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Entering the Testing Marathon Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder April 8, 2013 As we enter the final
quarter of the school year, we are also entering the testing marathon.
Over the next ten weeks students will be taking NYS exams in ELA, Math,
and Science, in grades three through eight. Older students will be
taking AP exams and Regents exams. In addition to these high
stakes tests, students at all levels will be taking post-tests in every
subject area to fulfill the Student Learning Objectives required to
demonstrate growth for the purposes of teacher evaluation. I am
posting this in order to articulate as clearly as I can that this is not
sound practice for school children—it is politically driven, not
educationally driven. It is an inordinate time commitment when
classroom time is so precious. A much wiser thinker than I once said,
“Children do not get heavier because you weigh them.” I think that
sage comment applies in this era of test mania. Children do not
become smarter because you test them. Children become smarter by
their daily interactions with content, curriculum, and caring educators.
We know that there are so many factors that affect our students’
performance at any given moment. If you do an internet search on
how to improve standardized test scores, you will note that there are
thousands of tips—rarely any of them related to teaching and learning.
Everything from eating bananas, to taking a nap, to listening to
classical music, to cooler room temperatures, to petting your puppy
seems to be included in tips to improve scores. Those of us who
have been around the block a few times will tell you that a youngster’s
outcomes on any test can be affected by whether the sun is shining, or
whether a child had a decent breakfast, or an argument on the bus.
I read a letter from a teacher in another district last June who
lamented that her students who were sitting for the 9:00 a.m. Regents
English exam had been out at a rock concert the night before and some
had not slept more than a couple of hours. Sleep is associated
with better outcomes! Again, these deviations in outcomes are
related to factors extrinsic to the interactions in the classroom. We
will, of course, be administering all of these required exams because we
are good soldiers, but I feel compelled to also take on the role of the
“Loyal Opposition.” I have worked in this field for so long and with so
many children (each as unique as their thumbprints) that I simply cannot
pretend that compliance with the requirements is good educational
practice for the youngsters in my care. I have spoken my piece in
every forum available to me. I ask parents and teachers to put
these long Spring days of testing in perspective. Not one bubble
sheet will define the capacity of our children to become what they
choose for themselves in the future. All this being said,
please know that teachers assess all the time. We deal with a
dynamic population. Whether I assess a child’s grasp of one to one
correspondence by observing them counting out manipulatives in the
primary grades, or whether I assess an older student’s comprehension of
complex text by interacting with them verbally or in writing, it is my
job as an educator to assess and address understanding and deficits.
Assessment is rigorous and complex—it is too important to simply be
reduced to a bubble sheet. Let’s confirm to the students that
teaching and learning are about time and space. We will work hard
on our end to support the students in their diligent work of compliance
with this quarter’s expectations—and take some time to watch Spring
unfold.
An Effort to Put Testing in Perspective Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder March 15, 2013 Once again, an effort to put testing in perspective: I was recently home on an off day when I received a text message from one of my daughters. She was ecstatic because an article she had written had been selected for publication in a professional journal. Amy is a social worker by training and is a policy analyst for the New York State Department of the Aging. She is also a doctoral student at the University. The reason why this event is an effort to put testing in perspective is because when my daughter was a child, one of New York State's interests was in testing fifth grade writing. I bet many of you remember that test. In those days, unlike today, there was a particular interest in creative writing. Today, of course, the focus is largely on informational, non-fiction writing. Amy barely passed the writing test--really, by a single point. It was not a surprise to me as Amy is a linear thinker, and although highly creative in many ways, she approaches text like a laser--fits in well with her work as a policy analyst. The writing prompt that caused her such difficulty when she was ten went something like this: "I was walking through the woods and I found a box. When I opened it I found....." Amy wrote something very powerful, something like, "nothing, it was empty." I believe she filled the page describing aspects of the rest of her walk, but did not score any points for her written response to that prompt. As it happens, when she grew up she discovered that her writing ability is prized in her field because she doesn't fill her writing with fluff. She is succinct and efficient in a field where those traits are highly desirable. As we prepare to enter the testing marathon, I hope to reassure all of you parents and students--and teachers--that a child's performance on a given day is not predictive of who they will become or how their personal gifts will be viewed when they mature. These children are not finished yet. No test will define who they are or what they will become. When a child scores well on a test, I say good for them; but when a child scores less well, I remember Amy, and say perhaps the test did not measure what you are good at. As I write this, I
also wanted to acknowledge a couple of other indicators that we need to
celebrate at least as much as we celebrate those bubble sheets thousands
of children will be filling out in the next couple of months.
Right before vacation, I watched our high school physics students
competing in the pool with the cardboard vessels teams of classmates
collaborated in designing and building. The object is to build a
cardboard boat that will carry two students twice the length of the
pool. Everything, including the paddles, is constructed of
cardboard and duct tape. It was amazing, it was fun, it was
physics! The record keeping included rubrics for the construction of
the vessel, a dry sponge weighed and recorded prior to launch and post
launch (to see how much water was taken on), and speed. It was
quite a feat to keep the soggy boats afloat, but the students persisted
and learned a great deal about sinking and floating! The kids worked so
hard and, even as they wound up in the drink, there was a sense of
celebration. I guarantee they will remember that day a lifetime
from now, whereas their memories of scantron sheets will be short-lived.
Back to the Future: How 2013 Resembles 1957 Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder February 25, 2013 I have been quiet for
a few months. Between adjusting the school lunch program and
beginning our difficult budgeting season, I have taken a break from
commenting on the area of schooling that actually matters most to
me—teaching and learning. Perhaps it is because I am a Sputnik kid
that I find the current focus on education to be strangely retro.
