Preying on education bloggers

Are you an education blogger?

Do you help online colleges and universities prey on underprepared students by clawing their way to the top of search engine results by linking to their websites?

Are you sure you don't?

Here are two ways unsuspecting bloggers are made accomplices in preying on others for online colleges and universities.

• LISTS: Bloggers will receive a flattering email saying they've been chosen for a list such as 100 Top Edtech Bloggers or Top 50 Classroom Blogs. Bloggers are further enticed by a badge that is presented to them with the request that the badge be displayed on their blog. Or the blogger is encouraged to write about their accomplishment of making the list with a link back to the list or website.

What's the catch?

The flattery and the badge are Trojan Horses that mislead bloggers into thinking all of this attention is for them when really they are being used by online scammers so they may increase their ranking on search engines.

• GUEST BLOGGING: Bloggers will receive flattering emails that either ask the blogger to write a guest post for the scammer's website or allow a guest post to be displayed on their blog.

What's the catch?

The flattered blogger is led to believe the content of the posts are what matters when really it's the link that matters most. Want proof? After receiving a flattering email asking me if I would accept a guest post on my blog, I found the content to be acceptable and posted it. However, when I chose not to post the link back to the online university, I received a series of emails from the guest blogger that reminded me and then badgered me about inserting their desired link. I refused.

So what's to be done about all this?

First, be informed. I'm all for sharing but this is about privatization and profits. Second, ignore them and never link to them. Third, write a post of your own about all this to get the word out.

For a more detailed look at all this be sure to take a look at Dan Meyer's post Stop Linking to "Top 100" Lists, and read the comments.

The continuing folly of merit pay

This was written by Bill Boyle is the principal of both Model High School and Bowers Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Opinions on his blog are his own. He can be reached at wboyler@gmail.org. Bill blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared here.

by Bill Boyle

A couple of days ago I read an article titled “Consider the Merits of Merit Pay” in the Detroit News. Got me a bit steamed, as these writings promoting the wrong things tend to do. Simply put, the idea of merit pay is a misaligned imposition of a business solution on a public entity. Why misaligned? Excellent question. (What follows is my somewhat simplistic explanation of the misalignment- for a more thorough one, see The Folly of Merit Pay.)

Business is designed to make money via a process of competition. Education should be designed to create learning via a process of cooperation.

Competition creates a dynamic of “us vs. them.” This means that resources (information, knowledge, product, etc.) must be protected and hoarded. Less for them means more for us. We win, they lose. Learning, on the other hand, requires sharing. If I, as a teacher, know more (using content knowledge as a resource in this example), I have more to share with my students, which thus benefits us all. If my teaching peers know more than I do, and I am able to access their knowledge, I become better. If a culture of cooperation is in place that allows me to access the skills and knowledge of my peers, we all benefit.

With these assumptions stated, it makes it a bit easier to see why the imposition of a system of competition on schools negatively affects kids when the core value of that school system, learning, is foundationally based upon the necessity of cooperation. If, as a teacher, my pay is dependent upon my ability to be “better” (regardless of the measurement), why share my knowledge and expertise? It will only hurt my pay. Paul Thomas does an excellent job of analyzing this effect here.

But the purpose of this whole post really is simply to provide a context for Hargreaves and Fullan’s quote on this topic. The quote comes from the preface of their book, Professional Capital.

“In the United States, state departments of education have committees stacked with economists who are coming up with formulas to pay teachers according to their indvidual performance- especially in relation to their students’ test scores…This strategy has no historcial precedent of success, it flies in the face of psychological resarch indicating theat financial reward only improves perfomance in areas of low-level skill, not in complex jobs like teaching, and it creates perverse incentives for expert teachers to avoid difficult students or challenging classes that might depress their test schores. At best, performance-related pay will motivate a few teachers while alienating others and neglecting the majority. I’ts a political fix that will lead to professional folly, and we should steer well clear of it.” (Italics are mine.)

This is simply another example of economics being extracted from context. We must begin to see the ways that a culture is connected to economics, history, tradition. If economics continues to be the one lens through which we see the world, we are in for some serious trouble ahead.

If it's harmful, get rid of it

Here is a guest post that was written by Lisa Cooley. She blogs here.

by Lisa Cooley

Let's think about those school practices that have actually been proven to be harmful to kids. Not big-picture issues this time; let's think of the littler stuff that is very big in the eyes of the kids who are subjected to it.

1. Homework. Get rid of it. Elementary grades: we should be giving none at all. Middle and high grades: only stuff that is supported by research. Don't make kids work a second shift. Do we really have any idea the happiness this would bring to so many kids? Instant good will on the part of children, with accompanying positive impact on learning.

2. Extrinsic motivation. Snuff it out. No more lollipops for "good behavior," no more rewards for conforming to adults' expectations. Again, check out the research. All negative. Dump it.

3. Early start times for adolescents. Do you need to see any more research? Our high schools are full of zombies half asleep, half awake, all miserable. Let them sleep. It won't kill us.

4. Ban on cell phones. If you can't hold their attention in competition with a cell, that's not their problem.

5. Ban on social media. Kids have the world at their fingertips...except in school. Figure out how to connect your classes to the world. Better still, let kids do it.

6. Stop making them wait to go to the bathroom when they have to go.

7. Stop the ban on food in the classroom. When kids are hungry, they should eat.

8. Let them play. Let them hang out. Let them socialize.

9. Better lunch food, with kids playing a role in researching and deciding on menus.

Easy peasy, right? Send me your ideas on ways to make kids happier in school, starting right now.

Rethinking Exam Week

Lori Cullen is the principal of Erin Woods School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She blogs here.

by Lori Cullen

One has to ponder the question “why,” on many occasions. A recent “why” has come to me this month as January is the mid-term point of the school year and most high schools are in the midst of exams that mark the end of term one. “Finals” as they are called run for three weeks. Three weeks of no classes, and no learning. When we know better, why do we do this? Why do we persist in this practice?

