Students Know

There was a great article in the Dec. 1st issue of Ed Week, about an Ohio school that turned itself around.  The great part of the article wasn't about how a tech company had partnered with them to give students access to technology.  That alone will not make a school great, or increase student involvement. The best part is that a group of community members lobbied to keep the school open, the district recruited a dedicated person to be the principal who worked hard to find the tech partners, and the fact that any student can attend.  It's about relationships...people believing in each other. The principal is quoted as saying, "When kids believe that you really want them to be successful, they'll do whatever you want them to do."  Students know what you have in mind.  They can sense it like a shark senses its prey.  If they know that the school doesn't really think they can succeed, then what's the motivation to try?  It seems that our best teaching tool is to develop an authentically caring relationship with our students so that they can see in themselves what we see in them.  We create an environment where we can do our best together, on the same side.

Unharmed...really?

One of the smallest articles in the Dec. 8th edition of Ed Week made one of the biggest impacts on me.  There was a news brief about a Wisconsin teen who took a teacher and fellow students hostage and then ended up killing himself when police entered.  The part that struck me so much was the last two sentences, "Mr. Hengel shot himself. All of the hostages emerged unharmed." I know that Ed Week got this report from the AP, but they actually left it like that.  Unharmed...really?  There is not a chance that the 25 people held in that room by someone they knew, who also witnessed a police intervention and a suicide, remain unharmed. At the least, they will deal with the tragedy of the situation and the "what if" questions. Maybe this news brief displays some of the same sort of societal apathy that alienates kids and makes resort to this tragic action as a means to be noticed and taken seriously.

How Testing Reflects on Our Shortcomings

Sometimes I see us (society) complaining about students and the fact that they want to put in the least amount of work to get by.  We wonder what the problem is...why do they cheat? why don't they want to learn?  They are no different from the rest of society.  We do the same thing, especially when it comes to education, especially testing.  The November 17th edition of Ed Week contained a number of articles that point out the fact that many different elements helps students learn:  integrating dance into lessons, commitment from teachers & scientists in the study of evolution, technology, recess, etc. However, they are all effective tools that create results which are hard to measure.  So, instead we focus on the superficial facts when creating the tests, and we put in the least amount of effort and work when figuring out what our students have learned.  Do we want to have students who have good short-term recall to answer well on tests, or do we want students to have a concept of what they learned that they can apply to other areas of their studies and their lives for the long-term?  The short-term recall is the quickest and easiest for us to assess. If we had to measure the real depth, it would cost much more time, effort and money.  We're doing the same thing that we look down on students for doing.  It seems that we are complaining about bad model we've provided for them but still expecting different results!