Madeline Levine on changing school

I am reading Madeline Levine's book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, and I also came across an article called Why Kids Need School to Change. Both feature Levine prodding us to rethink how we parent and educate our children. Levine makes a strong case for how school needs to change -- here are five of her suggestions:

• PROJECT BASED LEARNING. Project-based learning has shown to be a much more effective way to think about learning, “particularly when you live in a world that’s incredibly unclear on what content is going to be relevant in not just 10 or 20 years, but in three years,” she said. “Over and over business leaders say kids need to be collaborative, work across time zones and cultures because problems are so complex.”

• ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT. “You don’t have the opportunity to show what you know in a regular school because standardized tests that are mandated only show what some kids know, but leave out a whole bunch of kids who aren’t able to show what they know in different ways,” she said. We should have alternative criteria for gauging students’ knowledge and ability to show what they know.

• SCHEDULING. Neuroscience research on sleep is becoming more compelling by the day, particularly around depression, Levine said. “We’d always thought fatigue is symptom of depression, but now it’s looking more like lack of sleep causes depression, and that’s something looked at seriously.” Kids needs nine hours of sleep, and if schools were in synch developmentally with teenagers, should would start at 10 a.m., especially when kids enter adolescence. Teachers should also coordinate their exams with each other to ensure that students are not taking multiple tests on the same day.

• CLIMATE OF CARE. Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school. “Almost every private school has advisory, a person for each kid to go to,” Levine said. “But in public schools, there are just a few counselors for a thousand kids or more. By the time you’re hitting high school, you need someone apart from parents to test ideas with, to kick around problems, a go-to person who a kid feels knows them.”

• PARENT EDUCATION. Well-meaning parents are confounded with how to approach managing their kids’ times. Kids needs playtime, downtime, and family time, Levine said. “We’ve robbed kids at each stage of childhood and adolescence of tasks that belong in that particular stage,” she said. “You can’t push kids outside their developmental zone and expect them to learn. You want to push them towards the edge of it, but not over.”

One of my favourite quotes in Levine's book is this:

There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom.

When we choose to openly ignore these problems we fail our children more than they could ever fail us.

Best use of technology

Scott McLeod created this picture from a Chris Lehmann quote that came from a post I wrote about YouTube adding a multiple choice quiz function.

Scott McLeod's review of Will Richardson's Why School?

Here is Scott McLeod's Amazon Review of Will Richardson's book Why School? Scott McLeod blog here and tweets here.

by Scott McLeod

Why School? is a superb summary of why schools need to be different. We now live in a world where the rule is abundance, not scarcity. Where teachers are from all around the world, not just in those buildings down the street. Where students can make and do and share, not just sit passively and regurgitate.

There are lots of insights in this short text. I read the entire book in a sitting of an hour or two. But the ideas within will last much, much longer...

A few quotes to whet your appetite:

1. "let's scrap open-book tests, zoom past open-phone tests asking Googleable questions, and advance to open-network tests that measure not just if kids answer a question well, but how literate they are at discerning good information from bad and tapping into the experts and networks that can inform those answers. This is how they'll take the real-life information and knowledge tests that come their way, and it would tell us much more about our children's preparedness for a world of abundance."

2. "Discovering the curriculum changes the teacher's role in the classroom. It becomes less about how well the teacher develops the lesson plan and what that teacher knows (though those ingredients are still important). Instead, they must inspire students to pursue their own interests in the context of the subject matter. Teachers need to be great at asking questions and astute at managing the different paths to learning that each child creates. They must guide students to pursue projects of value and help them connect their interests to the required standards. And they have to be participants and models in the learning process."

3. "'How do your teachers learn?' Most answers I get follow along traditional lines: 'They go to conferences.' 'They take after-school workshops.' 'They read books.' They see their teachers' learning as an event, not an ongoing process."

4. "We saved every bit of paper that came home in the Friday Folders that year, and they grew to a three-foot-high stack in the corner of our bedroom. It was an impressive collection of stuff that my kids never again looked at once it was added to the stack. Countless hours spent filling in those worksheet blanks, working those test problems, finishing off those projects, and Tess and Tucker had literally zero investment in any of it after their grades and our signatures were in place. Zero."

5. "I'd articulate the shift to teachers like this: Don't teach my child science; instead, teach my child how to learn science -- or history or math or music. With as many resources as they have available to them today (not to mention what they'll have tomorrow), kids had better know how."

Make school different. Start by reading this book. I've already ordered multiple copies as gifts for colleagues, friends, and family members, with plans to expand the circle even further. If you like this book - and you will - do the same for your own circles. And then start talking with each other about what school could (and should) be.