The ironic part is we know better. We know that high stakes, final exams that provide no opportunity for feedback or further learning are not representative of a student’s knowledge or understanding, and do nothing to further a student’s knowledge or understanding which is arguably the point of school.

Image via Wikipedia

An argument that is often launched for those who believe in and rely on final exams often goes something like this… “How will I know what they have learned, if I don’t give them an exam? How will they prove that they have learned anything at all?” To those, I offer up the following response:

1. Formative Evaluation – In his book Visible Learning by John Hattie, the effects of formative Evaluation were found to have a d = .90 or standard deviation of .90. Hattie describes this effect size as, “…a 1.0 standard deviation increase is typically associated with advancing student children’s achievement by two to three years, improving the rate of learning by 50%…” (pp 7 of Visible Learning). Thus, formative evaluation strategies in the classroom would not only give teachers information about what a student knows, but work to increase a student’s rate of learning by almost 50%.
2. Self-reported Grades d=1.44 where Cohen argues, “…an effect size of d=1.0 should be regarded as a large, blatantly obvious, and grossly perceptible difference…” (pp 8 Visible Learning). Hattie found that even without tests, “…high school students have a reasonably accurate understanding of their level of achievement… This should questions the necessity of so many tests when students appear to already have much of the information the tests supposedly provide…” (pp 44 Visible Learning).
3. Feedback (d=.73). “When teachers seek, or at least are open to feedback from students as to what a student knows, what they understand….then teaching and learning can be synchronized and powerful.” (pp 173 Visible Learning)

When assuming the reason for a final exam is to find out what students know or best case what students have learned, my question back to a teacher would be “Why don’t you already know?” I believe that if effective teaching and learning practices such as formative evaluation, self-reported grades and feedback are consistently and appropriately utilized by teachers, a final exam would simply provide them with a weak, irrelevant example of what they already know.

Hattie, John, Visible Learning A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, Routledge, 2009.

Why we really do need scantrons!

David Martin teaches high school math in Red Deer, Alberta. You can find David's blog here and follow him on Twitter here. This post was originally found here.

by David Martin

Most schools buy Scantron sheets by the thousands, and the cost per year must be over $1 000 as each pack of 500 are approximately $100. I was thinking that there must be other uses of scantrons other than their traditional use for this amount of annual costs. After doing some thinking I am now a believer that Scantron sheets do have a place in schools and below is a list, divided by subjects, for which you can use scantron sheets: I do apologize they are broken up by subject not grade.

Math

· Provide each student with a scantron sheet and ask them to guess which would be the correct answer to the first question, if you were unable to see the question.. Talk about the percentage of the students in the class which would have guessed correctly. Extend this to two questions and so on. You can then talk about the math behind probability.

· Turn the scantron side ways and draw graphs. A constant graph would be were all the answers were A, an oscillating graph would go ABCDCBA…. I bet there are many different graphs which could be drawn. You could then talk about slope, absence of concavity and so on.

· Using the scantron, you could create a ratio of Surface Area to Volume, or perimeter to Surface area, and so on.

· You could talk about the costs of buying scantrons and create a Cost graph and calculate the slope and y-intercept and explain what do these values mean.

English

· Have younger students read the instructions on the scantron sheet and have them explain to a classmate what the instructions mean.

· For students learning the alphabet, have them create the different letters by connecting the dots on a scantron in different formations. (“U” might be a tricky letter!)

Other languages (French, Spanish, etc):

· Have students translate the meaning of the instructions on the scantron sheet into the desired language.

Physics

· Push a marble down the floor and ask the class to estimate the number of scantron sheets, vertically, it would take to stop the marble. Increase the speed of the marble and estimate again. Extend this to the problem “How many scantrons would stop a car going 30 km/h?” (I would like to know this answer?)

· Talk about the air resistance as you drop a scantron from a desk to the floor, and then ask “Would the same action occur if this was a vacuum?”

Chemistry

· Determine how much water one scantron can hold by weighing 20 of them dry and then soaking them in water and comparing the weight difference.

· Take one scantron and light in on fire. Talk about the combustion of paper. You can extend this by dipping the scantron in different liquids and talk about the difference in speed of ignition.

Art

· Instead of using construction paper, have students cut up Scantron sheets and art with them. They can be colored on, and easily cut!

· Have them draw a picture only by connecting the dots on the Scantron.


The best part of these activities is that you don’t need a scantron machine ($5000) to do them…oh wait..you don’t even need the scantrons!!

However, if you have other activities, I invite you to share below!

Happy Marking!

My Struggle With Letter Grades

This was written by Tia Henriksen who is a vice-principal of an elementary school. Tia blogs here.

by Tia Henriksen

Much of my teaching experience, prior to becoming a vice-principal was teaching primary students. When teaching primary students, we do not assign letter grades. Instead, we look at each prescribed learning outcome for each student on a continuum of learning: not yet within expectations, approaching expectations, meeting expectations, and exceeding expectations. I very rarely indicated a student was “exceeding expectations”, unless a child is quite far above in certain reading, writing, or math learning outcomes.

When I became a Vice-Principal, I had the opportunity to teach a variety of classes, some of which had to be given letter grades. I wasn’t all that comfortable giving letter grades, but I did it the way many teachers did at that time – gather many, many assignments, and give them each a score (I had a 1-4 levelling system – not letter grades), then add them all up at the end of the term and then average them all out, etc… and come up with a letter grade for that subject. This was not the worst method, but it was still not great. That was 5 years ago. I’ve learned a great deal since then and have not taught/assessed this way this year.