All this hoopla about races and global comparisons and about how poorly
our children achieve compared to the rest of the world is all so
familiar—and incredibly painful to recall. I was seven years old
when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, thus putting our role as leaders
in the world in jeopardy because they had gotten a rocket ship into
outer space before us. It changed my educational experience
drastically as there was a race to outperform those Communists—our
education needed to be more rigorous and we needed to identify students
who were the next generation of scientists and engineers. Over the
subsequent years of my schooling, we were tested routinely. As it
happens it was, for me, both a blessing and a curse. I happened to
be one of the kids who tested strongly. I, by the way, attribute
that more to my family life than my schooling or any innate ability.
I was the much younger sister to two brothers—one who went to MIT and
one who went to Harvard. They taught me to read and write.
They played math games with me and they told me bedtime stories which
years later I identified as synopses of Shakespearean plays. They
never gave me an edge in any game and if I complained about that to my
parents I was told to simply not play with the big guys any more.
My mother was one of my biggest supporters. I recall a story about
my fifth grade teacher who was convinced I was underperforming—he urged
her to send me to a specialty school for math and science prodigies.
My mother’s response was, “for goodness sake, John, she is nine years
old.” I am grateful for her intervention. I was not a math
or science prodigy, I was a curious little girl. I did love math
and science—my dad helped me build a science lab in my basement.
I spent a lot of my time making up experiments and working on math
puzzles—on my own time. The events that changed my passions for
science and math occurred in seventh and eighth grades. I was
identified for a special math group—one of two girls who, along with six
boys, made up a little class of our own. We were actually
separated in the classroom, sitting in a group away from the other
students. We were accelerated, which meant in that day, you just
worked really hard on really advanced stuff without much interaction
with the teacher. I was one of those kids who had a really
good memory so I could plug in formulas, but I had absolutely no idea
why the formulas worked. As soon as I got to high school
I dropped math and science once I had reached the minimum required for
graduation. I threw myself into the humanities and wound up
majoring in philosophy in college—I think because I was still stuck on
the why. These days, which seem so frenzied, so much of a
race, take me back and it worries me that the urgent focus on global
competitiveness is misleading. I fear that there are little girls
and little boys, who may very well have a penchant for math and science,
who will have all of that curiosity hammered out of them. On the
other hand, maybe our new world would benefit from a few more
philosophers! The reason I say that
the urgent focus on global competitiveness may be misleading is based,
quite frankly, on research which clearly indicates that when you correct
for poverty, U.S. students already are competitive with the highest
performing countries. Indeed, our issues have less to do with
education than with pervasive, multi-generational poverty.
We have known for dozens of years that three of the top factors
associated with results on standardized tests are socio-economic status,
levels of maternal education, and mobility—(interesting that the second
two factors are actually subsets of the first). That said,
the amount of time and the amount of misuse of the data sets we are
about to begin collecting on the backs of school children is profoundly
disconcerting. A child is as unique as his or her
thumbprint. The compelling force to squeeze every child into a
standardized measure is, from my point of view, antithetical to what a
good education is supposed to accomplish. I keep hearing arguments
about rigor—even for children as young as three years old—but what I see
is not rigor—it is rigidity—and with that rigid implementation I worry
that these children will respond as a little girl did more than fifty
years ago by withdrawing from the very areas that were her primary
interest, her passion—and curiously the very areas that the powers that
were (and are) identifying as a national need. The reason companies
outsource or “off-shore” their work is not because our educational
system has failed in providing workers, but because in the “global
economy” the companies can reap larger profits by paying lower wages
elsewhere. This is not an issue of education, but of economics.
Indeed, William Mathis, Director of the National Education Policy Center
indicates that we have approximately 9 million workers with credentials
that would qualify them as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and
Math), however, only about a third of them work in those fields.
There are no jobs here, because they have gone elsewhere, where industry
can hire low and reap high profits. Should education
improve? It most certainly can and must, but not by reverting to
tactics that are not revolutionary, but retro—dating back to the middle
of the last century. "Toys & Games" Happy Holidays! Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder December 12, 2012 Lately, my columns
have been challenging the perspectives of the current crop of
educational reformers—strangely, I recall when reform was cutting edge
stuff, not throw backs to a post Sputnik era of trying to surpass the
Russians and testing, testing, testing—but that is another story.
I decided that I wanted to focus on some of the funny things that have
happened to me in my long career as an educator in the private,
parochial, and public sectors. Any educator who has been around long
enough has a bushel full, but I wanted to share a couple that are quite
memorable, and in the spirit of the holiday season, let’s take a break
from the serious side of my work. Many of you may not
know that I entered the convent straight out of high school in 1967. It
was my intent to change the world! Needless to say, it did not work out
quite as planned. My mother always told me that I would never make it
as a nun because I have terrible handwriting—I never quite made the
connection on that one, but I am sure that the many wonderful
secretaries I have had in my career would agree with my mom. Anyhow, as
very young nun, I was sent out to teach whenever there was a shortage or
a need for a substitute. It mattered not that I was only 17. One of my
classes was a kindergarten and there was a little boy in the class who
was extremely active. On about the second day I was there, Matthew
shoved his legs in the desk. Now in those days in older school buildings
the desks were bolted to the floor. Much to my horror, Matthew was
stuck up to his pelvis in the desk! I tried to remain calm as these
little five-year-olds circled Matthew and me, chanting “Matty’s stuck in
the desk!” It was a loud enough ruckus to attract the principal’s
attention—in those days classrooms were pretty quiet. Soon enough
Sister Mary Principal (not her real name) was by my side trying to
restore order, while sending a child to the custodian’s room to retrieve
Mr. Helpful (not his real name). Mr. Helpful spent the next half hour
dismantling the desk to extract Matthew, while Sister Mary Principal
lectured me on why I should not have let him do it. To be honest, it
took all of my self-control to keep from saying: “It never occurred to
me to establish a rule about not shoving your legs in the desk.” Shall
I say it was a learning experience? You bet! But I confess that many
times over the course of the weeks I was there, as I tried to keep track
of Matthew, (did I mention that he was extremely active?), I realized
that the only time I actually knew Matthew was not getting into mischief
was that fifteen minutes he was stuck in the desk! I think the reason I
get nostalgic about all my experiences in the classroom around this time
of year is because in my last classroom this was a period of time when I
developed one of my favorite units of study. I observed that in the
span of time between Thanksgiving and the holidays, my delightful second
graders turned into penultimate would-be consumers! “I’m getting this
for Christmas, I am getting that for Hanukah” was reiterated as often as
the holiday songs. I decided to build a mini-unit on “Toys and Games”
so the students could understand that they had within them the capacity
to entertain themselves. I integrated the subject areas and developed
lessons that had kids building toys and making games, comparing prices
from toy advertisements, looking at gender stereotyping in the toys—why
are Barbies dolls and GI Joes action figures? My culminating project
was creating board games—so they would never be bored again. I remember
one little boy announcing that board games are a lot like chapter books.
