The Test…or a focus on Feedback
Traversing is coming up on its one year anniversary and in honor of that event, I am going to be reposting some of the first issues, as we have a lot of new readers who were not with us in the beginning. These first posts outline the foundation of the blog and the educational philosophies that guide my work and the work of City of Bridges High School.
This week I will continue with my plan to spend the first weeks of publication building off of the six components of Progressive Education outlined by Tom Little and Katherine Ellison, in their book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education can Save America’s Schools. Here is the list again with the focus of this week in bold:
1. Attention to children’s emotions as well as their intellects.
2. Reliance on student’s interests to guide their learning.
3. Curtailment or outright bans on testing, grading and ranking.
4. Involvement of students in real world endeavors.
5. The study of topics in an integrated way, from a variety of different disciplines
6. Support for children to develop a sense of social justice and become active participants in American Democracy.
If you are new to Traversing and want to read my initial thoughts on why this list matters to me you can find the first issue here. If you want to hear about Martin Buber and Attention to Children’s Emotions, you can check out the issue from two weeks ago, here, and last week’s discussion of Flow and Personalization here.
Testing, Grading and Ranking
I know that it is a topic that people have strong feelings about with a variety of nuanced arguments both in support of and in opposition to Testing, Grading and Ranking. It is important to note that testing, grading and ranking are not synonymous with high stakes standardized testing. Although it is true that the PSSA and Keystones Exams here in Pennsylvania or the PARCC or Smarted Balanced Assessment System are tests and are often used for grading and ranking, they are only one type of what Little and Ellison are sharing as characteristics of Progressive Schools.
As I mentioned last week, I’ll write an entire issue on assessment in the next month, but quickly there are two primary types of assessment for the sake of this topic.
Formative Assessments are ongoing analysis of students work with the goal of shifting instructional experiences in order to support student learning. Formative Assessments can take many forms, a conversation, a quiz, a paper, a project etc., and the essential distinction is that the assessment results are used directly to shape the learning experience of the student in order to impact their learning directly.
Summative Assessment are designed to determine the degree to which students have mastered the Knowledge, Understanding and Skills expected of them in a curriculum in a given timeframe. They are a summation of learning and are given after learning has ended. Typically, Summative Assessments come at the end of period of learning, such as unit, semester or school year. The standardized tests that I mentioned above are all examples of a Summative Assessment. They are used to evaluate student, teacher and school performance and don’t usually have a direct impact on the learning experiences of the students who took the test.
Although testing is a part of the picture that Little and Ellison are speaking about, the more important message is about philosophical and pedagogical beliefs around learning and supporting the whole person. The impact of grading and its influence on learning has been well documented and I don’t need to retread arguments when they have already been made eloquently, in fact I invite you top pause in reading this news letter to take a few minutes to read Alfie Kohn’s article from Educational Leadership, The Case Against Grades.
Welcome back.
If you haven’t read Alfie Kohn’s articles and books I encourage you to explore his long career. As with many things, I don’t agree with everything that he has proposed, but the vast majority of it makes sense to me.
The practical background that he provides leaves a space for me to offer a philosophical rational for the absence of grades, ranking and testing through the lens of accountability, obedience and surveillance.
One way to think about these trends in schooling of schooling can is to use the idea of the Panopticon devised by Jeremy Bentham, but used as a metaphor for surveillance and control by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The Panopticon was a prison design with;
an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells…. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man a worker or a school boy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. (200)
The observer in the central tower is able to see into the cells, but due to the nature of the design, those being observed cannot see if they are in fact being observed. Therefore, “the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). This idea and its relevance to schooling and education is further discussed by Herbert Kohl in the Teachers College Record in 2009 in his essay “The Educational Panopticon” in which he states;
When I talk about an educational panopticon, I mean a system in which teachers and students are under constant scrutiny, allowed no choice over what is learned or taught, evaluated continuously, and punished for what is considered inadequate performance. In this context students and teachers are forced to live in a constant state of anxiety, self-doubt, wariness, anomie and even suppressed rage.
Although Kohl’s description might be waved off as overly dramatic, when one considers the reality of a grade, rank and testing-based learning environment, his concern is well placed. Often the constant scrutiny comes from the departments of education at the state level, who themselves are responding the funding which is tied to federal education policy[1]. Even when a school is outside of the mandated systems of accountability, such as private or parochial schools, the pressure to have get or give good grades is felt by students and teachers alike.
I suppose the point of these two lenses for exploring this element of progressive schools, as described by Little and Ellison, is that the reasons are clear why Grades, Ranking and Testing have a negative impact on the education of the whole person. Alfie Kohn has presented the evidence and the research and there is also a profound philosophical and moral reason to eliminate the surveillance and control that is a hallmark of these systems. Yet, grades are deeply embedded in our ideas about what school is. There is a deep cultural narrative around grades and tests and ranking, which is reinforced in our stories, tv shows, movies and the ways that we talk about our own histories in school. In an earlier version of this weeks issue, where I talked about feedback, I even included that I was a straight A student.
We are currently in a time of reflection and reevaluation. The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed us the opportunity to rethink the deep cultural narratives that we have around everything, including schools and learning. The pause in traditional schooling practices that occurred beginning in March of 2020 was an opportunity to wonder what we wanted to leave behind and what we wanted to carry forward. Unfortunately, many schools are coming into this year with the drive to increase accountability in order to make up for lost time. I guess I am asking that we reconsider what Grades, Ranking and Testing really do and potentially decide that they are something that we want to leave behind.
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
I suppose the entry for this week manages to encompass people, places and things. I have already described my journey to education in earlier issues, but briefly, after graduating from college, I was a substitute teacher and then the Director of Academic Assistance Programs for a small United Way Agency. It was then that my partner and future wife heard a talk by David Sobel who was a faculty member in the Integrated Learning M.Ed. program at Antioch University New England, which is the people, place and things for this issue. Were it not for that chance encounter I might not have learned about a place that transformed my experience.
The original Antioch College was founded in 1852 and it first president Horace Mann’s quote was read at the graduations for both my M.Ed. and Ph.D.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”
The college was on the edge of progressive education for decades and in the 1960 began to expand to build a larger university network, which included Antioch New England, in Keene New Hampshire. The undergraduate college fell on hard times and eventually closed before re-opening as an independent institution in 2011, while the 7 University campuses have and continue to thrive.
I have had the opportunity to spend time at many of the campuses and in my experience all of the programs offered are excellent. Moreover, the University lives into the progressive values that we have been discussing here these past couple of weeks. My M.Ed. was the first time that I did not receive grades and had to read feedback on my work, and that experience was formative in building my understanding of the value of feedback over grading. At Antioch, I learned how to integrate curriculum, so that learning looked and felt like the experience of life.
I also had the opportunity to learn from some of the most remarkable, dedicated and amazing educators that I have ever met, both in my M.Ed. and my Ph.D., people who continue to teach me even though some of them are no longer with us on this earth.
The café at Antioch New England was also the best lunch spot in town.
I am sure that I would not be where I am now were it not for this institution and since I only found out about it by chance, maybe this will be the chance for a reader.
See you next week!
[1] Oversight of education is not one of the powers enumerated to the federal government in the constitution, so the majority of federal education policy is driven by the allocation or withdrawal of federal education dollars. This is another topic, I’ll explore at length in a latter issue.