This year, I am teaching 4 classes to whom I have to give letter grades as a representation of their learning at the end of each term. I teach French to two Grade 5 classes and Health and Career Education to a Grade 5/6 class and a Grade 6 class. While these are all new subjects for me to teach, I feel it has been going well this year so far.

In the Health and Career Education classes, we’ve been discussing, working in groups, working individually, blogging, watching youtube videos, watching educational videos on learn360, and talking about what we’ve learned. The students have been motivated and have been learning.

In the French classes, we’ve been singing, talking, watching funny french youtube videos, making posters, making booklets, and asking and answering questions. We have been just generally enjoying ourselves along with our learning.

In addition, and possibly most importantly for many students, but especially those from inner-city schools, we have been building relationships in all four classes. We have been getting to know one another, our learning styles, our likes, our dislikes, our hobbies, and learning to trust one another. Sometimes, I must admit, the curriculum has taken second-fiddle to relationship-building since we only see one another for 2 – 50 minute blocks each week.

We’ve had some assignments which the students have self- and peer-evaluated. I have also evaluated some of these assignments, but not many, to be honest. Too often, the kids would ask, “Are we being marked on this?” or “Does this count for our mark?” I cringed each and every time I heard this question. And, I would respond, “Everything ‘counts’ – it’s all about our learning. The process is much more important than the product. Stop thinking so much about grades and start thinking more about your learning.” This response seemed to pacify them for the most part. The learning and excitement continued. We also do not have homework in my classes. We work on the work in class. It may take longer to do things, but I feel with all the other work they have in their other subjects, the last thing I wanted was to add more work on them at home with our class as well.

My students come up to me each day while I am on supervision and ask, “Do we have HACE (Health and Career Education) today?” They would either cheer (if I said yes) or moan (if I said no). Same with my French classes. They love our classes. They are motivated, they are learning, and they are having fun!

Yah, okay, now reporting time is coming and I am struggling. This is my struggle. I really don’t want to give these students grades for their work this term. It all seems so subjective to me. We’ve read so much on letter grades and how letter grades actually hinder their learning, not enhance/motivate the students. In a recent article,The Case Against Grades (http://bit.ly/tEeNRE), Alfie Kohn, asserts that,

“Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.”


Kohn goes on to discuss the effects grades have on students. In fact, he states that,

“when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust conclusions: 

* Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning. 

* Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. 

* Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.“ (Kohn, November, 2011).

Furthermore, Kohn goes on to state that,

“the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing.”

In today’s age of disengaged students, we need to do more to engage our students, not further disengage them and discourage them from challenging themselves and learning to the best of their ability.

One may think that there are not any alternatives. In fact, Kohn states that an alternative to giving letter grades is not a “utopian fantasy”. Some classes and schools are

“Replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or conferences — qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation.”

Furthermore, with this new reporting practise, these schools have found that,

“their students are often more motivated and proficient learners, thus better prepared for college, than their counterparts at traditional schools who have been preoccupied with grades.”

While I would love our current system to be like the one described in this article, that is not the case. I will have to give letter grades to my students. As one way to mitigate the difficulties associated with giving students letter grades, Kohn says that

“although teachers may be required to submit a final grade, there’s no requirement for them to decide unilaterally what that grade will be. Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting students to grade themselves.”

What an interesting concept. I could have the students themselves grade their proficiency in the prescribed learning outcomes for the term. I wonder how accurately they would assess themselves. I wonder how parents would react? I wonder how the other teachers would respond?

Do you have experience having to give grades, not wanting to, and then finding another alternative? If so, what alternative have you used?

Finnish Lessons for Scotland

Here is a guest post by Niall MacKinnon who is a principal of a primary school in Scotland.


by Niall MacKinnon


I am the principal of a small rural primary school in Scotland. I am honored that Joe has asked me to write a guest blog. It is an exciting time to do this.

From half way round the globe I share the excitement of Pasi Sahlberg’s new book Finnish Lessons. Its subtitle What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? has come at the right time for us here in Scotland. 

We have just gone through a curriculum review seeking to re-vision education. A welcome policy mix was coming in: opening up wider capacities, de-cluttering, deepening learning, personalisation, choice, creativity, professionalism, and a visionary ‘building the curriculum’. This explicitly gave us local ownership of pathways forward in our own institutions. 

The official message here is that the big curriculum change debates are settled. But now there is an overlay. As we embraced principles to ‘build’ in our schools, our inspectors gave us ‘required’ characteristics of successful ‘implementation’. We were asked to declutter through rounded, non-target-driven outcomes based on experiences, but were handed a specified listing hundreds and hundreds strong and told to cross-match our practice to these. We had to continue grading to the existing audit indicator schedules, then were told that inspectors had ‘increased expectations’ in inspections. Now we are to get standardised testing. What happened? 

It is Sahlberg who shows how this happened, from the Finnish alternative. We tried to bring in a new curriculum approach without re-thinking the basic underpinning values which would frame it. Whilst our new curriculum asked us to rethink practice, it did not give us the means to think. Scotland could not break free from audit indication, inspection and targetised attainment. Its culture remained top-down. 

The critical shift needed is to purposes and principles, giving professional ownership of the means to realise them at the local level. Sahlberg shows that this is what Finland got right. It embraced dialogue basing practice change in reflection over theories and models of education. This is not possible if loaded down with top-heavy audit indication schedules, micro-specification of actions and of curriculum content from the center. 

The central message of Sahlberg’s book is that Finland established a high performing education system by adopting policies counter to that which came in across most Western education systems. Sahlberg calls these the GERM – the Global Education Reform Movement. The features of the GERM are: standardizing teaching and learning with common criteria for measurement and data; increased focus on core subjects, particularly literacy and numeracy; teaching a prescribed curriculum; transfer of models of administration from the corporate world; high stakes accountability policies – control through testing, inspection, division between schools and an ethos of punishment (for educators). 

