Techlearning blog

I had a conversation last week, while working the North Carolina Educational Technology Conference, that has haunted me ever since, especially during my flight, later that night, to Colorado.

First, I want to say, that the two people I'll be referring to are dedicated, caring, talented educators, with the very best intentions at heart -- model educators in almost every way. ..And I feel more than a bit uncomfortable reporting on the conversation here, but I am pretty sure that this is important — either in terms of my objections or in terms of finding, from you, that I’m wrong.

It was a teacher and a principal of an elementary school in a low wealth rural county of the state. I asked my usual question, “What’s knocked your socks off at the conference?” The younger of the two, the teacher, 4 years experience, started telling me about a web service that they were both excited about. She was practically bubbling. I listened. Then she proceeded to describe an web-based assessment service that was tied directly to the North Carolina standards, and that it would enable the teachers to frequently test their students’ mastery of specific standards, evaluate their strategies, adapt, and improve their students performance.

Now normally, I’m losing interest at this point, but she was so excited and expressing herself with such animation, I have to say it was contagious. My skeptic antenna stayed put, and I started prodding with questions. The principal, then, described the assessment tool that they were currently using, and how it worked, and I interrupted. “So how good has your current assessment tool been at predicting performance on the state’s End of Grade test?

She looked at me, and said, “Terrible!” She said, we were so excited and proud, and proud of our students, when testing time came, because they were doing so well with the assessments. But then, the test scores came back and they were very bad (I do not recall the descriptive word she used). But this is why they were so pleased about the new tool, which seems better aligned with the style of the NC tests.

OK, most of the readers here know where I’m going with this. So there is no need to elaborate. But as we were climbing to our cruising altitude that night, approaching the Appalachian mountains, I thought, "We’re trying to paint the clouds!"

Our kids are not a picket fence of identical rails you can paint white with a broad brush. They’re all different, with their own strengths and weaknesses, talents and challenges, surfaces and depths — and they’ll all need to know different things for their futures, futures we can’t even describe. Certainly they need to learn certain basic literacy skills (which we’re still trying to redefine). And we need to be sure these skills are learned and mastered.

But when we teach kids how to pass tests, we’re trying to spread paint on to something that just want hold it.

Looking out to the west, and seeing the setting sun shine through the ubiquitous haze of the Smokies, I thought, "This is how to get your picture. Not by painting the clouds, but by watching the sun shine through the clouds -- empowering learners to surprise you with their brilliance."

I simply can't help but wonder what those children thought, when they’d been so successful with the schools assessment practices, only to fail the state tests.

What do schools come to mean to these children?

How long will they stay in these schools?

Image Citation:
Sparrow, Tom. “Flying Sunset.” Tomsparrow’s Photostream. 11 Sep 2007. 30 Nov 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/spidge/1360010165/>.