When I asked how so he declared: “Well there is a beginning and an end
and in the middle there are pitfalls.” Don’t you just love little
people’s insights? Well, anyhow, a couple of years later I was named
principal of that school, but the new second grade teacher kept that
mini-unit and every year she would invite me back to do the Board Game
project. We spent a week creating everything from the pitfalls to the
rules for play, from the tokens to the spinner. Making the spinner was
a formative geometry assessment. I gave each child a four-inch square
of card stock and I asked them how would we find the exact center of the
square because if the spinning arrow was not placed exactly in the
center, the spinner would be unbalanced. The children volunteered
ideas: “If you fold the spinner in half and in half again the middle
will be where the creases meet.” That works—another might say, “If you
measure down each side with a ruler and make a cross half way down, that
will be the center”—that works—but what I always waited for was the one
that came up every year. “If you draw a line from one corner to the
opposite and make an X, the center will be where the lines cross.” At
that I would jump up and down and say excitedly: “Boys and Girls,
congratulations you just did high school geometry because if you bisect
opposing angles of a regular quadrilateral, point of intersection is
true center. Repeat after me: If you bisect opposing angles of a
regular quadrilateral, point of intersection is true center.” I had
them repeat that several times while I made wild gestures to show where
the terms applied on one of the squares. I would tell them to go home
and tell Mom and Dad that you could do High School geometry because “If
you bisect opposing angles…” It was always very gratifying until one
year I got a call from a parent the day after the lesson. She started
by saying, “It’s a good thing I know you.” That made me take
notice—why? She laughed and said that at the dinner table last night,
when we asked what he learned in school, he said that “Mrs. Snyder came
to class and taught them all about bisexual angels.” Bisecting
angles…bisexual angels…it is amazing the vocabulary they can master!! Teaching is such a
rewarding profession, filled with ups and downs, but I can think of no
way I would rather spend my professional life than in the schoolhouse.
I would like to take this time to wish you all a wonderful holiday
season, a respite from the ordinary days of our lives. Let's Do The Math Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder November 27, 2012 Last time I wrote, I
addressed the challenges of the sample ELA questions that are posted as
examples of the types of expectations our students in grades 3 through 8
will be confronting when they sit for their exams. This week, I
want to address the sample math questions that are currently posted as
samples for us to utilize to demonstrate the rigor and complexity that
those students will be facing when they sit for the math exams.
I ran some of the problems through that same readability formula and
found that many of the word problems were likely several years past
grade level. I admit, because the word problems are shorter
passages, that the formulas may be slightly less accurate for
comparisons to be condemnatory, but if a math test is a reading test
many students will be disadvantaged. Readability aside, the
level of expectation for students as young as 8 or 9 years old is quite
daunting. They include multi-step problems: Grade 3 Sample:
Part A: Fill in the blanks below with the whole numbers greater than 1
that will make the number sentences true.
1.
63 ÷____ = 7
2.
63 = 21 × _____
3.
21 = _____ × 7
4.
7 × (____ × ____) = 21 × 7
5.
(21 × 3) ÷ ____ = 7 Part B:
If the product of two whole numbers
greater than 1 is 63, what could the two whole numbers be? ______ ,
______ There is a lot of
information in this problem and it could be fun to study the properties
of the number 63 and its factors, but I would suggest that for beginning
mathematicians, this is level of complexity in a high stakes examination
is way more than a stretch. If you spend time in the company of third
graders you will understand that we are still reminding them to watch
the signs! If you spend time in the company of third graders you
will recognize that this problem relies on a bank of knowledge that is
well past what most eight year olds have mastered and it requires a
level of cognitive stamina that will have many students, even ones who
can perform, diverting their attention from the problem, especially when
they realize this is just one problem in their booklet! Here is one from the
fifth grade sample: 1(10,000) + 2(1,000) + 4(100) + 3 (10) + 2(1)
+ 5(1/10 + 3(1/100).
Which number below is one-tenth of the expanded form above?
A 12422.53
B 1243.253
C 12432.53
D 12432.43 I grew up in the post
Sputnik generation where there was a huge push in math and science and I
did not learn expanded notation until eighth grade! Many fifth
graders will truly struggle with the decimals. Although it may
seem rudimentary to us that finding a number one tenth of the expanded
form simply requires us to move that decimal to the left one place, I
can pretty much guarantee that the average ten year old will not grasp
that concept, simply because they have not had that much experience with
manipulating decimals. Indeed, they frequently have trouble lining
up decimals for simple addition and subtraction—once again, a
developmental issue, not a deficit in mathematical education. How about grade
eight—are we feeling brave? Truthfully, I cannot actually write many of
the grade eight problems because I don’t know how to create the graphs
and diagrams on the computer and I cannot cut and paste their pdf
document, so for this example I will pick an easy one. 2/3(2x – 1) + 2
1/3 = 7 + 1/2(x) Which step would
not be a possible first step for solving this equation
algebraically?
a.
Multiplying every term
in the equation by six.
b.
Subtracting 2 ½ from 7
c.
Subtracting ½ x from 2 x
d.