That is what went wrong. These remained in place in Scotland and so our new vision was never going to succeed. Finland’s success has been achieved by the simple solution of framing the development of the system around professional dialogue. We need to do the same. But to do that we have to strip out the blockages. If we want to rediscover our professionalism and our ‘love of learning’ we need to be GERM free. The real problem in a GERM ridden system is that the simplicity of professional conversation is lost. Of course, what we may then talk about is anything but simple. 

This is a lesson for Scotland, and for the world. We all need a course of Finnish Lessons.

Common Assessment = Undifferentiated Assessment

Here is a guest post by Dave Martin. He tweets here and blogs a lot about math here.

by Dave Martin

I would like to challenge the idea of common assessment. Not just common throughout a department but common even in a single classroom. From this time further I will refer to these assessments as their true name “Standardized Assessments”. The definition of a standardized assessment is:

a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent.

Also, I refer to these as standardized assessments as they are designed in such a way the class average should fall in a “reasonable” zone. This zone may differ from teacher to teacher and from class to class but this underlying bell curve does exist. I have heard of meetings where discussions such as “The average was low, so the test should be made easier” or “The average was too high, so we need to increase the difficulty” have been had. This saddens me as we are requiring students to fail such that others can feel success.

Since by the definition and the manner these assessments are designed, usually, they must fall on a specific day, common to all teachers of the same course, and also consist of some mixture of the following:

· MC 5-10 questions
· NR 3-5 questions
· WR 2-5 questions with bullets

Usually the test days, and requirements are decided before the first day of schoolI have asked why do teachers give common assessment? I will provide the two top reasons I heard, and then my counter-argument.

1) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal assessment practices between the same courses throughout the school.

Counter: What is fair is not always equal and what is equal isn’t always fair. If we truly want equal assessment, then should we not require all students to write with the same hand, take off their glasses, set the temperature in all the rooms to be the same, and have all students write with the same type of pencil? I know this sounds absurd, but where does the fair and equal practice stop? Each and every student, in my class, has a different set of needs and abilities yet these exams will force each student to be put through the same hole. Alberta Education recently, wrote:

Differentiated assessment means selecting tools and strategies to provide each student with the best opportunity to demonstrate his or her learning. As you get to know your students, and as student differences emerge, assessment naturally becomes more differentiated, because its purpose is to meet students where they are and to coach them to the next step. In this way, assessment and instruction continue to support and inform each other.

By making these decisions before ever “knowing my students” how is one to decide which would be the “best opportunity for each student to demonstrate his or her learning”? I do not see standardized assessment as a fair and equal practice at all.

2) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal instructional practices between courses throughout the school.

Counter: This seems like the standardized assessment is more assessing the teacher than the student now. Even if two students, in two different classes, receive the same mark this does not guarantee the same instruction has been given. One teacher could be “teaching to the test” and involving daily test prep activities while the other is implementing quality instruction and critical thinking.

Now, the problems I see with common assessment:

First and foremost: It is the duty and responsibility of the classroom teacher to determine how and when to assess each student. I am confused and distraught when people, outside the class, control the assessment strategies, without even knowing the individual students they are impacting.

Alberta Education’s ideas are:

Differentiating assessment involves rethinking the standard practice of having all students do the same assessment tasks at the same time, regardless of their individual learning needs or the learning they have already demonstrated. Rather, in this new paradigm, teachers customize the selection and use of assessment information to reflect each student’s highest level of achievement.

By having standardized exams, we are going against the research and knowledge of our government. Also, it should be the freedom of the teacher to decide, and indeed, the freedom of each student to decide how and when they will be assessed on their knowledge. Of course we all know that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job, but by forcing everyone to assess, and ultimately, teach the same way it does not improve these “bad teachers” – but actually hobbles the good ones.

Is there a case for summative assessment?

This was written by David Didau who is a Head of English at Priory Community School. Davidblogs here and tweets here.

by David Didau

I’ve written a lot on the importance of formative assessment recently and feel pretty cear in my own mind of its efficacy. In contrast I see summative assessment as existing only as an external measure of success or failure. I know it exists and I know it’s fairly important to my students’ life chances. It’s also one of the primary means by which my professional practice is judged, so I’d better take notice of it. This seems like a necessary evil, not something to be celebrated.

Cristina Milos and Jennifer Borgioli have challenged this view and asserted that actually, summative assessment has its place in the classroom and fulfils a useful purpose. Cristina says that summative assessment “need not be constructed in terms of pass/fail” and Jennifer suggests that “quality assessment is about balance” and using the right tool and the right time. She also says that the problem with using formative assessment to evaluate whether learning has occurred is that it is “unethical to evaluate a learner while they are still learning”.

Now, I consider myself to be an open minded chap, so it seemed reasonable to check out what’s been written on the subject to see if there is merit in their views.

Firstly, let’s define our terms. Summative Assessment is the formal testing of what has been learned in order to produce marks or grades which may be used for reports of various types. This is different from Formative Assessment, in which the emphasis is on on-going assessments of different types used to judge how best to help pupils learn further. Have I got this right? I’d be very grateful if anyone would like to (politely) set me straight.

