Thursday, February 14, 2008
Teaching to better students or teaching to the test
I was thinking back the other day to a conversation I had with a collegue. The person told me that everything s/he was going to read/teach was to prepare for the End of Course test at the end of the semester. Everything. This person was not going to do anything that wouldn't prepare students for the test. Now, I completely understand why the person felt this way. Now that these tests are a part of school report cards, there is more pressure on teachers to help their students do well. If your school doesn't get an "Excellent" rating because the passage rate goal wasn't met, then you better believe there is going to be pressure on these teachers to meet that passage goal. However, when has teaching become all about the test? I feel like the strategies and ideas promoted in this course do more than just help us teach to the test. I don't want to just teach to the test. Yes, I do want my students to pass these high stakes tests. I would love to have a 100% passage rate. However, it just bothered me a little when this colleague said this to me. Again, I completely understand it; but it's sad that education has come to this. Let's face it. The reality is that test scores are everything. We can come up with the most engaging fantastic lesson imaginable; but if these lessons don't help raise test scores, then you better believe you'll be told these lessons are the wrong way to go.
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2 comments:
I see where you're coming from on this. Currently we do not have a standardized test in Spanish, but we hear it's coming. Teaching Spanish is pretty open and even our district wide units are very vague leaving us to fill in the blank. When we go to standardized tests, will we too turn to "teaching to the test" and lose all the fun, interactive, hands on activities we use? It worries me, and I hope that foreign language teachers don't get the standardized test blues that I hear about in other subjects.
Im not entirely sure that these strategies don't help students get ready for these tests. What we are trying to do is get students to critically think about what we are doing and what they are reading. I am one of those teachers that has very strict district guides and district made tests. But, I can gladly say that my pass rate doubled this past semester. I can only hope that Project RAISSE has been a small part of that.
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