Multiplying -1 by 2/3 If you are interested
in reviewing other samples, they are posted by grade level on EngageNY,
http://www.p12.nysed.gov/apda/common-core-sample-questions/ One of my favorite
developmental psychologists is Lev Vygotsky. He was a Russian
researcher who was investigating child growth and development around the
same time as Piaget. However, given the political chill between
Russia and the US, he was not really studied much here until the late
twentieth century. His work centered on how children learn and he
posited a theory that learning is innately social. Much of
what was identified as affecting learning before Vygotsky was the
student’s ability to process information. However, Vygotsky argued
that a child learns most effectively in the company of an adult or a
more experienced peer. He identified a “zone of proximal
development” which is a reachable zone a bit past where they are
cognitively and experientially right now but where they can achieve
mastery of new material. The coaching from a more experienced
other person can bring the student to new understanding, but only if
they are already grounded.
Vygotsky gave the example of a teacher who
works an arithmetic problem in front of the child, repeating it as
necessary until the child can master the skill. But Vygotsky noted that
if, instead, the teacher had worked a problem in higher
mathematics--outside the zone of proximal development--the child would
never learn it no matter how often it was repeated.
http://lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/PSY_376_Zone_of_proximal_development Many
of the math examples posted may well be outside the zone of proximal
development for many New York school children. It is a bit like
building a house without a foundation. If we want children to
engage mathematically at ever increasingly complex levels, it is
imperative that the learning be attached to their prior knowledge.
They will master content in the company of teachers who are able to help
the students negotiate the expectations. However, they will not master
content if they cannot make heads or tails out of it.
Assessment and Reachability Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder October 22, 2012 Another challenge has been placed on the agenda for schools preparing students for the State examinations. The posted sample texts for preparing students for the new exams in ELA are hardly reachable by most students. The New York State Education Department has posted
the sample common core questions as prototypes of the upcoming New York
State Testing Program for grades 3 through 8. For ELA, they are public
domain pieces of literature and informational text with specific
practice questions attached. In perusing the samples, I was struck by
what seemed to be a fairly high degree of readability required for
students in various grades. I decided to run some readability
calculations on the provided pieces and I am posting them here. The
calculations were run through a website called "Readability Score" which
includes five different tests and an average of the results of all five
tests. Click here to view the ELA Readability Calculations I realize these are not the actual test samples and are only prototypes, and one can only hope that when the exams are constructed, that the texts selected are considerably more reachable for the students being subjected to them. The above passages would be more than a stretch for the average reader in the named grades. Mind you, I am a big believer in rigor. At this time of year, when I taught second grade, I shared the witches' chant from Macbeth: "Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble." It was a great literary transition into the Halloween season. However, I read it with them, I did not expect them to extend their early reading reach so far without my coaching. As we approach these new renditions of the New York State exams, using the common core learning standards, let's be mindful that expecting students to grapple with rich and rigorous text is appropriate, but the texts must be reachable. In these samples, only a handful of selections are remotely close to grade level expectations. I fully expect that some students will be able to handle the readings, just as I fully expect that many students will be totally frustrated. For those students who are truly able to grapple with these texts and deduce meaning in response to the questions attached, what this test will truly measure is background knowledge. We, not surprisingly, discovered this in our pre-assessment marathon the first week of school. Students who took music lessons outside of school fared better on the music pre-assessment. They had already been exposed to some of the concepts. Do we really think that the majority of New York's sixth graders have been exposed to Demosthenes? I wonder if many sixth grade readers will take one look at that proper name and shy away from exerting any effort in trying to master the text. Should we have an expectation that an average eighth grader in New York ought to be able to engage with text written at the senior in high school level? Tolstoy's little story about the gray hare is an excellent piece, but hardly for independent reading by third graders. The vocabulary is challenging. Words like hoarfrost; threshing-floor; peasants; caftans are all words that are pretty much outside the reading expectations for most third graders. Even if they can pronounce them, their understanding of them is likely to be rather primitive at best. The passage from "Heidi" in fifth grade has a sentence that reads: "I shan't want them anymore," was her prompt answer.' Shan't? My goodness, there's a word I hear commonly among our ten year olds! Some students will be able to read these passages, but New York State is not Lake Woebegone, where every kid is above average! I understand that these are just samples, and the actual exams may have vastly different passages - as I said, one can certainly hope so. Rigor is so much more than baffling text which is well past grade level. If you want students to be able to grapple with higher level thinking skills like comparing and analyzing and evaluating, you must give them texts which are reachable for them. If the texts are not reachable, then the test is not about critical thinking. It does not indicate the effectiveness of teachers, or the capacity of students. Accountability is a two-way street. Expecting students and teachers to engage with text requires that the text be reachable. One Size Does NOT Fit All Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder October 3, 2012 In late August, I watched a bit of the Little League World Series. I am a fan of baseball and I particularly like watching little kids play this game. What struck me, though, was more closely related to what I have been ruminating about for the past year or so: the differences between individuals who can still reach high standards. If you look at all of the little boys in the series, there is a vast range of players. The smallest boy was 4 foot 8 inches, while the tallest was 6 foot 2 inches. They ranged in weight from 80 pounds to 205 pounds. These boys are all around 12 years old. Each boy was playing to a very high standard. They would not have made it to Williamsport if they were not. However, there was nothing standardized about them - except perhaps for a common liking of pizza! Establishing standards is not the same thing as standardized measurement. It is quite possible to have extremely high standards and not measure success on those standards by a one-size-fits-all approach. Imagine how silly it would have been to outfit all of those boys in a uniform that was designed for the average 12-year-old boy. According to the CDC, the average 12-year-old-boy is just under five feet and about 90 pounds. Many of the boys