Research suggests that while summative assessment can be motivating for some students, it has a negative effect on others:

• After summative assessment, low-achieving pupils had lower self-esteem than higher-achievers, whereas there had been no correlation between self-esteem and achievement before
• Repeated practice tests reinforce low self-esteem of low achievers
• When results of summative assessment are presented as primarily relating to individual pupils the negative effect on low-achievers is more pronounced than when the results are for evaluation of school or authority standards.
• Secondary age low-achievers may deliberately underperform in summative assessments because they are failing anyway
• Summative assessments can be limiting for the most able
• “Big bang” tests cause anxiety in pupils, especially girls and widen the gap between high and low achievers’ motivation
• Summative assessment promotes “extrinsic” motivation, in which pupils respond to the promise of some kind of reward rather than “intrinsic” motivation in which they perform because they are interested and want to do the work

Summative assessment can also produces problems for the curriculum and with teaching:

• The curriculum can be narrowed by “teaching to the test” which can take away from curriculum content
• It can produce distortion in terms of teaching techniques
• Summative test questions may not be framed in the same way as those preferred for formative assessment
• Teachers can spend a lot of time on summative assessment which does not directly improve pupils’ learning
• Teachers sometimes adopt a more didactic “transmission” style of teaching which disadvantages those who don’t respond well to it

Now, I accept that many of these problems can be planned for so that their effects are minimised if not avoided all together. Here are some of the ways to avoid some of the pitfalls:

• Intrinsic interest in tasks can be encouraged
• Students’ awareness of learning goals rather than test performance goals can be developed
• A wide range of types of understanding can be included in summative assessment
• Some formative assessment evidence may be included in summative reports
• Peer- and self-assessment could be included in summative records
• Tests don’t need to be formal written assessments
• The comparison of individual pupils on the basis of scores can be avoided
• Summative tests can be placed before the end of a teaching block so that there is some opportunity for follow-up based on the results, and even reassessment
• Summative judgements can be made on the basis of a variety of tests (varied both in form and content)
• Students could carry forward lessons from assessments even into the next school session (eg in the form of a copy of their school report)
• Feedback can be given to pupils in terms of the learning goals rather than just a test mark
• Tests might be devised to assess separate elements of the course separately
• In practising for summative assessment, pupils can make up and answer their own questions. (Research has shown this to be an effective strategy)
• Tests can be timed according to pupil readiness rather than leaving them to the end of the block of work
• Summative assessment can be presented realistically, as being limited
• Tests can provide evidence for evaluating courses and teaching approaches
• Whole-school discussion of such assessment principles can be helpful

The problem is though that these measures, whilst all very worthy, only provide a way to cope with something that is essentially damaging. Look how tentative the language is: the potential harm of summative assessment can, could, might be ameliorated by conducting it in a more formative way. If that’s the case, why bother? Why not simply ensure that all assessment provides opportunities for formative feedback which enable the teacher to redirect teaching and the learner to make progress?

Maybe I’m being dense but I really struggle with the idea the summative assessment is useful for anything other than providing data on students’ (and teachers’) success and failure. I’m not being bombastic and I like to think that I don’t deal in “vague rhetoric” as Cristina accuses me. In fact I’m desperately keen to be shown the error of my ways and will respond positively and graciously to any comments. 

Over to you.

Everybody is a genius

This was written by James Gutteridge who is an educator in Australia. You can find his blog here.

by James Gutteridge

Few things sadden me more than when I hear my students declare that they will never be successful, that they don’t have a dream, and that they don’t know what makes them happy. This is such a pessimistic outlook that one really has to wonder where it originated. And it’s not something they’ve been told.

It’s something they have learned. It is interesting that we hold up those who have university degrees to be the pinnacle of society. Perhaps the quality of society could be measured by community cohesion and the happiness of its members than by the number of people with university degrees?

As a result of this academic pursuit of knowledge, schools do their best to educate people to enter university. We therefore value those disciplines that are most closely aligned with academia. The arts aren’t as valued, and we commonly hear the phrase – “you can’t do that, you won’t get a job!” Yet who do we pay most to be entertained by? Actors, chefs, dancers, musicians, sports women and men, and authors.

It is a mistake to make students feel stupid for not fitting in with the academic demands of school. There are, of course, those who thrive academically, and their best contribution to society may require that particular pathway to expertise. There are also those whose contribution to society will be aspiring to the likes of Jamie Oliver, Johnny Depp, Michael Schumacher or J.K Rowling. Whatever makes us happy, providing of course that it does not involve harming others, should be our pursuit.

A.S. Neill, founder of the world-renowned Summerhill School, famously stated that he would rather educate a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister.

Albert Einstein also famously stated that “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Optimism, as Martin Seligman writes, is the key to success. But when many students feel as stupid as a fish feels that cannot climb a tree no matter how hard it tries, society will continue to be filled with pessimistic people.

Despite this, I’m optimistic it can change! People just need to realize their inner genius.

Gapwash

Here is a guest post by Iamcompucomp who is the creator of some very cool YouTube videos based on today's test and punish accountability policies and the drive to privatize public education.

By Iamcompucomp

The idea of working to close the so-called “achievement gap” in education is very similar to the concept of “greenwash” in environmentalism.

Greenwash is the term used to refer to propaganda deliberately used by polluters to cover up what they are really doing. A typical example would be the plant-a-tree days that are funded by big oil and auto companies. Obviously, no amount of tree planting will ever undo their damage, yet the public relations people know that greenwash is a great way to protect their profits from costly calls for more government regulation: it distracts people from real causes. It encourages people to “take personal responsibility” rather than blame corporations who are made to look like leaders of environmentalism.

Similarly, when we look at education, we find that its new mission around the globe has, ever since NCLB, become “closing the achievement gap,” that is, leaving no child left behind. I call this “gapwash” because it covers up the real problem of the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, a gap which was caused by globalization and technology which together have dealt a death blow to the “decent jobs” of yesteryear’s working class and given rise a new super-class of billionaires. “Closing the gap” gives educators a feel-good mission of raising test scores and graduation rates as it preserves the illusion that they are actually doing something to raise children out of poverty. Because, as many scientific studies have conclusively demonstrated, poverty will always be the single greatest cause of failure at school (and wealth not surprisingly predicts success), there is never any danger of the gap actually being closed. It is the perfect War on Terror for education. If it were actually possible to close some kind of achievement gap (and the sheer range in incomes and intelligences guarantees that it is not), the fact that it could never bring back the jobs that were exported to places that lack labour rights would become all too obvious.

