Tag: wrong

8/365 ‘Right’ Answers are Overrated

As I work my way through Duckworth, I’m tempted to temporarily change the name of this blog to Reading So You Don’t Have To.

I threw the picture below up on instagram as I was reading last night, and feel like it needs a more prominent display:

A Thought on Assessment

 

My comment attached to the photo was something along the lines of this way of thinking being the only thing I needed to guide my thinking on assessment. That stands. As I continue exploring The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Duckworth is pushing my thinking on assessment even more. Actually, she’s not pushing my thinking so much as putting thoughts I’ve had before into better prose than I’ve yet managed.

It occurred to me, then, that of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands. It is automatic. It is thoughtless.

 

This past semester, for the quantitative methods course I was taking, we used a textbook of dubious pedagogy. At the end of each section, though, were some practice problems of the type I remember from my math textbooks of my youth.

Because statistics isn’t exactly where my innate intelligences lie, I found myself frequently stopping to attempt the practice problems. I was curious about these new ideas and this mostly new language of statistical reasoning. I filled large pieces of chart paper with my thinking on these problems with arrows and borderlines to delineate where one thought took a break and moved on to be another thought.

Not always did I arrive at the right answer. What I found, and what surprised me, was the sense of joy and accomplishment I felt when I had an answer and could explain those with whom I studied how I got to that answer. When the answer was wrong, being able to hold up the path I’d taken to reach it somehow took the sting out of its wrongness.

I wouldn’t have paused to appreciate and “meet” the thinking necessary to solve those problems if I simply knew the right answer. If it had been automatic and thoughtless as Duckworth describes, it also would have been a hollow victory if it had been any victory at all.

They’re breaking teachers

A friend of mine has been crying a lot recently.
After more than a decade and a half in the classroom, my friend has been labeled unsatisfactory.
You may have heard about the schools my friend works for. Oprah loves ’em. Turns out the federal government loves ’em to. I’d be willing to venture neither Oprah nor Sec. Duncan would want to learn there, but they’re fine enough for other people’s children.
About a month into the school year, my friend had her first formal observation the other day.
We talked before. She was nervous.
Seems a rating of unsatisfactory could come as a result of not keeping her lesson within the timing framework of 10 minutes of introduction, 20 minutes of whole group instruction and 15 minutes of practice. This friend who guided and mentored me when I entered the classroom 8 years ago – this master teacher who has shaped thousands of lives – has been reduced to cookie-cutter teaching.
It is breaking her.
As it turned out, the timing of her lesson was not the point of contention. Content was the problem.
Her lesson introduced her learners to a key component of her subject area.
Without a mastery of this element of content, her learners would flounder in their further studies. Truly. In the list of basic things you need to know about the content of her course, this little tidbit sits near, if not at, the top.
My friend’s evaluator didn’t see it that way.
You see, this particular content is only featured in two of the questions on the quarterly benchmark tests her learners will be completing. And, they’re only comprehension-level questions.
The lesson should have been a mini-lesson, my friend was told.
Also, she should have waited for the learner who walked in tardy to the class to present her demerit card rather than moving on with the lesson and dealing with the issue when time permitted.
My friend – this resource, this veteran of the classroom who loves children and learning and igniting children’s curiosity and passion for learning – is being broken.
Something she loves is being molded into a pretty but deeply fractured system of homogeneity.
Other than these words, I’m uncertain what to do to help my friend. As the nation looks admiringly on, I can’t help but imagine others like her around her country who are finding themselves broken by the system.