Forget the test! Teach deeply.

“Teach to the test.” That is the message sent down to us from above.
Not the tests we use to inform and guide the instruction in our classrooms. But the end-of-year achievement test whose results we get after the students have already moved on. These tests are really for those farthest from our classrooms and our students. They are supposed to “hold us accountable” for teaching our students deeply, thoughtfully, and well. Is testing the silver bullet that will leave no child behind? I know that there is a legitimate need for those outside our classrooms to know how our students in our classrooms are doing. However, I think politicians have gotten the cart before the horse.
We do need to change the teaching in our schools. The old, industrial, transmission-based, teacher-centered approach to schools became obsolete half a century ago. Yet, it is the traditional approach many schools still cling to.

• Society has changed a lot since 1958.
• What we know about how student’s learn has changed a lot since then.
• Technology and teaching tools have changed.
• Our students are different than they were last century.

Yet, many classrooms look identical to how looked 50 years ago. We need to adapt to the changes or become irrelevant. (How much of what we learn in school has already become irrelevant to real life?)

Teach Deeply - We have so much to teach in the curriculum and so little time to teach it in, that school becomes an assembly line: read the chapter, take notes on the lecture, do the review questions at the end of the chapter, take the test, move on. Learning becomes shallow, mechanical, and soon forgotten.
We must move from a transmit-and-test model to in-depth teaching. We’ll need to teach thematically so that several of the too-numerous curriculum objectives can be grouped into a unit project. Reading and writing can be integrated into social studies units. For example, students could learn about government and economics by writing a play about establishing first colony on Mars. What if they then worked together in a virtual simulation of the Mars surface to design the station? Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy places creativity and it’s root, create, at the highest level of learning. Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind (on my reading list), tells us that emphasizing design changes the whole conversation about how we learn. Learning based around projects and problem-solving, PBL, gives the students experiences that they will learn from and remember way beyond their school career. Teach deeply and the tests will take care of themselves.

I divided this topic about tests and teaching into three parts because it was getting so long. This was part 1.

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