I opended the results of my kids Iowa test scores and have found myself excited to see a 95 th percentile on the sheet. Why am I happy? I do not even know the content that was assessed. Reading Todd Farley’s book about his lucrative career in standardized testing which began by grading exams in the basement of an abandoned mall, I am sure that I will never have that feeling again, especially when the test includes open-ended items.
Why do we trust tests given by people we don’t know and who have never met our children and yet we do not trust meaningful evaluations given by people who see our children for over 180 days each year?
Perhaps it is the low status given to the teacher profession. We all know the anecdotes about how easy it is to get into an education program. After all, those who can’t , teach. And of course, we get summers off!!!
Well ,as a former engineer, I find teaching incredibly challenging and yet familiar, not unlike solving a measurement problem in the lab. It requires adapting known concepts about what is good instructional practice like frequent formative assessment, using student ideas, construction of knowledge through language, and applying them to a specific situation like:
“It is a Tuesday in November and we are in the second day of projectile motion with a class of 28 12th graders, some of whom have trouble solving 2t2 -7 = 12. It is 9a.m. as opposed to the 11:30 class (right before lunch) with 12 people who all can do algebra well, except for one for whom 2x = 4 is a challenge . We have already sorted 15 situations into various student devised groupings so the students have seen the breadth of situations and have made a first attempt at teasing out important difference. Are they now ready to start pulling numbers out of the problems and assigning them to variables? Or maybe we should practice drawing the trajectories of the objects because if we jump into numbers too soon then the students just want to plug numbers into a formula. We also need to do the lab in which the students organize themselves to see how flight time varies with launch speed, height and angle. Oh and Thanksgiving break is in a week so we need to be at a solid stopping point by then. What to do first?
I am sure this rambling would come as a surprise to not only most of the non-teaching public, but also to education majors and even beginning teachers. Most people think that you just “cover” the material from the book and the curriculum tells you what to do. WRONG!!
Teachers are professionals who rely on their education and judgment constantly, just like engineers. I needed to design a way to measure the leaching of an alpha emitter from samples of glass to mimic the erosion of vitrified nuclear waste. This required lots of math and creativity, but not the split second decision making skill of being a teacher. My alpha particles behaved according to physics so they acted the same way every day and I could analytically test my different ideas one at a time. Each year my physics classes have their own personalities. Even in the same year, the personality changes depending on the season, day of the week, who is absent…! I need multiple solutions to multiple problems twenty times a day.
So I propose a new name for teaching: Instructional Engineering which will be defined as a branch of engineering that designs learning experiences for young people involving the disciplines of psychology, statistics, ergonomics, human resources, business administration, family studies, along with the content of the learning goals ( physics, math, US history, etc.).
I guarantee that Todd Farley, the out of work would –be writer, would not have gotten a job grading in the basement of a mall if the title of the tests were the Standardized Instructional Engineering Exams. Actually, those exams would never even exist because why would we not trust the engineers to design quality lessons for the students. It’s not as if they are just teachers. Problem solved!
No comments:
Post a Comment