would have been flopping around in super baggy clothes and many would be squished like sausages if they could even squeeze in at all. But of course we know there are so many factors that affect a boy's size - genetics, environment, nutrition, physical health and well-being. If we all can accept that these little boys were all different sizes and playing a high level game, why is it so difficult to accept that children's cognitive maturation is as non-standardized as their physical growth. We educators know that it is perfectly normal to learn to read any time between ages four and eight, yet we are expected to start marking kids down if they aren't reading by age six. It would behoove us to remember that Abraham Lincoln did not learn to read until he was fourteen. Children move through the curriculum in their own unique ways. Some race, some lope, some walk carefully, some stumble a bit. If we structure learning experiences that accommodate their development, they will progress. When I was a child, I was marked down on my kindergarten report card because I could not tie my shoes and I did not alternate feet on the stairs. No one mentioned that it is not unusual for a four year old to struggle to tie shoes; it is more a motor skill associated with five year olds. In December, shortly after I turned five, voila, I could tie my shoes. Recently my little granddaughter was struggling with the same issue. She was quite frustrated because she just could not figure out how to tie her shoes. I kept reinforcing for her that someday, when she was five, she would be able to do this. On the day of her fifth birthday, she tied her shoes! Back to my not alternating feet on the stairs - I lived in a ranch house - no stairs. It was not that I did not know how to alternate feet on the stairs, it was that I had little experience with stairs! The first irony: not alternating feet on the stairs has come full circle as I have a bad knee and frequently do not alternate feet on the stairs now. The second irony: for some reason these motor skills were highly prized in my school, and the fact that I could already read was not noted much. Someone, eons ago, determined that kindergarten children, who are all about five, should be measured against this motor skill benchmark - even though not all kindergarten children are five and even though not all kindergarten children, even those who are five, live in houses with lots of stairs. One of the cautions that I believe we must be aware of when we implement standardized assessments is that results are based on a statistically contrived model. Tests are designed to discriminate. What we must be careful of is not to project too much from those discriminations. Back to the not alternating feet on the stairs - is it a skill limitation or an exposure limitation? When we give ELA exams to students who have varied exposures to English, we must be mindful of whether their outcomes represent flaws in their learning or reduced exposure to vocabulary, language experiences, text and non-text communication. An exam might indicate to us that a child needs more exposure to these cognitive experiences, but that is pretty much all you can deduce. These students will distribute across the statistical representation, but all the results tell us is where a student stands in relation to the distribution, not whether they are deficient in capacity or understanding. The results certainly do not tell us whether the teacher was effective or not. This is why the results are consistently skewed by sociological factors like socio-economic status or high mobility. As an urban educator whom I know well has said, "The tests simply do not measure what my students know." Child growth and development is not a race, it is a journey. There are hills and valleys, straight roads, and unexpected curves. Certainly, we can benchmark certain elements of growth - physical, social, and cognitive - in the same way we map a journey. We just have to remember that the map is not the journey and the benchmark is not the goal. The children in our care every day are not finished - there is nothing summative about them. Analysis of the Instructional Process Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder September 13, 2012 Several years ago I taught a graduate course in education at a local college. The course was called 'Analysis of the Instructional Process'. During my first class, I decided I wanted to pre-set my students with the sorts of messages we give to students all the time, which may be unintentionally counterproductive to learning. I told my students that we would begin with a quiz, but they should not worry about the results as it would be for my purposes, for grouping students, or for understanding their prior knowledge. I selected ten questions from recent Regents exams in different content areas. I reminded my students that they should not worry as this quiz would not count against them in their grade and it shouldn’t be too hard as they had all seen items like these before. Within ten minutes I had three graduate level students crying. I stopped the quiz and asked them all how it was going. It turns out that only one student could answer one of the questions correctly and he confessed that it was because he was a math teacher and had only taught the concept that day. We had a lengthy and productive discussion on what they had experienced. I pointed out to them that every one of them had achieved a Regents diploma, which meant that they had passed all those Regents within the past eight to ten years and yet they had not retained any of the content or skills. I asked the students who cried why they were upset when I told them it would not count against them and they confessed that they were afraid I would think they were stupid. I asked them if they imagined school children ever had those same feelings. That was the beginning of a lesson on the difference between performance and learning. These bright and capable students, who had already achieved a degree and were working on obtaining their Masters, were flummoxed to think that their success on those Regents exams was more a measure of short‑term memory—what they retained for their performance on a particular exam at a particular point in time, rather than truly learned. They began to explain it to me and to themselves that taking those exams was like jumping through hoops to get to the next hoop. Several described that as pretty much their experience throughout their education, they merely performed in order to move on to the next task. I then discussed with them what learning meant—not learning to perform, but learning for mastery. I asked them to think about experiences they had where they worked at something in order to master it. One student talked about learning to drive and how much effort she put into parallel parking. Another talked about shooting a hundred foul shots a day. Another talked about building model boats. I asked that young man if the first boat he built was the same as the one he most recently built. He laughed and cringed a bit when he described his first model. I told him it was rather like being Picasso who once stated that he spent his whole childhood trying to learn to draw like an adult and his entire adulthood trying to remember how to draw like a child. I am reminded of this experience with my graduate students this week as we immerse our students in rigorous pre-assessments on content they have not yet studied in order to generate a target for their summative performance at the end of the course. While it is easier to explain to older students, I worry so about the little ones. I have had one report from a veteran teacher who was assessing first graders. A child said he did not know what fact families were and she told him not to worry because by the end of the year he would