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What's the difference?

Thoughts on making a real difference in the lives of learners...

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The Politics of Testing

1/23/2015

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Measuring student assessment should be an educational exercise, not a political one. When I see external agencies using test results to rank schools, or assess teacher performance, it is a clear example of a simplistic misunderstanding of the limitations of a single number as an indicator of the quality of a complex teaching and learning environment.
By the same token, I also bristle when I hear professional educators decry the use of some form of standardized testing or provincial exam as a means of benchmarking student performance and identifying areas for increased support and intervention. Both sides quite often forget that assessment is a tool for learning and not an end in itself.

Years ago, I was taking an additional qualification course in Special Education being offered by York University. A couple of weeks into the course I submitted my first assignment, which was subsequently returned the next class. In red ink at the top of the first page was a large “B+”. There were no other comments or notations on any other page of the paper. After class I went up to the instructor and asked what I could have done to have improved my essay to an “A”.  Her response was: “When a paper is worth an “A” it just jumps out at you, and yours didn’t jump out!” Needless to say, I took this valuable feedback to heart in all of my future assignments!

If you talk to teachers about marking student work, most of them will tell you that it is the least favourite part of their job. In many cases, evaluating student work is seen as a means to an end, and that end is having a spreadsheet full of numbers that can be synthesized into a “grade” on a published report. Consequently for many educators, at all levels, assessment of student understanding and mastery of the core knowledge and skills is the part of the teaching and learning process that gets the least time and attention. It is viewed as a necessary “evil”, is frequently viewed as drudgery, and is all too often done on the couch while watching television. Having said that, children, parents, and receiving schools, colleges and universities who are trying to gauge student ability and performance, depend upon the numbers generated by this process to give them an accurate picture. I once, briefly, had a teacher working for me who felt that if he simply gave all of his students high marks, he could avoid any questioning of his teaching or his students’ achievement. Besides giving little meaningful feedback, he also demonstrated the weak point of much student assessment – it is subjective, and it is disproportionately dependent upon the skill and professional integrity of individual teachers.

Assessment is a tricky thing. To be effective, it needs to be based on clearly articulated outcomes, valid methodology, and either criterion or rubric based evaluation tools.  It also needs to be validated against external standards or benchmarks to ensure that a student’s stated performance in one classroom or school is a dependable predictor of their future performance elsewhere. This external validity is of critical importance to not only to parents and students, but to educators as well. 

Recently in the media, there has been the re-emergence of the annual debate about British Columbia's FSA (Foundation Skills Assessment) testing for Grades 4 and 7. In many Districts, the BC Teachers' Federation has taken out ads encouraging parents to request that their children be exempted from writing them. These detractors decry the testing as a narrowly focused tool for school and teacher assessment and one that lacks generalized reliability. In a sense, they are correct. As a stand-alone measure, the FSA does not provide reliable, comparable school to school or classroom to classroom data. To see it as such is a misuse of the information.

On the other hand, as a snapshot of student performance and a measure of skill development in language arts and mathematics, standardized testing like the FSA or Canadian Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) or DIBELS such as we also use at KGMS is a critically important tool not just to look at how our children are doing, but to inform instruction and to benchmark school assessment standards. Over the next month, many of our students will be completing the FSA in Grades 4 and 7. It is our plan to use the resultant information to help us to measure their progress; to identify peaks and valleys in their performance; and, to help us to improve our own practice in order to more effectively meet their needs. Politics aside, standardized, norm-referenced testing can be a valuable tool for educators to track student growth, benchmark school-based assessments, and give a generalized snapshot of the extent to which the programme is supporting students in mastering learning outcomes that will prepare them for success in the next stage of their schooling.



As educators, our responsibility is to help our students demystify the testing process, reduce their anxiety in this and any future test-taking situations, and to encourage them to approach the process like any other new learning experience. We let them know that the stakes are low, but that the potential rewards, in terms of understanding how they learn, are tremendous!
In a school like ours, where everyone is on an individual education plan, the lines sometimes become blurred between achievement in terms of our programme expectations, and the norms outlined in provincial guidelines. This kind of external measure helps us to bridge that gap and ensure smoother transitions both ways for our students. And, in the final analysis, the more information that we have about our students, the better we can teach them. Standardized testing, like the FSAs, provides just another piece of the puzzle. It is our job to put it altogether for our kids.