Just as with greenwash, the real cause can never be addressed, but moreover, the “wash” distracts and diverts all energy into the busywork of what should be called “Stupid Goals” (referred to in today’s highly commercialized education lingo as “Smart Goals”): raising math and literacy scores or pass rates with the aid of all manner of commercial pedagogy (e.g. test strategy enhancement and/or systematic cheating as seen in recently in Atlanta), creative grade accounting (such as the various forms of “credit recovery”), and political manipulation (as seen most notably in New York under billionaire mayor Bloomberg).

Until this century the teacher’s job had been to educate and to provide equal opportunity, but the “closing the gap” agenda welded student “outcomes” to the fates of individual teachers, schools and districts. Education is now the perfect scapegoat for both child poverty and a seemingly chronic shortage of “human capital” needed in virtually every OECD member country to “make us competitive in the global marketplace.” The underlying mantra is always the same: “If we could only be more like Finland (currently number #1 on testing) then we’d all rich.” In reality, Finland’s gap is very largely attributed to the smaller economic gap between rich and poor. Yet, the corporate media, driven by barons like Rupert Murdoch, even scapegoats education for the 2008 Wall Street meltdown:

Society also gains when its citizens achieve. According to one study by McKinsey, if we had closed the gap in educational performance between ourselves and nations such as Finland and Korea, America’s GDP would have been as much as $2.3 trillion higher in 2008. That would be a 16% gain. Imagine that kind of gain compounded over time, and you begin to appreciate why other nations are putting such a premium on their school systems.

Not surprisingly, Murdoch wants to close down the what he and his ilk like to call “failure factories” in the poorer areas and replace them with charters.

Indeed the fact that “closing the gap” has become the mission of billionaires such as Murdoch, Gates, Broad, and the Waltons (of Walmart) ought to make us just a little suspicious. It is interesting how deeply caring they all appear to be when it comes to closing the gap IN SCHOOLS but how they oppose closing the gap outside school through progressive taxation or the provision of other social services, such as health care, welfare, or improvements to minimum wages. They encourage “right to work” legislation to allow for scab labor, but they oppose the right to job opportunity, which might limit the freedom of corporations to pull up roots and move to where the pickings are cheaper. Think-tanks and foundations which front for wealthy donors have a similar fixation with equalizing outcomes when it comes to school, but no conscience whatsoever for the poverty itself.

What is their motivation for putting the screws to public education? In simplest terms those with vested interests and a religious commitment to the ideal of schools as businesses in a free marketplace, want to privatize education. In a press release printed as news in the Calgary Herald, brimming with NCLB-style gapwash, the Fraser Institute’s Peter Cowley spells out the basic game plan. Suitably titled “Children should all have a chance to succeed”, the article demands "…bold action on the part of the provincial government. Instead of letting kids attend chronically low-performing schools, let's demand that Alberta Education open the province to school operators from around the world who have found ways of successfully meeting the challenges of children with personal and family characteristics not unlike those in Alberta's lowest performing schools. Let's encourage these more successful school operators--some of whom are already profiled on schoolchains.org to establish themselves here in Alberta so that they can duplicate their success with those same kids that the current Alberta system is now failing.

The same “if-they-can’t-close-the-gap” justification for privatizing can be found in the literature of all libertarian and neo-conservative think tanks. It is also the hallmark of Obama’s Race to the Top program, which encourages replacement of the low performing schools with charters. Similarly Gates demands the bottom ten per cent of teachers (as defined by test score production) be fired. There are emphatically NO EXCUSES allowed in this game. The truth about poverty is strictly off limits.

Most teachers now see the evil of NCLB in the US and that is why tens of thousands are marching to “Save Our Schools” this summer. What many teachers, and sadly their unions, have failed to recognize even now is that the achievement gap is not a legitimate goal in the first place. It creates accountability for something which is impossible. This is done as a means of putting a spotlight on the supposed failures of public education. It becomes little more than a ritual of humiliation in which fresh sacrifices are constantly demanded by sadistic reformers in the name of "saving the children". .

The irrelevance of the achievement gap in relation to the real economic gap cannot be overstated. For example, in the U.S.(and several other countries) boys’ literacy is presented as a gap which must urgently be closed. But while girls consistently outperform boys on literacy tests, the average incomes of women are well below those of men, and there are considerably more women living in poverty. This is just about as absurd as it would be for us to say that we now need to close the gap for the rich or people with lighter skin. What it really shows of course is that the closing the gap agenda, has, like Hal, in 2001, taken on a power-tripping life of its own, one that benefits the "innovators" who constantly dream up new needs, accountabilities and inadequacies that can only be resolved through private sector "solutions."

Indeed, such accountability as is imposed for closing poverty, race, ethnicity or gender gaps in terms of “outcomes” is nothing but a strategy for undermining public schools, replacing them with charters, voucher schools and a huge arsenal of for-profit delivery systems such as e-learning, tutoring, data warehousing and turnaround consulting. It is a formula for turning a broad, knowledge-based education with an emphasis on democratic participation into mere skill training for jobs and test score competition, a formula which allows the big education corporations and investors on Wall Street to take over, to replace expensive, unionized teachers with cheaper “practitioners” or “facilitators”, scripted lessons, and computer software. And, above all, using the gap to keep schools in a permanent crisis of underperformance is a formula for profit.

Give 100%?