be an expert. His response was “Can’t you help me?” It flies in the face of why we became educators in the first place. I remembered how unsettled my adult learners were, so I imagine this is very perplexing to many of our students. This is one of my major objections to the standardized testing movement. True learning is so much more than a performance on an exam at a given point in time. Learning is messy, not neatly packaged in 42-minute segments. Learning is expansive, not reduced to bubble sheets. There is a great deal of research which is being ignored by the policy makers which describes the difference between people who have performance goals and people who have learning goals. One of my favorite researchers, Carol Dweck, has written extensively about the difference. “Performance goals are about “winning positive judgments of your competence and avoiding negative ones. In other words, when students pursue performance goals they’re concerned with their level of intelligence: They want to look smart (to themselves or others) and avoid looking dumb.” A person usually does this by playing it safe. Learning goals are ones that are about increasing your competence. “It reflects a desire to learn new skills, master new tasks, or understand new things…” In order to develop new competencies students often go through a phase of confusion, failure, and discomfort. Think about what it feels like to learn a new video game, learn to juggle, or speak another language. Being a beginner requires us to quiet our egos and a willingness to look like a beginner, often in front of others.” The heavy focus on standardized tests is driving us towards performance goals and away from learning goals, despite the fact that learning goals result in sustained and continuously evolving understanding and performance goals result in those hoops that my grad students described. This leads to short-term learning, lack of generalizing from one lesson to the next. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague regarding math instruction. He teaches mathematics in high school and was commenting to me on how so many students still struggled with fractions. We discussed how many units of study from kindergarten through high school focused on fractions, yet the students had successfully performed on the grade level assessments all through school, without ever truly understanding fractions. At this point in my career, I can only hope that reason will prevail and that teaching for mastery will trump teaching for the bubble sheets. Education is about becoming smarter, not jumping through hoops. Welcome back message from the Superintendent Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder August 22, 2012 Ordinarily at this time of year I am welcoming back our teachers and students for the exciting beginning for the next academic year. I want to do so again, but I also want to explain that the beginning of this year is going to feel a bit different to everyone. This year we are being challenged by the State to demonstrate how much each student grows over the course of the year. To measure growth, we will be having most students take a pre-test in September in each of their courses. The pre-test will be rigorous because it is supposed to assess prior knowledge, not what has been taught. We will be explaining to the students that they should not be surprised if they can't answer all the questions because this will be a measure of how much they will be learning over the course of the school year. These assessments will not be used to grade the students, but will be used to demonstrate growth. When I was a second grade teacher, I wanted to know how much my students changed over the year and I set up a number of challenges asking them questions about themselves, posing some math examples, requiring a few sentences about their favorite books. I collected all the work and put it in a treasure chest and then took the class outside to plant tulip bulbs. I explained to them that when the tulips blossomed the following spring, we would open the treasure chest and they could see for themselves how much they had changed in one school year. One Day in May we opened the treasure chest and the children were astonished at how much they had changed. "My letters were backwards and I could not even spell!" I can't believe I couldn't multiply!" "Look, now my favorite books are chapter books!" Over and over I heard my students exclaiming about how much they had learned and how much they had changed. It was also gratifying to me, their teacher, as together we explored the many ways we had grown and how many skills were mastered. In a way, this process of pre- and post-assessment that the State is mandating could have the same affect, as long as we teachers and parents support the students during these pre-assessment periods. It is important that the students clearly understand that there will be many questions asked that they will not yet know. So many of our children are such driven youngsters, we want to make sure they do not begin the year believing they have not done well on a "test." It is more important that they learn how much growing they will be doing. After all, that is what the school year portends - in the next ten months every child here will be growing cognitively, physically, and socially. The sky is the limit for them all. Welcome back, and welcome to our new students and families who are just beginning their Voorheesville journey. Enjoy these last few, fleeting days of summer and prepare for the next adventure!
The absurdity of pineapples Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder June 25, 2012 In a recently administered New York State Test in English Language Arts for grade eight, there was a great hue and cry over a short piece of writing and the subsequent questions that were designed to measure student achievement and teacher effectiveness. The passage in question was a parody of the popular Aesop’s fable that many of our children learn in elementary school, in which a tortoise races a hare. In the state test passage, the tortoise is replaced by a talking pineapple, and the moral of the story is that pineapples don’t have sleeves. The passage illustrates perfectly the problem with relying on standardized tests to measure achievement and effectiveness. The writing piece about the pineapple was absurd, and the questions had no clear answers. Definitely a flaw in any multiple choice standardized test, where great attention is paid to making certain that the distractors are clearly not correct. Where this leads to an even deeper level of absurdity is that the author of the original piece stated in an interview that he had sold some writing to the testing company, along with editing rights. In his original story there was no pineapple. He admits the story was supposed to be silly, but the company had edited his story in which the race was between an eggplant and a hare with the moral of the story being “Never bet on an eggplant.” I am thinking that the test writers from Pearson realized that writing about an eggplant could be construed as racially charged, as in some communities “eggplant” is a disparaging word synonymous with the most denigrating racial slur we know. I once tried to become a test writer for a large company to make some extra money in my early days as an educator. I am afraid I had to walk out of the training session because we were being taught to sanitize every item so that it had no racial, ethnic, religious, sexist, sexual, cultural connotations at all. Results should not be skewed by connotations. In some respects this made sense, until we were asked to comment on one item in particular—one which every up-and-coming test item writer identified as acceptable. It went something like this: Which of the following is a principle export of Indonesia?