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Different but Equal

1/12/2015

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Yesterday I read a piece in Education Week written by Dr. James Delisle in which he flatly rejected the idea of differentiated instruction in the classroom in favour of a streamed teaching approach to homogeneous groupings of kids.

In his article he states: 
 Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back. In fact, what he argues is that differentiation, while a laudable goal, is too difficult for teachers to implement and it therefore is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students. In other words, according to him, the problem is not the theory, but rather the actual practice. And, rather than improve the skills of our teachers in order to meet the needs of all learners, we should turn back the clock and educate in narrowly defined silos of learner "capability". Hopefully, we have left those days behind us.

Years ago, I taught at the University of Connecticut alongside Jim Delisle and, ironically, Carol Ann Tomlinson who is perhaps the world expert and greatest proponent of differentiation. So I wondered, all of these years later, what would make him think this way?

There is no question that many teachers consider the challenge of meeting the needs of a diverse group of learners an impossible task. You only have to look at the rhetoric surrounding the recent teachers' strike in British Columbia with its rallying cry against the integration of special needs students into classrooms and demands for contract language controlling "class composition" to see this mentality at work. Unfortunately the idea of "streaming" classes is based on the fallacy that students fall into definable categories as learners and that if properly grouped, they can be taught with a "one size fits all" style of instruction. Certainly many post-secondary institutions operate that way but I have never seen a good school, or a master teacher who would ever consider that to be an effective approach to teaching and learning.

Teachers have always struggled with how to differentiate to meet the needs of all learners. Thirty years ago, attention to "learning styles" was all the rage. Teachers were encouraged to vary their methodology in order to give each student some opportunities to learn in their own preferred way. One system in vogue at the time divided students into four learning quadrants and recommended that learning activities and approaches be balanced among them. Although this was superior to a monomodal approach, it still meant - even to its advocates - that the needs of only one quarter of the students in a class were being appropriately addressed at any given time. 

What we really needed then, and still need now, is a multimodal approach. In other words, rather than varying our methods from time to time, educators really should offer multiple approaches concurrently. This is the fundamental concept behind Universal Design for Learning (UDL). You start with the concept, or the assessment, or the teaching strategy and offer a variety of approaches or options for students to pursue. UDL starts with the premise that everyone is capable of understanding a concept; or demonstrating mastery; or being engaged in learning; the role of the teacher is to find the pathway that will make it work for each of her or his students. For a class novel study for example, that might mean using a combination of a regular print copy; a digital book with adjustable font; an audio-book; or even speech to text software on a laptop or SmartBoard. Additionally, some creative strategies for challenging learners, inspired by a universal design approach, can often prove to be more effective for all students - even those who would normally succeed in a traditional classroom.

At KGMS and Maplewood Alternative, each of our classes is the most eclectic mix that you can imagine and our school functions quite wonderfully with over 160 different educational plans operating at the same time. Our teachers are masters of the art of running a truly student centred and differentiated classroom, being aware of the range of learning styles and needs that they face and helping children and young adults navigate their way through the curriculum. Do they have supports? Of course they do. We have relatively small core classes (15-18) which are subdivided into working groups of five or six with a dedicated teacher for language arts and mathematics; we have specialist support teachers in Science, Social Studies, Phys-ed and the Arts; we have a strong counseling department which delivers our Social-Emotional Learning programme; we have psychologists, an SLP and an OT at our disposal; and a legion of expert tutors that provide close to an hour of one on one tutoring for each elementary student, every day and individualized academic support for all of our high school students.

You see, the real issue is not about who is in your classroom, but rather it is about how you are organized to effectively serve them. In our school, students with complex learning needs are not a challenge to be faced, they are a puzzle to be solved. We work as a team to unlock the barriers to their learning and open up new pathways to success. It is often a difficult task, but it is always rewarding.

Every teacher, every classroom, and every school has to provide a learning environment that recognizes that every student learns differently. You can call it differentiation, or you can just call it effective teaching. Either way, it is the only way to meet the needs of the learners in our care.  Anything less, to put it in Jim Delisle's terms, would be a "farce"!


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    Author

    Dr. Jim Christopher is recently retired Head of Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School and Maplewood Alternative High School in North Vancouver. A parent, author and long-time teacher, and educational administrator across Canada, he has been actively involved in the drive to differentiate learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

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