Paul’s method? He has asked his students to grade him on how well he taught the lecture. Paul simply asks for an assessment of his performance in real time!

He does not wait for his students to fail their Solo Test, but rather adjusts his approach while he still has the power to impact his students. That this seems like a radical notion for a teacher is a sad reflection on methods employed by many teachers. The stereotype, as much as I hate to say it, is that a teacher will say, “My students just aren’t getting it! I’ve tried and tried! They just aren’t capable.”

Absent from that stereotype is the teacher saying, “I asked my students what they were not understanding throughout the course of the unit and have adjusted my approach based on what they have told me.”

Dr. Jackson writes that if you collect test scores but do not adjust your approach you are wasting your students’ time and your own (132). “Checking for understanding throughout the class period,” Robyn Jackson writes on page 131, “gives you an opportunity to see in real-time how students are progressing towards mastery and adjust your instruction based on their needs.”

Should we test? Should we assess?

There are three related, but not synonymous words that need to be discussed: test, assessment, and feedback. “Test” and “assessment” are so close as to be nearly synonymous but “feedback” stands out. Feedback seems the most active of the words, perhaps because the word is used in business to mean soliciting ideas, collecting them, analyzing them and then using them to chart a course forward. Grant Wiggins in his article “Feedback as Assessment” defines feedback as “information about what [was] and was not accomplished, given a specific goal.”

But do the words “test” and “assessment” mean something different? “Test” is the more limited of the words. All tests are assessments but not all assessments are tests. When most people hear the word test, they usually think of a paper document with a list of questions to be answered. For the most part tests are used to measure, sort, and rank students argues Alfie Kohn in his book Punished by Rewards.  Alfie Kohn goes on to argue that we should not assign grades unless those grades are “A” and “Incomplete” (Kohn 208), an idea that Robyn Jackson echoes by suggesting a three grade system, “A”, “B”, and “Not Yet” (Jackson 148).

An assessment also measures skills but it carries the connotation of being more complete while also being less value-laden.

Using tests and assessments throughout a unit, rather than at the end, allows teachers to pace the lesson. If an assessment at the beginning of a unit reveals students have previously mastered some of the material, the teacher can adjust the unit to focus on what the students don’t know and deepening what they already know (Jackson 132-133).

Educating Students Using Feedback

When she was an English teacher, Jackson noticed that her students repeated mistakes from essay to essay and noticed that some students would look quickly at the grade and then discard the essay. I would point out that sticking an essay in a folder never to look at it again is as much discarding as throwing it in a trash bin. She asked herself if there was a better way.

Jackson decided to focus on discussing their mistakes rather than just assigning a grade which she describes between pages 140 to 143 in her book. Her method involved:

• devising an analytical framework:
  • seven of the categories were flexible;
  • one of the categories varied from essay to essay;
  • each category was assigned a specific color.
• introducing the framework when she assigned the paper;
• reviewing it when she discussed revising papers; and
• employing the framework to educate students.

Instead of grading in the traditional sense, she underlined sections of each students’ paper that were weak in the color assigned to a particular category. The result, Jackson writes, was that, “Our conversations about their papers shifted from a discussion of their grade to setting goals for how they would write their next paper” (Jackson 142).

So, the question is not, as I stated it above, “Should we test?” but rather “How do we use tests to educate our children?” To educate our children we need to change the focus from high-stakes testing to consistent assessment and testing throughout the learning process that demonstrates and proves mastery.