Why & How We Assess: Confronting Our Educational OS
During our most recent Creative Conversations--hour-long explorations of the Laws of Learning described in Trust the Science: Using brain-based learning to update our educational OS--we explored Learning Law #3: Why and how we assess learning, impacts learning.
After a brief framing, participants reflected on their formal education, from kindergarten through their post-secondary courses. Why and how were you assessed, and what impact did that have on your learning?
Next we moved into small breakout groups, giving everyone a chance to share their reflections and crowdsource resources re: assessing in ways that bring out the best in learners.
We wrapped up our hour with a round of insights & wonders. One person asked, “If the systems and structures stay the same, how do we move forward? I’m wondering if this year is the year the ‘walls have come down’ and made it possible to change the way we offer things in the future.”
Falling Walls?
One of the human brain’s most remarkable features is its plasticity, the capacity to rewire itself when confronted with novel, and often threatening, circumstances. The pandemic has showcased our plasticity’s prowess. Our brains have changed; we perceive things differently; we’re behaving in new ways.
The crack of COVID has let some light in (thank you, Leonard!) and, at least for a little while, we’ve got a chance to reconceive our answer to the fundamental question: What is the purpose of school? Our answer to that question determines why and how we assess learning, which determines whether and how students learn.
If the primary purpose of school were to help all learners develop their full and unique potential, then assessment would become an ongoing and deepening conversation with students, one driven by three recurring questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What will I do? Assessment would seek to understand students at their core, within the framework of a curriculum designed to develop their capacity to be skilled communicators, problem solvers, creative thinkers, and team players who take care of themselves and each other. Each school year, students would continue to draft and craft the story of who they are, what they’ve done, and whom they hope to become, gathering evidence from in and out of school experiences. And each spring, teachers would study these portfolios and meet with their future students to begin understanding their stories, hopes, and concerns. In this kind of assessment system, students would become better known each year, and school would become increasingly in sync with their particular interests, hopes, and needs. Students would be at the center of this approach to learning.
But if the primary purpose of school is to sort and rank students according to the narrow metric of how well they take tests that predict the likelihood of them scoring well on similar tests in college, then assessment will continue to be done to students, rather than with and for them. This kind of assessment system motivates some students, with its promise of a brighter future for those who play the game best. Over time, students eager to get into a good college bear down and give it their all, gaming the system when necessary to cultivate an impressive GPA and stake their claim to a competitive college. But most students don’t bite, opting instead--to the discouragement of their hard working teachers--to invest their focus and energy in out-of-school experiences that nourish dimensions of their development that fall outside of the narrow mission of college prep. In this kind of assessment system, students become less known as they make their way through a school system. Teachers are at the center of this approach to learning.
Many schools continue the futile and exhausting task of trying to serve both of these purposes. They say that the primary purpose is the first, yet still operate with the systems of the second.
Despite Vermont’s decade-long mandate for personalized learning plans, flexible pathways, and proficiency-based learning, our school systems still march to the drum of school’s original purpose--measuring, ranking, and sorting students according to their capacity to get good scores. This outdated operating system incentivizes students to master the art of short-term learning, running a gauntlet of standardized, fragmented, and recall-based curricula, disconnected from their lives, interests, and most pressing questions.
COVD has temporarily crashed our outdated operating system, an industrial-aged model that objectifies students and commodifies learning. Walls have begun to fall down, providing us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to break the cycle of generational pedagogical poverty that’s prevented schools from developing the unique and full potential of all learners.
Next we moved into small breakout groups, giving everyone a chance to share their reflections and crowdsource resources re: assessing in ways that bring out the best in learners.
We wrapped up our hour with a round of insights & wonders. One person asked, “If the systems and structures stay the same, how do we move forward? I’m wondering if this year is the year the ‘walls have come down’ and made it possible to change the way we offer things in the future.”
Falling Walls?
One of the human brain’s most remarkable features is its plasticity, the capacity to rewire itself when confronted with novel, and often threatening, circumstances. The pandemic has showcased our plasticity’s prowess. Our brains have changed; we perceive things differently; we’re behaving in new ways.
The crack of COVID has let some light in (thank you, Leonard!) and, at least for a little while, we’ve got a chance to reconceive our answer to the fundamental question: What is the purpose of school? Our answer to that question determines why and how we assess learning, which determines whether and how students learn.
But if the primary purpose of school is to sort and rank students according to the narrow metric of how well they take tests that predict the likelihood of them scoring well on similar tests in college, then assessment will continue to be done to students, rather than with and for them. This kind of assessment system motivates some students, with its promise of a brighter future for those who play the game best. Over time, students eager to get into a good college bear down and give it their all, gaming the system when necessary to cultivate an impressive GPA and stake their claim to a competitive college. But most students don’t bite, opting instead--to the discouragement of their hard working teachers--to invest their focus and energy in out-of-school experiences that nourish dimensions of their development that fall outside of the narrow mission of college prep. In this kind of assessment system, students become less known as they make their way through a school system. Teachers are at the center of this approach to learning.