Here is a guest post by Samantha Douglas who is a third year student of education at the University of Regina with a major in mathematics and a minor in visual art. This post first appeared on her blog here, and she Tweets here.

by Samantha Douglas

Working at a daycare has shown me many things and given me much insight into how children behave, and more specifically, how they learn. The kids that I work with are so incredibly eager to learn, it almost makes me jealous. They want to know everything, and they seem to retain anything they find interesting. When i tell them stories, or work on the different topics that we are learning about, they have an ambition to learn just because it interests them.

It’s amazing.

In no other teaching environment, and i have been in with all grades, have I witnessed children who have such a drive to learn. They want to do math just because they think it’s amazing that I can show them how to do it! I know it is probably a lot different being in a daycare rather than a school, but there is still a much different attitude towards what they are learning.

Then one day I noticed a cancer.

It spread so quickly through the children that I barely noticed the change. The change took a week to get rid of though.

I gave my students a word search to work on, just as a task to keep them focused for twenty minutes, and to go through some Ancient Egyptian vocabulary with them. They were so excited each time they found a word. They wanted to finish the task and find all the words because until they found it, I wouldn’t tell them what it meant. They were racing, and excited, and wanted to learn all the new words.

Then I went on my break.

I came back, and the person who took over for me started marking the word searches. 100% ‘s filled the pages and stickers and the kids all came running to me to tell me they had all got 100%. No more cheering for their actual accomplishments, just excitement for the mark that was written at the top of the page. When I asked if they wanted to learn all the words, they simply said they were done because it already got marked.

These are 5-8 year olds.

I was incredibly disheartened. If they didn’t get a sticker and 100% they didn’t want to do it. They lost their intrinsic want to do the activity. For a week I had to decline their pleads to mark their work. Now they are finally back to wanting to learn for their own reasons.

It’s sad that a race for marks can start so young.

Salaries as Rewards - a Non-Sequiter

Here is a guest post by Nick Jaworski. Nick is a Director of Studies based in Shanghai, China, where he lives with his beautiful wife Hande. He also blogs about ELT in Turkey and China at Turkish TEFL. Follow him on Twitter here.

by Nick Jaworski

"Your salary is a reward. People work for salaries, so rewards must work." This is the faulty logic I often hear when discussing my dislike for the use of rewards in education and business.
Rewards are a tool used to manipulate (or more positively - extrinsically motivate) staff and students into doing what you want. They place a carrot in front of the individual and say, "Hey, if you try hard enough, this could be yours." This is fundamentally different from a wage or salary.

Wages and salaries are based on mutual agreement by both parties. It's a contract. The company says they believe this job is worth such and such pay. The employee agrees and accepts or disagrees and looks elsewhere. That salary does not change regardless of the extent to which you do your job.


While salaries that are too low often result in worker dissatisfaction and lack of productivity, higher salaries do not equate with increased performance. The extent to which an employee does their job is generally a result of job satisfaction, personal competence, and faith in the company.


What rewards try to do is to motivate the employee to work harder by offering them something in return for a desired behavior or outcome. It moves motivation from something internal to the employee to something external. This has all kinds of negative consequences that have been written about by many others before me. I recommend Challenging Behaviorist Dogme: Myths about Money and Motivation by Alfie Kohn and Daniel Pink's speech on TED as good starting points.

Redefining Success by Kirsten Hill

It is my pleasure to have Kirsten Hill guest blogging here today. She is the author of her own blog called experiential continuum. Kirsten is an outspoken student of education policy and is an ally to progressive education.

By Kirsten Hill

I voted for Obama in the 2008 election because he was inspiring. Like the majority of the country, I was hopeful and ready for change. When I heard him speak at Tulane University about public school reforms, I was sold: finally a President who truly valued education and would fight for our children.

Unfortunately, as he entered his Presidency I didn’t see the changes I expected. I began to lose hope as the testing regime continued its reign and competition was promoted over collaboration. Despite having a President who vowed to advance 21st century skills, promote good character, and informed citizenship things only got worse. Unless that is, test taking is a 21st century skill, good character is obediently taking tests, and informed citizenship involves the exploitation and degradation of teachers.

While I don’t have faith in the direction of education reform, I do have faith in many of the teachers and progressives who are speaking out and asking for a change. To say that current reform efforts are facing resistance would be an understatement. I think we all support the goals; of course we want all students to have equity and opportunity, to be college and career ready, to attend schools with great teachers and leaders, and certainly raising the bar and rewarding excellence is not a bad thing.

Quite frankly, I believe the problem is the plan to attain these goals. I’m not a teacher, I’m not a parent, and I don’t have an advanced degree in education policy (yet), but in the past four years I’ve spent over 800 hours volunteering with two New Orleans Recovery Schools. I’ve become close with students, teachers, and administrators, and I’ve done extensive reading and research on all things education.

Most importantly, I am a student, and have been for the past 18 years. Not only that, but I’m a good student: work hard, pretty much straight A’s, graduated with honors, you know the type. The thing is, I’m terrible at history, I can barely remember a thing from my biology class, and when it comes to math I constantly need refreshers. Why? I got good grades…I passed all the tests. The indicators would point to the fact that I learned all these things. But, I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t. I memorized, filled in blanks or bubbles or scribbled down short answers, and when time was up the information exited my brain to make room for the next subject, to prepare for the next test.

The things I remember the best are things I wrote about, projects I did, engaging discussions I had with professors and other students. To me, these ‘hands-on’ experiences represent the things I learned; all the information that I no longer possess is simply stuff I was told, things I temporarily stored in order to pass on to the next task at hand, and ultimately the next grade level. Unfortunately, from what I’ve both seen and heard, these projects and meaningful discussions that taught me the most are quickly being traded in for rote memorization, formulaic writing—statistics. Yes, it’s hard to quantify a project or a discussion, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable measure of learning. But, according to policy it appears that it’s the numbers that matter most. If you can’t quantify the learning, then obviously no learning has occurred. Nobody would agree with that, so why do we insist on using measuring sticks to gauge student performance? Why not take a holistic, qualitative approach?

