babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Support rabble | Advertise with us | Contact our staff | About rabble | Log-in or Register for a new account | Corrections | Privacy policy | Newsfeeds | Mailing lists
rabble: Features | Columnists | In Cahoots | Blogs | Books | Photos | What's Up | Polls
babble: Forum Topics | Active Topics
The rpn: About the RPN | Become a podcaster
rabbleTV: Program Guide | Features | Indie Inside | Best of the net
Copyright © 2001-2013 the authors
Syndicate
Actually, I've not conceded that. Testing -- any testing -- is imperfect. But, unless a student's mere presence in the classroom, by itself, is a sufficient indicator that the student understands a subject, we are going to have to evaluate the student's knowledge. So, the question becomes: How do we evaluate students' understanding of a subject? We give them tests (both standardized and non-standardized tests).
But, if you think tests are terrible indicators of what students are learning and if we should, therefore, stop giving students any tests, how would you propose schools evaluate students' progress?
Or, like teachers, do you think students should simply not be evaluated?
Ha ha. Squirm and wriggle, Sven. I like how your mock concern about genuinely evaluating teachers has been completely jettisoned in favour of evaluating students.
Again, wise. If you can't win the debate then change the subject.
Maybe, as a form of "wrap up" you could go back to attacking teachers? Full circle and all? Bwa-ha-ha.
Your problem, Sven, is that you are completely uncritical of status quo education but remained focused on "bad teachers". You take for granted that students know nothing until they enter the classroom and are filled with "knowledge". The amount of knowledge that they have been filled with surely must be able to be measured. You view students as empty beakers and schools as great jugs of knowledge, you are searching frantically for the measurement on the beaker so you may determine which teacher has filled which student with the right amount of knowledge juice (so you may determine teachers' proper pay scale).
Basically, you are just like all the politicians who frequently completely re-arrange how teachers are asked to teach. You know nothing about education, pedagogy and have obviously never set foot in a classroom as a teacher. Your fundamental understanding of what school is has been completely taken apart in literature but you are ignorant of the body of literature around education. Despite your ignorance you have appointed yourself inquisitor of "bad teachers", who must be the cause of all educational faults, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone who holds an uncritical perspective on education and has not read any literature on standardized testing, socio-economic levels and schooling or race and colonialism in schooling.
Indeed. My concern is with educational results: What have the students actually learned?
But, I've "jettisoned" nothing: The whole argument I've been making (if you bothered to actually read and to think about it) is that we want teachers who actually deliver positive results -- delivering positive results is precisely what makes a "great teacher".
Student evaluations of progress and teacher evaluations of success are inseparable. Part of my point is that if you can evaluate student learning, then you can evaluate teacher effectiveness.
So, I return to my question: How would you evaluate student learning? Or, is such a task simply impossible?
Actually, I'm highly critical of the status quo. Under the status quo, there is a virtual absence of rational evaluation of teacher performance...and poor teachers remain, like sticky garden slugs, firmly embedded in the educational system. All, of course, to the grave detriment of the students they are responsible for.
So it is, in fact, really time to look at radically changing the status quo.
Sven, thank goodness you are not an administrator. You haven't a clue what is expected of teachers in terms of meeting all aspects of the curriculum and evaluating students, and how detrimental this is to the learning process. There isn't time for teaching in the world you imagine. Second, hiring more administrators to scrutinize teachers in an imperfect system is just revanchist bullshit that serves the very people who want transparency and tests: teachers who don't follow the rules entirely will get punished for not following the rules (whether or not they are good teachers) and those who do will have students who are professional test-takers.
People like you know very little about teaching, about the multiple facets of the job, the long hours after teaching hours are over and the constant berating of the parents who feel that the babysitting service is going horribly.
A while back I ran into a retired former colleague who asked, "How are things at the factory?" He's a little bit bitter, I suppose. We instructors are constantly at odds with gnomish administrators who view what we do as the production of graduates who will be able to enter the work force. They seem to have no clue about education.
I see what I do in class as a form of theatre. On the other hand, marking is a type of creative drudgery.
I really dislike the term "empowerment."
You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!
I'm just going to give my own personal experience, which is really all I can do anyway:
My son is in Gr. 4 this year, and his first year in a gifted program. He has had both wonderful and horrible teachers in his time at school; not wonderful or horrible overall, or for all students, but just for him. My wife and I are both very involved in his education, and we have a good understanding of what he enjoys, what comes easily, and what is difficult or just plain boring. So when we get a report card or have a teacher interview, we don't consider it so much an indication of how he is learning, but a measure of how well his teacher understands him, his type of learning, and his strengths and weaknesses. As my wife puts it, how much the teacher "gets" him.
So in my opinion, a "good" teacher is the teacher that "gets" your child, and teaches in a way that your child finds enjoyable but still challenging. A "great" teacher is one who can do this for a variety of learning and personality styles. Those are few and far between, and I don't know how we make more of them.
Cheers,
It's funny how many times in class I've been able to refer to that meatgrinder scene in The Wall to make a point.
Following "rules"? The fixation with "rules" seems to come from unions (i.e., very complex and intricately-defined "work rules," which have everything to do with protecting teachers but approximately zero to do with educational outcomes).
I'm not interested in "rules"...and I don't think teachers should be judged on whether or not they "follow the rules".
As professionals, teachers should be given very wide latitude in their classrooms to achieve overarching performance objectives, objectives that are rooted in increasing student performance. The precise manner in which a particular teacher accomplishes those objectives should be left to the teacher's professional judgment. And, as professionals, they should be accountable for the results they achieve or fail to achieve.