Many schools continue the futile and exhausting task of trying to serve both of these purposes. They say that the primary purpose is the first, yet still operate with the systems of the second.
Despite Vermont’s decade-long mandate for personalized learning plans, flexible pathways, and proficiency-based learning, our school systems still march to the drum of school’s original purpose--measuring, ranking, and sorting students according to their capacity to get good scores. This outdated operating system incentivizes students to master the art of short-term learning, running a gauntlet of standardized, fragmented, and recall-based curricula, disconnected from their lives, interests, and most pressing questions.
COVID has laid bare how paltry that purpose is, how poorly that operating system serves our students and communities. The pandemic has allowed educators to adopt a “slow down, simplify, relationships first” approach to teaching and learning, a refreshing reprieve from the traditional “hurry up, cover, GPA first” approach.
COVD has temporarily crashed our outdated operating system, an industrial-aged model that objectifies students and commodifies learning. Walls have begun to fall down, providing us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to break the cycle of generational pedagogical poverty that’s prevented schools from developing the unique and full potential of all learners.
And hey--we’ve learned a thing or two about how to think and act flexibly to meet our and our students’ wide ranging needs.
Staggering Opportunity Cost
By the time students enter high school, their brains have adapted to the operating system that drives what happens in schools. Deep in their bones they know that school curricula are short-term learning obstacle courses, a series of fragmented and disconnected classes that reward compliance. They also know that their teachers will knock themselves out to make sure that, one way or another, they all make it through to graduation.
The staggering opportunity cost of our outdated operating system is difficult to overstate. So much untapped talent and potential lie dormant in students as they bide their time to get out of school and begin their “real lives.” So many student lives are stunted by the narrow metric of success that drives school systems, which unintentionally damage too many students’ sense of intelligence, worth, and potential.
And those who successfully game the system pay a price, too. To learn about the mental health crisis that bedevils our "best and brightest", please watch the first ten minutes of Princeton Professor Laurie Santos’ pre-pandemic presentation to the National Council for Behavioral Health.
And then there’s the cost to our democracy and our economy, that never reap the rewards of a more fully realized body politic. Instead, our current operating system creates division and cultivates inequity.
Confronting Our Operating System
The pandemic has displayed just how resilient and adaptable humans are, when confronted with threatening circumstances. It’s time for us to confront the damage and cost of sticking with our familiar-yet-threatening educational operating system. Let this be our bottom, our chance to transform our raw and vulnerable selves and system. Let us resist the call and comfort of the familiar, which perpetuates inequities and prevents the full blossoming of our students’, communities’, and country’s potential. Let us draw on our brain’s remarkable capacity to chart new and better courses.
If you’d like to learn more about the why, what, and how of upgrading our educational operating system, read the blog Trust the Science: Using brain-based learning to upgrade our educational OS and consider joining our free and ongoing series of Creative Conversations, devoted to sharing ideas for how to upgrade our educational OS. We next meet on April 7 from 3:30 - 4:30, when we’ll explore Learning Law #4: Human beings construct their own understanding of the world. Register here.
The staggering opportunity cost of our outdated operating system is difficult to overstate. So much untapped talent and potential lie dormant in students as they bide their time to get out of school and begin their “real lives.” So many student lives are stunted by the narrow metric of success that drives school systems, which unintentionally damage too many students’ sense of intelligence, worth, and potential.
And those who successfully game the system pay a price, too. To learn about the mental health crisis that bedevils our "best and brightest", please watch the first ten minutes of Princeton Professor Laurie Santos’ pre-pandemic presentation to the National Council for Behavioral Health.
And then there’s the cost to our democracy and our economy, that never reap the rewards of a more fully realized body politic. Instead, our current operating system creates division and cultivates inequity.
Confronting Our Operating System
The pandemic has displayed just how resilient and adaptable humans are, when confronted with threatening circumstances. It’s time for us to confront the damage and cost of sticking with our familiar-yet-threatening educational operating system. Let this be our bottom, our chance to transform our raw and vulnerable selves and system. Let us resist the call and comfort of the familiar, which perpetuates inequities and prevents the full blossoming of our students’, communities’, and country’s potential. Let us draw on our brain’s remarkable capacity to chart new and better courses.
If you’d like to learn more about the why, what, and how of upgrading our educational operating system, read the blog Trust the Science: Using brain-based learning to upgrade our educational OS and consider joining our free and ongoing series of Creative Conversations, devoted to sharing ideas for how to upgrade our educational OS. We next meet on April 7 from 3:30 - 4:30, when we’ll explore Learning Law #4: Human beings construct their own understanding of the world. Register here.
I love this post
ReplyDelete