In society, one might argue, the things that matter most are those that aren’t easily quantified. It’s innovation, creativity, and critical thinking skills that our children need the most to succeed; that society needs the most to advance. These crucial skills are stifled in the current educational environment that is driven by data. Undoubtedly, it is nobody’s intent to trample such vital skills; however, we ought to be wary of how the continued crusade for testing and accountability affect such areas.

To think that teachers will be fired, that students will be held back, that schools will be closed or ‘transformed’ largely because of test scores is a disturbing thought. It’s clear that high-stakes testing has fostered an environment of cheating, teaching to the test, and a narrowing of curricular goals. I understand why teachers, students, and administrators are upset, because they know our current approach is counter-productive and it doesn’t really measure anything that can be called “learning”. I’ve had great teachers; some kids still failed those tests. I’ve had terrible teachers; lot’s of people still passed. And in the end, after all that teaching and testing many of us retained very little knowledge. There must be another way. That’s what we should be spending time, effort, and money on: developing a new and improved way to assess student, teacher, and school progress; developing innovative ways to get students engaged with learning. Sure, the Race to the Top Fund and i3 grants provide the opportunity to do just that, but improving student learning isn’t a competition—it is a collaborative mission to save our children and the future of our society.

In defense of current initiatives, it’s been said that ‘we just need better tests’, but until we have those better tests ought we stop putting so much stock in the tests we have? Ought we limit the damage that can be done by relying on imperfect measures of achievement? It seems as though rather than racing to the top, we ought to be working together to create a better way to measure student progress. We ought to be putting more resources towards researching best practices, towards sharing and expanding these best practices.

We need to redefine results—Stop looking at education as if it’s just a bunch of statistics and see it for what it really is: individuals struggling to acquire knowledge, working to find their way in the world—individuals growing as students, as people, and as citizens.

We all want what is best for our children; they are our future. Yet the power to do what is best is not in the right hands. I can only hope that those who have been honored with the power to reform our education system take that power and give it to the people who matter most—who know best. Empower the citizens and let teachers, students, and administrators, lead the way in education reform.

The Relationship Between Accountability and Creativity

My guest today is David Wees, teacher and technology guru at Stratford Hall in British Columbia. David is also an important part of my Professional Learning Community, and I am pleased that he agreed to guest blog here today. You can check out his blog here and his twitter here.

By David Wees

Imagine this graph represents the possible relationships between accountability and creativity.

Where would you put the activities you do as a school?  Here are some examples of activities some school do, and where I think they lie on the accountability vs creativity scale.

What you may notice about this graph is that, for the most part, activities which hold schools and students highly accountability are not associated generally with creativity and that activities which are highly creative can fall short of being very accountable.  It's not a perfect graph, and I think that some of the examples could be moved, but the idea I think is pretty clear: the more you increase accountability, the less flexible the activity, and hence the less ability for students to be creative while completing the activity.

Accountability in this sense means how the activity and the student's performance of that activity, is shared with the student, the teachers, the school, and the wider community.  Standardized tests are considered a "highly accountability" activity simply because everyone has access to how well pretty much any school did, and educators within those schools generally have access to their individual marks, and of course students get feedback about how well they did.

Creative activities to me are generally areas where the student has a lot of choice on how the activity will be completed, and how they will complete the activity.  These are often the types of activities that I think students will actually be able to do once they finish their education, and according to Sir Ken Robinson, our schools fail to provide opportunities to students to do them.

There are a few activities which fall with higher accountability and decent ability for students to be creative, and we often find that these activities are not ones which are done by most schools.  Anyway, I'm sure the model I have up there is imperfect, so I invite you to follow this link to this collaborative Google drawing I've started, and we can add other activities to this chart.

Guest Blogging

I have become a big fan of social networking. In fact, Twitter has become my number one source of information.

Did you hear what I said?

My number one source of information!

Unreal. I know.

I am amazed by the implications of all this. The amount of sharing that occurs on Twitter is simply unbelievable. And here is an example of how Twitter can be so damn cool:

I have met some very interesting people on Twitter including:

• @educatoral has retweeted me more than almost anyone else I know.
• @kmcg2375 is from Australia and we have engaged in some rather interesting dialogue about how stupid grading is.
• @ktenkely hates grades too. We talked.
• @tomwhitby blogs. I commented on his blog.
• @josieholford has suggested a number of anti-grading book titles for me to call the book I have yet to write, but should write sometime soon.
• @tkraz is quite perplexed by my views on not grading effort.
• @monk51295 loves to hear about how we should subvert grading
• @republicofmath seems to agree that grades are the spawn of the devil
• @akamrt I owe him a bottle of Crown as of today, but by the end of the Olympics, he will owe me :)
• @hshawjr doesn't like grading, but I am still trying to find out whether he really grades as little as possible.
• @aaron_eyler we guest blogged

These are all very cool interactions that I've had in the last 24 hours, but it is the last point that I want to discuss.

Aaron Eyler and I decided to guest blog with each other. I sent him a direct message on Twitter asking if he would like to blog on my blog while I blogged on his blog.

Here's my idea: I want to encourage even more sharing. Aaron has a following with his blog. I have a following with my blog. If I write on his blog, and he writes on mine, there is a chance that we could end up sharing our readership. The idea being that we would share more.

So now I am looking for other bloggers who want to share more. I want to create a network of bloggers who occassionaly guest blog for each other in an attempt to share and link more bloggers and readers to more bloggers and readers.

Sound intersting? Want to guest blog with me or Aaron? tweet me joe_bower or aaron_eyler