In the second part of this five part series, I’ll address the need for developmentally appropriate standards and differentiated assessment. Click here to view part 1 where I addressed the need for play in the youngest grades and the need to reintroduce basics and classics. As I mentioned before, I wrote this in 2016 or 2017 when I was still teaching and I have retained the present tense.
Standards are not Developmentally Appropriate
I do not write curriculum. I teach what I’m told to teach. Sometimes, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I teach it because I don’t want to lose my job. For example, in my state students learn about ancient cultures in faraway places two years before they begin to learn about history in their state or country. This seems backwards to me because I remember from my developmental psychology class that children develop from the inside out. In other words, they care about themselves, then their family, then their friends, then their community, etc. Even at age seven, for many children if they can’t see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, hear it, or experience it, it doesn’t exist. They don’t really have a great concept of time or space. To them, long ago was when I was a little girl (their grandparents are ancient) and far away is the grocery store on the other side of town. But I dutifully try to illustrate to them what we mean by ancient when it comes time to teach ancient cultures. Why? Because it’s rigorous! We want a rigorous curriculum so that we can say to other states that our seven- and eight-year-olds can identify contributions of ancient cultures while your nine- and ten-year-olds are just beginning to understand! Ha!
You see the same thing across the curriculum. In Language Arts, students haven’t even finished with phonics and sentences and we’re already teaching them about author’s purpose, and inferences. In math, we expect students to compare fractions before they have mastered basic facts or place value. In science, small children are expected to understand the complexities of habitats and ecosystems and be able to identify ways in which living and nonliving things are interdependent on one another. Wow! There sure are a lot of big words that little kids can say! And for an afternoon on a test, they can probably even tell you what it means (ask them again in two weeks). But what is the goal of education? Is it to spout off big words and regurgitate complicated relationships you memorized from a study guide without really understanding? If so, we’re right on target! But if we want our students to be able to draw legitimate conclusions to truly think critically and to really see relationships for themselves and learn to think for themselves, we’re heading down the wrong path.
Just as abandoning the basics and the classics is bad practice, so is trying to force feed children knowledge that is just not within their scope to understand. Social Studies curriculum is an excellent example of this. Years of psychological studies have shown us that our brains develop in predictable patterns and we become ready to process new kinds of information at different stages of development. Our first concern is for ourselves, then our family, then friends, and on out. But Social Studies curriculum is written from the outside in! Why are kids learning world geography before they can name the state or country in which they live? Why are they being asked to identify the contributions of ancient cultures before they understand the contributions of the Founding Fathers? In math, why are we asking children for whom things they can’t see don’t exist to solve for missing addends? Sure, it looks great on paper to say that we teach our kids, A, B, and C by the third grade, but then we wonder why they struggle to demonstrate understanding on a standardized test. They can’t make a meaningful connection to the curriculum because it is not developmentally appropriate.
What can we do about it? Just as we have to advocate for our children to have the basics and classics taught, we also need to advocate to be sure that in the effort to keep things rigorous we don’t lose sight of what’s appropriate. Child psychologists and/or educators who actually work with children need to be part of the discussions when it comes to planning curriculum.
Differentiated Instruction for Standardized Testing
Yep, you read that correctly. Differentiated Instruction is one of those buzz phrases that gets used A LOT in education. And it really does make a lot of sense. You meet kids where they are and you give them what they need to make the progress they need to make. Some students come to you knowing all the stuff, so you have to provide them with opportunities to extend their learning. Some students come to you reading two grade levels below grade level so you have to provide them with opportunities to access the curriculum in a way they can understand while you try to meet their unique needs. Some students come to you right where you need them to be so you have to make sure to make their learning just right so that it’s not too hard or too easy. Some students are visual learners and will need a lot of visual aids to understand what you’re teaching. Some children are kinesthetic learners, so they’re going to need a lot of movement to make meaningful connections. Some students are very artistic and can really grasp a concept if you give them an artistic representation. Teachers are great at differentiating instruction; they go to A LOT of training to learn how to do it. They have small groups and centers and songs and fingerplays and posters. They don’t even have to think about it; they just do it. Once they figure out what everyone needs and how they learn best, they are modifying their plans to meet those needs! And then comes a test and every child, regardless of learning style or level of understanding takes the same test in the same way. And then we tell the teacher she has failed because some of the students have done poorly, or we call her liar when her gradebook shows that the students understood the material but the test did not.
Teachers are forever cautioned against “teaching to the test” but our evaluations (and therefore, our jobs) are tied to these tests so it is really hard not to do that. But most of us are there for the children and want them to grow and learn so we do what we need to do to help our students learn. Sometimes that means they don’t pass a standardized test. Children aren’t standard, people aren’t standard; we are all different; we all have different strengths and weaknesses. But every spring, all across the country, we sit children down in hard, plastic chairs in front of computer screens or bubble sheets that look exactly the same and tell them they all have to pass. They didn’t all learn the information in the same way so why do we expect them to demonstrate it in the same way? I’m not saying that we don’t need some way to measure what students know. How else will you know whether your methods are effective? But, we need to look at HOW we are measuring that.
I was an excellent test taker in school. Give me a bubble sheet and I was good to go! I had the school thing figured out. Now, I don’t remember half of what I learned in school. Why? Because I committed information to short-term memory, regurgitated it on a test and forgot it an hour later. Did I really learn the information? Apparently not. I memorized a lot of stuff really well. The only thing all my tests in high school tested was how good my short-term memory was! Now, our students live in a world of testing. From the time they are in kindergarten they are testing! Some of them have become excellent test takers, even by third grade, like I was in high school. They memorize the things you put on a study guide for them and spit it back out at you on a test. Others can tell me about a time they went to a museum and saw an exhibit that showed something that relates to something they are learning but two days later they will fail a test. What is the purpose of education? I don’t think anyone would say the purpose of education is to pass tests. Tests are meant to be a tool to guide instruction. They should be used to see what students know, what they need to know, which strategies, materials, etc. were effective in teaching and there does need to be some degree of standardization, but if you’re asking a kinesthetic learner to sit in a hard plastic chair, staring at a computer screen for two hours to show what she knows, you’re not going to get a very good representation.
If we had more creative and effective ways of measuring student success (rather than testing), perhaps our students wouldn’t suffer from the anxiety about testing they currently do. Test anxiety and school anxiety are real and are happening at younger and younger ages! First of all, testing in the way it is carried out is not age-appropriate for many of the students who are being tested. Secondly, there is a lot of pressure on very young people to perform well so that they get into a good college or to perform well so their favorite teacher doesn’t get fired or to perform well so that their school doesn’t lose federal funding. If you’re not very good at sitting in a hard plastic chair staring at a computer screen for two hours, it’s just too bad for you.
What can we do about it? This is a change that will not be easily made. The advantages to standardized testing are that it is relatively cheap (compared to my suggestions), easy to roll out and provides a standard measure against which all students (and teachers) can be measured. It keeps the language the same whether you’re on the western side of your state or the eastern side and it makes data really easy to compare and disaggregate so school systems, states, and the federal government really like it. But we know it’s not the best way to do things so we need to change the system. We have to change the way we assess student learning. There have to be different ways to assess student learning just as there are different ways to teach students. First, we would have to determine a standardized way to determine the best way to teach and assess students. Then, there would have to be a set of agreed-upon standardized ways to assess different learners. This would require a complete overhaul of the whole idea of how we teach and assess students. But if the true purpose of education is to educate children and not to do well on a test, then these are necessary changes.
Tomorrow I’ll address the lack of critical thinking and funding.