a) Cotton We trainees all selected the correct answer c, and we were told that, while we were correct, it was a test item that would have to be thrown out because of its connotation. I was embarrassed by my naiveté, and I decided on the spot that I did not need extra money that badly and excused myself from what might have been a lucrative career as a test writer! Perhaps it would be different in math as it is so much more precise, with less room for personal interpretation. However, on an elementary NYS math test this spring students were marked off if they did not identify a rectangle as having two sets of parallel sides with four 90 degree angles. One child wrote that a rectangle is a quadrilateral with two sets of parallel sides and the angles are equal. He lost points because he did not put 90 degree angles. Since the day of the test correction period, I have been trying to figure out how you could have a quadrilateral that had two sets of parallel sides with equal angles and have those angles be anything other than 90 degrees! I have been skeptical of these testing mandates for many years—in fact, I wrote a piece for the Spotlight in 1999 about the then-fourth grade tests. Please understand, I am an avid believer in assessment, but I don’t have confidence that these very expensive tests are anywhere near as accurate in measuring achievement as a teacher who works with students every day. At least in class, assessment can take on color and texture. The passage illustrates the problem with relying on standardized tests to measure achievement and effectiveness. Back in the day of my early first principalship, I had a third grade teacher who begged me to buy her class world maps that you see in classrooms—the ones that roll down. I purchased her state-of-the-art maps and she was very happy. Then in 1991, about 24 hours after they were installed, the Soviet Union collapsed. In September, when her class returned, her first assignment involved those maps. “Ms. Snyder just bought us these amazing maps! Using the resources in the classroom, identify why they are no longer accurate.” I was astonished at how invested these young children were in this worthy search for information. That same year, I attended my own sixth grader’s open house and, as I sat in a brand new classroom, I heard the following: “We use a standardized assessment for social studies and it won’t be corrected in time for the June final (this was September) so we are going to teach the Soviet Union like it still exists, although we will touch upon the collapse during current events.” I was astonished and I simply asked: “Why don’t you just ask the students to write an essay on why the questions are no longer relevant?” Well, that would not be standardized—I agreed, but who cares?? I happened to visit kindergarten screening where we use a very tried and true assessment tool, but my ears hurt when I listened to one of the questions posed to a preschooler: “What are shoes made of?” When I was a child (probably around the time this assessment was first developed!) there would probably have been one correct answer: leather. But I glanced at the tiny feet in the gymnasium and saw the widest selection of materials covering them—vinyl, cotton, leather, canvas—in bright colors—and some of them even had several materials on one shoe (with lights!!). That is what is flawed about the overreliance on tests to measure achievement and effectiveness. It removes the vitality of the instructional interactions. There is nothing standardized about a child—which brings me to another testing challenge. When my youngest went to his preschool screening—using that same exact screening tool—he was asked to write his name. He wrote ZAK. I was pretty impressed because Z and K sometimes came out twisted and turned. When I mentioned that to the screener, I was told: “Yes but it’s too bad he spelled it wrong—it should be Zach.” I was astounded as I responded that his name was Zak and the reason why was because he was born prematurely and his tiny shirt that matched his siblings’ with their names on the back was only big enough to hold three letters! I once read an advertisement for a testing company that said they could make measuring your child’s achievement as standardized as McDonalds makes French Fries. That led me to write an essay entitled, “Your Child is Not a French Fry.” Those of us who know and love children know that they are as unique as their thumbprints, and no matter what test you give under any conditions, it will never be a full measure of who they are and what they can accomplish. The sixth grader to whom I alluded in the social studies experience came home on the last day of sixth grade. My older daughter told me her sister was upstairs very upset. When I got to my child who had just completed elementary school, she was sobbing on my bed. This was not because of her sadness at leaving her school, but resulted from her perusal of her standardized tests scores, which the school sent home with the children. I asked her what the problem was and she told me the reports said she was below average. “I am only in the third stanine,” she cried. I burst out laughing, which sounds quite cruel, and on one subset of a multi-set test she had, indeed, scored in the third stanine. She looked at me horrified, as I chuckled, and I explained that any 11-year-old who could interpret stanines was anything but below average! She is now an accomplished professional with a master’s degree. I did not enter this field so that I could place ceilings on what children could accomplish. I believe it is the job of an educator to open doors, not to box students in. My sons are both teachers. My oldest had a sixth grade student a few years back who came to him reading at a first grade level. At the end of the year he was on grade level. People asked what my son did, and his response was that the boy had heard for so long that he could not read, he believed it. That is one of the problems with some assessments: They can become self-fulfilling. Our challenge as educators and as parents is to understand that no child is finished just because of a summative assessment. In fact, every summative assessment is nothing more than a set of data to inform instruction. Going to school is about becoming smarter—a fact that I am afraid is losing ground in the race to the top! Much ado about nothing Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder March 1, 2012 Recently Governor Cuomo graciously took credit for bringing to fruition a joint resolution to the issue of teacher evaluation in the State of New York. Times Union Columnist Fred LeBrun took him to task for having created the problem in the first place by imposing his view that 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation be based on student scores on New York state examinations. Most recently, Larry Schwartz, Governor Cuomo's secretary, took issue with LeBrun's perspectives in a Time Union editorial. While the sparring will undoubtedly continue, the entire conversation is based on a major flawed assumption. I have been a school administrator for 22 years in private, parochial, and four different public school systems in New York. In every setting, we had teacher evaluation systems in place. Not only were they in place, they were based on the very rich and rigorous rubrics now being touted as essential to quality education. I, along with a multitude of colleagues, received training on using the Charlotte Danielson model of teacher evaluation 10 years before the current Governor took office. As a school administrator I have observed in hundreds of classrooms. I have written countless evaluations and have counseled young educators on areas to improve their instruction. I know this is not unique to me. I know for a fact, because I actually work in schools, that administrators and teachers spend countless hours in the evaluation cycle. There is a pre-observation conference, an observation that typically covers a class period, a written evaluation of the observed class period, a list of recommendations and commendations for areas observed, and a post-observation conference. For non-tenured teachers, this process occurs several times a year. It takes hours of administrative time and is, without doubt, among the most important tasks instructional leaders perform in the academic year. Tenured teachers frequently have different methods of demonstrating their expertise, ranging from portfolios, to goal setting and reflection, to formal observation by an administrator. The new political football will not improve student performance on state tests, because it already exists and it has not improved student performance on state tests. The reason why this is a red herring is because state tests and other standardized tests are notoriously instructionally insensitive. In the words of W. J. Popham, a professor emeritus from Stanford who taught psychometrics, "...an instructionally insensitive