[Now if I only could get legislators to read this!]

Standardized test scores are like a broken clock

Have you ever heard someone use standardized test scores to judge schools?

The Alberta Government recently released an information bulletin that boasted Alberta student performance results continue to rise:

The overall percentage of students who attained a standard of excellence on Grade 3, 6, and 9 provincial achievement tests (PATs) increased to 20.2 per cent from 19.5 per cent in the previous year. The percentage of students who met the acceptable standard also rose slightly to 75.5 per cent from 75.2 per cent. One of the highlights of the results is the percentage of students who achieved the standard of excellence in Science 6 and Science 9.

Many Albertans might take these standardized test score results as prima facia evidence that things are well. Many Albertans may be satisfied with this information and confidently move on with their regularly scheduled day, thinking that Alberta schools are not only doing well, but they are improving.

What if we are wrong? What if these scores are giving us false confidence? What if standardized test scores aren't telling us what we think they are telling us?

When some Albertans boasted about these results on Twitter, I responded with:

Assessing an education system via standardized test scores is like assessing a car by kicking the tires.

Some challenged me by asking:

Wouldn't the analogy be, "like assessing a car by comparing its gas mileage relative to motor size and tank capacity?"

My response: 

No. 

The assumption made by this analogy is that we think we know what standardized test scores tell us: we assume these scores are our window into the schools -- therefore we assume we can use these scores to judge the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in a school.

But what if these unquestioned assumptions about standardized testing are wrong?

Seth Godin writes:

The worst kind of clock... is a clock that's wrong. Randomly fast or slow. 

If we know exactly how much it's wrong, then it's not so bad. 

If there's no clock, we go seeking the right time. But a wrong clock? We're going to be tempted to accept what it tells us. 

What are you measuring? Keeping track of the wrong data, or reading it wrong is worse than not keeping track at all.

Standardized test scores are like a broken clock because we assume that these scores tell us what we need to know about our schools -- we assume that these scores reflect teaching and learning and therefore assume that if the numbers are rising that must be a good thing.

But what if this is misguided? What if our reliance on standardized tests to judge the quality of the teaching and learning in schools is like relying on a broken clock for time?

Consider this:

• Standardized test scores are a remarkable way of assessing the socioeconomic status of students and their families. Study after study has shown that out-of-school factors account for an overwhelming proportion of the variances in scores. That means that standardized tests tend to tell us more about what kids bring to school than what they do at school. Here's a Canadian example and an American example.

• There is research that suggests there is a statistical association between high scores on standardized tests and relatively shallow thinking.

• Campbell's Law tells us that the more standardized test scores are used for making decisions and judging schools, the more subject the scores will be to corruption and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the teaching and learning it was intended to monitor. This includes cheating scandals, teaching to the test and narrowing of educational opportunities.

• Standardized tests tend to measure what is easily measurable, which turns out to be what matters the least. There is a big difference between measuring what we value and valuing what we measure. When we narrow what matters to what can be measured by a standardized test, we fall victim to the MacNamara Fallacy which basically looks like this: (1) Measure whatever can be easily measured on a standardized test. (2) Disregard whatever can't be easily measured or given an arbitrary quantitate value. (3) Presume that what can't be measured easily isn't important. (4) Say what can't be easily measured doesn't even exist.

• There is research that suggests that when teachers are held accountable for their students' standardized test scores, they tend to become so controlling in their teaching style that the quality of students' performance actually declines.

To fully grasp why this is true, there's a lot to know about the arcane underpinnings of standardized tests; however, testing guru Daniel Koretz gives us a single principle that summarizes what we need to know:

Never treat a test score as a synonym for what children have learned or what teachers have taught.

Again, this too can be true for lots of reasons, but Alfie Kohn gives us a single principle that summarizes what we need to know:

A right answer on a test does not necessarily indicate understanding and a wrong answer does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding.

I would imagine there are times when standardized test scores might reflect the teaching and learning that goes on in a school, but remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Standardized tests look good from afar but are far from good at reflecting what matters most when it comes to teaching and learning. The closer you look at standardized tests, the more you realize that their utility and convenience comes at an alarming and unacceptable cost. Ask yourself if what we're learning from standardized tests is worth the price.

I would rather no information - no data - nothing! than the grossly misleading and misused data that is extracted from standardized testing. As long as the public is fed standardized test scores, we will be tempted to accept what they tell us -- but if the public had no information about their schools, they would be forced to seek it out which might lead more people to actually step foot in their local schools.

Education Reform as a comic

This was created by Adam Bessie and Dan Archer. The comic first appeared here and here at Truth-Out. The full comic can be seen here.

by Adam Bessie and Dan Archer