Monday, April 12, 2010

Teaching to the test

The latest reading scores were published in the USA last week.

They showed little change, despite a huge investment in time, student effort and teacher energy.

This means that one in six kids will continue to leave school, functionally illiterate. One in six!

That's 50 million of tomorrow's Americans who will be unable to read, write or count adequately. And as the world becomes more complex, these marginalized citizens will face a dwindling supply of jobs, and the cost of supporting them via the public purse, will continue to climb.

McKinsey, the management consulting firm, forecasts that by 2017, some 44 per cent of all jobs will require conversation and negotiation skills, to help collectively create new knowledge, and use that knowledge to develop new and better products, or deliver new and more powerful or effective services, that improve our quality of life.

So what are schools doing to prepare young people for this kind of world? Certainly not helping young people develop their teamwork or conversation skills, because we know from the research that most US classrooms are designed for "blah, blah, blah" rather than "yak,yak, yak". The teacher at the front of the class lecturing or asking closed questions. The students seated at separate desks, remaining quiet until spoken to.



Could it be that by focusing on the minutae of how well kids can read, write or use mathematical ideas, we are setting ourselves up for failure? Could it be that we teachers "teach to the test" so our schools keep their funding and we teachers keep our jobs? Could it be that short-term memorization strategies are not in our student's long-term best interests?

What if we used the latest knowledge from brain science to guide how we teach? What if we designed an education system that teaches to our frontal lobes, the part of our brain that makes us uniquely human, rather than the ancient "reptilian" brain we have in common with many other creatures, or the limbic brain we and our fellow mammals developed?

Our frontal lobes are responsible for making sense of the world, planning what to do and how to do it. They act as our own personal Google and find stuff for us when we most need it, in the context of a complex problem or issue. They lay down new automatic thinking and acting patterns, so we don't have to push the porridge up our nose every day. They give us the capabilities that most other animals don't have, the ability to use tools, to learn from the past, plan for the future, create new knowledge together, and make new and more powerful tools.

What if we judged teacher and student success by focusing on the bigger picture of student passion, engagement, performance or contribution? So that we create a classroom culture in which young minds and bodies thrive? And where teachers are actually rewarded for teaching this way.

A frontal-lobe focused classroom would provide opportunities for young people to develop their conversation, planning and problem solving skills in interactions with each other. To respect each other, ask rich questions, use different forms of discourse, listen empathetically, persuade an audience, engage in playful simulation or present a performance. They would be prepared for the world that's emerging, not the world of a hundred years ago, when unskilled work was plentiful and technology less complex.

And when we teach this way, our brain chemistry delivers enjoyable rewards for successfully completing tasks, especially those that are just a little ahead of our capabilities, like the way games are designed to reward you as you progress through each level.

Think of it this way. If you were a movie mogul, would you judge the success of your movies on a written exam of what moviegoers learned - the minutae, the detail and a fight/flight response - or the jingle of the cash register at the box office and the reviews by the pundits - the big picture, and the flow of good feelings.

Here's a workshop to explore the mood of your classroom:

1. When you are asked to recall specific information from memory, what emotions do you feel? And why do you feel this way?
2. What is the mood of your classroom? Make a list of the main emotions that students experience during the course of the day, and why they feel this way?
3. What is YOUR mood in the classroom? Make a list of the emotions you experience and why you feel this way.
4. Describe an activity in your classroom when your students experienced positive emotions. What were they doing and what teaching strategies were you using at the time?
5. Describe a time when your students were enthusiastically engaged in an activity for a long period of time, so they did not notice time passing. What were they doing and why did they stay engaged for so long?
6. Thinking about what you know about learning, engagement, our emotions and how the brain works, design a learning activity that generates positive emotions for you and your students, and results in enthusiastic and passionate engagement.
7. Describe a learning activity that is designed to make use of the frontal lobes ability to connect up/develop lower level component skills of reading, writing and maths so they are swept along for the ride.
8. Describe a test that would allow teachers and students to measure the "big picture" aspects of learning including passion, engagement, performance and contribution.
9. Describe a dual system of testing - the "big picture" and the "nitty gritty" so that both act as feedback loops to guide the kind of learning students need to undertake for the future. How would you ensure there is balance between the two?