test would not allow us to distinguish accurately between strong and weak instruction. Currently, for example, students’ performances on most accountability tests are more heavily influenced by students’ socioeconomic status (SES) than by the quality of teachers’ instructional efforts. Such instructionally insensitive accountability tests tend to measure the SES composition of a school’s student body rather than the effectiveness with which the school’s students have been taught." Another facet of the state tests being poor measures is the very fact that they are unreliable. This was noted by the current chancellor of the Board of Regents in her first days in office. We school folks had been faithfully administering the assessments that were sent to us by the state, only to have then Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch make the declaration that the scores we had been receiving, and seeing published in local media, were flawed, as the scaled scores allowed too many children to score proficiently. The next set of tests would be more rigorous, meaning longer. Schools complied, using the tools, only to be told that the standards we had been using in New York would be changing to the Common Core Standards next year. This means that the new state assessments would not only be longer (90 minutes at a time for an eight year old??), but they would be based on a brand new curriculum. These massive changes make it very difficult to do any trend analysis and therefore, it is very difficult to determine the reliability of any of the assessments we have been using or will use in the future. We do not have any data base that demonstrates the connection between instruction and these assessments. How, therefore, can these tools be used to evaluate a teacher's success in teaching children when the tests are not related to the instruction? As mentioned, I’ve been in school administration for 22 years and in that time I have worked with teachers in many settings. I have met some extraordinary educators. I have observed some amazing lessons, where children were engaged and excited. I have also met many, many dedicated professionals who are eager to improve the craft of teaching, who are attentive to the needs of the children around them. These children are as unique as their thumb prints, nothing standardized about them. I have seen teachers purchase school supplies or pay field trip funds. I have been privileged to see teachers in many settings celebrate the success of their students, and work to assure all of them that they are works in progress, that going to school is about becoming smarter, that no single measure should put a ceiling on a child's opportunities. Over my career, I have also met some teachers whom I have counseled out of the profession. Of this number, virtually none would have been tagged by student test scores. Indeed, I can think of several who would have been deemed 'effective' or even 'highly effective' using student outcomes, but who were simply not teachers. Teaching is not a reductionist activity; it is a vital, relational interaction with students. It is about inspiring and inviting students on a lifelong journey of getting smarter—and that is not measured on a set of examinations that are given in May. An update on the exploration of IB programming Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder February 2012 As we continue our exploration of International Baccalaureate (IB) programming, I wanted to give the community an update. At this juncture, we have filed a letter of interest with IB, which is required before a school can proceed with more in-depth examination. We have sent several small groups to visit IB schools in New York, including an elementary school in Monticello, Albany High School and two schools in the Rochester area. Mr. Reardon and I also attended an orientation in Rochester. We have connected with a district in New Hampshire that is in the process of converting the whole district to IB over the next three to four years. We expect to build a relationship with that district as we continue to explore. We are exploring the IB program to begin with the elementary program, which would be eligible for IB’s Primary Years Program. The transition, should we decide to continue, would not be a very heavy lift at the elementary school, as so many of our current units of study are exploratory and already focus on higher-level thinking skills. They would be easy to adapt to the IB frameworks. What is required before we can continue, is professional development provided by IB. Of course, with tight budgets, it is going to be a squeeze to get that training and we are in conversations with IB providers about the best way to effect training, given scant resources. Since IB deals with systems worldwide—many in third world countries with even bigger challenges than we face, they do have some credible expertise on how to obtain the professional development within the economic limitations schools face. We will continue to explore and I will continue to try to win the lottery to ease the burden! International Baccalaureate is a globally recognized educational delivery focused on challenging learners at all levels to think deeply. For those who are interested in reviewing the construct of IB, their website is www.ibo.org. Full-Day Kindergarten Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder (Jan. 26, 2012) At the January 23, 2012 meeting of the Board of Education, a vote to approve conversion to full day kindergarten was approved by the Board of Education. The district is projecting 70 kindergarten students for the fall, and the state has earmarked $188,000 in aid for conversion to a full-day program. If there are more or fewer students, the conversion aid is adjusted accordingly. I recommended that we access this aid and move forward. Subsequent to my recommendation, the Board requested and helped author a survey of the community on this issue. The survey results included 541 responses, with more than 77 percent supporting the move to full-day kindergarten. Today, I want to address one issue that was brought up by some parents who expressed concern that if they had known that we might change to full day they would have made different plans for their pre-school children this year to ease the transition. I found that reason very compelling, so I thought I would address it from a personal and historical point of view. Many of you may know I have four children. I was able to take time off from my career to stay home with them, a time in my life I will always cherish. In the case of my three older children, they went to three-day pre-kindergarten and then to half-day kindergarten, as was more typical in that era. My youngest son, however, stayed home with me until he was five. I returned to work, teaching at a private school where he was enrolled in full-day kindergarten. Although I was concerned about the transition as he had never gone to pre-school at all, my guy thrived. I hope by sharing this, it helps some parents. Of my four children, he is the only one who recalls what a wonderful time he had in kindergarten, remembers all of his teachers’ names, remembers the playground, the lunch room, the books and stories. He still communicates with many of the kids and some of the teachers he went to school with 24 years ago. School was a challenge for him from the academic point of view as he is dyslexic, but he cherished his classroom experience. When he was recently completing his master’s degree in education, he frequently alluded to his kindergarten experience as enriching, encouraging, nurturing and fun. He once wrote of his love for writing which, though difficult for him, was a passion lit up by his teacher. I still have a piece of his writing which by many standards would be so primitive—it is laden with strings of letters with some approximate spelling, but which contains the dictation his teacher took when she asked him to read it: “This is the story of a king and a queen and a girl named Felicia who lived in a haunted castle by the edge of the creepy forest ( ‘cweepy foris’!)…” I remember his teacher telling me he was lacking conventions, but he surely had voice. I am a big believer in time and space—so many children are living in such a rushed world, with so many transitions. I earnestly believe that full-day kindergarten will afford children time and space to develop the skills they need and to discover their own voice, in the company of teachers dedicated to the best tenets of early childhood education. That said, for those parents who feel strongly that their kindergarten child does not need or cannot handle a full-day program, parents can exercise their parental rights to pick their child up at noon. Kindergarten, unlike upper grades, is not mandatory and a parent who chooses to pick a child up will be accorded the same accommodations that parents currently experience when they pick up a child for an appointment. |
