At the end of the chapter, the author shares a key question he posed to teachers at a school wishing to raise its reading scores: "Are you so interested in improving your students' reading abilities that you are willing to change what you do in your classroom - or do you wan to raise their test scores so that you don't have to change what you do in your classroom?" Write about your reaction to this question. By posing this question, what is the author hinting at in terms of what is important to teachers about standardized tests? Are most teachers willing to change what they do in their classrooms? If so, why? If not, why not? What - ultimately - should determine whether teachers change their classroom practices?
Ah, I like these kinds of questions where a slight change in words/word order completely changes the meaning - the beautiful subtleties of languages. The author appears to be hinting that standardized tests are useful in determining scholar abilities in an unbiased environment, but they are also a problem because it becomes easy to simply want your students to do well on the test to demonstrate your teaching skills and to forget that there is more to education than that. Thus it was a reminder for teachers that they should use standardized tests as a useful tool but remember that as the students are there to learn the teachers are also expected to continue learning and growing in their role as well.
ReplyDeleteI think student/fellow teacher feedback is good to ensure teachers are able to recognize their weak areas and ways to continue to develop, but it is also the teacher's responsibility to pay attention to how their teaching impacts students and how they could continually adapt and work on this.
I agree with you that it is a way to check learning and teaching skills and see if they match each other. I think that change is something most people don't like. I however, enjoy challenges and the opportunities to improve both myself and the students.
DeleteClassrooms are like a living thing. They always need to be looked after and cared for. Standard tests should be one of many tools used to help find what works best in your classroom. Without even thinking about it, you change the way you deliver material and what you deliver between classes, adapting as you go. With testing, it shows if you are doing this or if more changes are needed. We need to get out of the idea that this is our material that must be taught in a certain way. Being flexible allows us to take the information from tests and change the way we teach as ultimately our success is not the test scores, but the long term learning of the student. If they are not really learning something, are we really teaching them then?
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