the forest or the trees?

There have been lots of "flavors of the month" at LPS, so I hear. My more experienced colleagues have mentioned a few, and they tend to be wisely skeptical when another new trend comes their way. I have heard some quieter mutterings like this about PLCs and developing essential learnings and common assessments. I don't feel this is just a passing fad; I think that if we handle this trend intelligently and from a variety of perspectives, we can keep it from becoming just another fad that teachers will chuckle about a decade or so after it's passed.
Really though, common assessments are running the risk of TRULY being the kind of thing the "flavor of the month"! What do I mean? Let me tell ya! Common assessments are meant to ensure that students arrive at essential learnings, no matter which school they go to. So, in the hierarchy of importance with PLCs, essential learnings are at the top. However, it's going to be pretty much impossible to make sure that each teacher grades the same way. That appears to be a big hurdle for creating common assessments. So, we should resort to holding students accountable mainly for information that could be tested very easily with scantron sheets, right? I don't think any of us thinks scantron-type tests are very good assessments, but I think this is the direction we'll go in if we want to dwell the fine points.
Some of these fine points are that none of us grades the same way, and that objective tests might be the only way for us to have a "reliable" common assessment that rates the kids' knowledge and ability exactly the same way. This is dangerous if we want to overwhelm ourselves with "perfecting" the assessment rather than keeping the big picture in mind. If having the most accurate means of assessing students' knowledge is the true end-all with this district-wide push toward common assessments, we'd have to discount entirely the importance of essential learnings.
I think it's not being able to find the forest for the trees: the forest is to get them to attain these essential learnings, but we're hitting the trees of common assessments like unfortunate skiers!
Missing the forest for the trees, I think, could be a real reason why educational trends come and go, and that new ones lose clout because of the way others have been handled in the past. I probably don't have enough experience in either the field or the district to make this claim, but here's some more fodder for my argument anyway: when describing other "flavors of the month", many of my friends who've seen trends come and go say that the main idea behind the philosophies and practices are great - ie the big picture is great - but the details are what made it fall apart and pass into history.
This was the main complaint this afternoon in the world language office: how to give an accurate common assessment despite how differently people grade. The horrifying idea came out that an accurate common assessment could only be an objective one, because even with rubrics, everyone grades so differently. I'm pretty sure that this claim was horrifying even to the person who made it, and that she made it out of frustration and uncertainty about what to do instead. However, if we had to resort to an objective test because of a fastidious desire to have students assessed the same way, we would start to undo what we've done on emphasizing upper-level thinking skills in the last few years. This kind of test would that tell us only about their fleeting knowledge, but it also would send the message that we expect our students simply to recall what we've taught without true application.
The theme of the conversation was that, according to pretty much all world language teachers in the district, we don't count simple knowledge of a discrete grammar point or a set of vocabulary words an essential learning. We agree that the bigger picture is what matters: what they're able to do with the language. I think what makes common assessments run the risk of becoming another passing fad in pedagogy is that it might become the main focus rather than truly what they're learning, be dealt with in a way that doesn't support what teachers feel is worth learning, and make everyone so fed up with the idea that they just chuck it. Until the next trend comes along, that is.


I have a couple of questions for myself and others:

• How can we make an assessment that best measures what we find valuable in our subject areas?
• Can we skip the "drill and kill" of grammar and vocabulary and still get our students to a point where they can move on to more sophisticated uses of the language? Is there a way to teach the material that simply needs practice of patterns and memorization of words WITHOUT the traditional drill and kill, like sneaking vitamins into a kid's food without his knowing?

I ask these questions because I really don't think there needs to be either-or kinds of approaches to practice and testing. I don't know the right answer yet, but I don't think it's gotta be drill and kill to build their knowledge sufficiently, and only after that can language use become more personalized and meaningful. I also don't think we have to resort to testing students on just what's easily graded in nearly the same way by many teachers, just for the sake that all the students jump over this particular hurdle in essentially the same way. If you have any possible answers to my conundrum, let me know. Believe me, I'm not just waiting for the answer to be given to me, either!

Well good golly....

It's been TWO MONTHS since my last post! For SHAME. I really have been filling up a desktop folder full of items that I've labeled "blog-worthy", but there's been so much going on....bad excuse.
Speaking of so much going on, we had our first Critical Thinking meeting today in about 2 months (maybe more). This is the third year we've worked together, and I even have a co-chair now, but this is the first year that we've had to put off meetings for a couple of months because of scheduling conflicts. I'm worried that we're losing steam, maybe. Maybe I am. I think next year the PLC will have to be updated or changed somehow. I should put a survey together for people who've been involved so I can see anonymous feedback. Everyone's so nice that I think they'd be hesitant with criticism when we ask for feedback during meetings. I've also been thinking about how CT will fit into the late start PLC time next year. My feeling right now is that it won't fit. I think that time is going to be consacrated to subject area work. That's okay, I guess. We can keep meeting after school.
Well, enough of the technical details: we met about how to create the best possible physical environment for learning. That's something that isn't directly related to critical thinking, but I feel strongly that in order for the best kind of thinking to take place, certain criteria - or even standards - need to be in place (Boy am I tired of that word "standards".) It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs: if a kid doesn't have food, clothing, or shelter, learning is certainly not a top priority. I know I refer to Maslow's a lot, but it's really apt; if the learning space is really physically uncomfortable, horribly sterile, or even overly distracting, you can't expect the best sort of thinking to take place.
The meeting in general went well, I think, despite the weary looks on people's faces - it's been a long semester. However, some of the weariness made itself more evident that just by people's faces. Yeah, we don't have the most ideal learning spaces right now at AHS, but will complaining about it ad nauseum change anything? Really, there wasn't a ton of venting, and I did address the fact that we're venting probably just because it's post spring break, we're tired, and this is just the complainy time of year. BUT I reminded the group to keep two things in mind: what can we do with the current space we have to make it conducive to our students to learn, and learn how to use, what we find the most valuable in our subject areas; and what kinds of immediate, relatively low-cost/ low-effort changes can we make that will begin AHS's evolution to a 21st century physical learning space?
The kids-in-rows pattern seen in most classrooms is over a century old. I still CHOOSE to set up my classrooms in rows. Why? Well: 1) It enables me to move up and down rows easily to check homework while they're working on their warm ups; 2) it seems - to me - the best way to discourage cheating during quizzez; 3) when there are 35+ students in a room, finding other configurations that still allow the students and me to move around the room with relative ease is REALLY challenging (Oh, and I've really tried.); and 4) when each classroom is used by at least 2 other teachers, I have to consider what the other teachers would like their rooms to look like.
These are lame reasons. I think I could find my ways around nearly all of these obstacles. What do I want my students to be able to do with the language? Use it in personally meaningful ways, and to be able to speak intelligibly enough - albeit in an elementary way - to be able to use the language skills outside the classroom if they needed to (or even to seek out reasons to use the language, which always makes me EXTREMELY happy!)
I don' t know that I need to have the classroom set up this way in order to have this happen. I think I could arrange pre-arranged "pods" or something that they could move together themselves out of the original rows when they're not receiving direct instruction or taking a quiz. Really, they already do this in an informal way, but I could polish it up a bit. Just simply having them in these "pods" drastically alters the atmosphere in the room; no longer will it seem like individuals who just happen to be sharing the same learning space, the arrangement will show them that they are intended to share ideas, talk, and help one another. I don't think any teacher could argue that we don't want those kinds of interactions taking place on our watch.