The normalizing, rule-making institution is the government, actually. Strange that a libertarian is so blinded by anti-unionism that he would forget enemy #1: the government.
It's a great music video, and I think most primary and secondary school teachers earn their pay. I'm more worried about kids being able to access higher education today. Grade twelve level of achievement used to be a ticket to a good job. A college diploma or B.A. were once considered to be tickets to a decent job not so long ago. Our kids are now competing globally for jobs of the future, and there is no shortage of well educated young Asians who've never known student loan debt and high interest paid on those debts like young Canadians have had to deal with since the 1990's. I can see where there need to be labour agreements between countries. We need to raise the bar in this country, and I think US economist Dean Baker has an excellent idea to create a free labour market in teachers and doctors to bring down the cost of higher education and health care etc. Then again, I think the lack of interest-free money in our economies is a root cause of this current debt crisis. According to some economists, there will be significant change over the next ten years wrt economic theory and how we finance the important things around the western world. But for now I think teachers and college professors are the future as much as young people are. Children are the future, and I see teachers as those who pass the torch to them for them to hold high. The important stuff is happening in our schools every day.
I'm thinking of the philosophy of teaching, as in, e.g., Paulo Friere, in which the empowerment of the students is considered an important factor in the methods of teaching as well as the content. I dislike the fashionable use of this term probably as much as you do.
Anyway, since Sven, who started this thread by linking to some article about education in a right wing US magazine, hasn't really done anything but repeat the repulsive mantras of the Fraser Institute - especially their disgusting use of Standardized Testing - maybe a better link is in order.
ooh rah.
Standardized Testing Moratorium and Task Force
Brief 2009
BC Teachers' Federation
It's a 5 page .pdf file.
Some highlights:
1. The census application of the tests and the promotion of test scores as the objective of schooling leads to a competition for marks, and the identification of standard practice and standard curriculum. This competition sacrifices curriculum breadth and depth, academic rigour, and the ability of teachers to design instruction to meet individual student needs.It compromises sound pedagogy.
This last point is extremely telling. Many teachers in the public school system have, in their classes, students over a gigantic range of levels and abilities. These teachers rely upon Educational Assistants and all sorts of help to address the learning needs of such children. Standardized tests are an obstacle here.
2. Regarding the misuse of test results by the (fascistic) Fraser Institute to create school rankings ... All the parties in education have condemned the way these results are used.
3. What is needed are assessments and an evaluation process appropriate for a particular objective. There is, therefore, a need for an analysis of the educational value of existing provincial and local assessments. There is a need to assess the assessments.
4. In regard to Standardized Testing, the Finnish example is particularly significant. Their randomized method of assessment, based on a supported community of teachers (instead of vitriolic hostility to educators and an anti-intellectual neaderthalism) is outstanding and works well.
5. Standardized tests impact on the joy of teaching and learning for children. It narrows the curriculum to teaching the test, destroys deep learning, and attacks the already marginal students with another blow. Recent evidence indicates that more students drop out and fail to graduate ... compliments of standardized testing.
6. Standarized tests emphasize what students cannot do. They don't help teachers teach; they narrow the scope of learning. Important learning such as creative and critical thinking cannot be standardized and measured, and therefore doesn't "count".
Babblers ought to care about such things as creativity and critical thinking, for obvious reasons. The right wing shit bags of the Fraser Institute, and their cheerleaders, do not.
----------------
But enough already. Clearly, as Le T pointed out, our friend Sven has never been in a classroom doing any of the real work of teaching.
In your zeal to disagree with the concept of holding teachers accountable for delivering educational results, you seem not to understand that I agree with you that it is silly to micromanage teachers by imposing a myriad of complex rules on them.
What needs to be done is to set educational objectives and then let teachers determine the best way to accomplish those objectives.
Sven: how about the objectives of creative and critical learning? (i.e., creativity and critical thinking) Please tell us how to "test" and measure these objectives.
N.Beltov, what you're basically saying is that teachers' performance can't (or shouldn't) be evaluated and, even if it can be evaluated, there should be no adverse consequences for failing to perform (nor even positive consequences for superlative performance).
Is that correct?
So, if it is, indeed, impossible to test or measure subjective learning (such as a creative writing piece), then I guess all students should be given an "A" (for effort).
Not a bad idea. In fact it's been done. A professor at a Canadian University is currently appealing his layoff/dismissal under these circumstances. His arguments are pretty good ones, too.
But my point was a much smaller one. Simply, that trying to measure all important learning is impossible. But the learning still takes place. The issue of grading is, therefore, of secondary importance.
Learning is more important. That's it.
Montessori School Of Dentistry Lets Students Discover Their Own Root Canal Procedures
But, if there are no evaluations, you won't even know if learning is occurring!!
Yes but if the evaluation criteria are abitrary and rigid then attempting to meet them may actually interfere with the learning process.
If your goal is to discipline students so that they can replicate a set of practices, then yes, this criticism is valid. Am I going to go to a welding class for the purpose of learning by exploring my own experiences and their relationship to the rest of the world?
I think this is a grave conflation between being trained and education.
I also think you are trying to be antagonistic to labour issues today. Do you think your contribution isn't an obvious siding with the antipathy towards educators and their goals for producing learners - not standardized products of the currriculum?
Then the focus should be on developing appropriate evaluation criteria, not throwing our hands up in the air and declaring, "Student performance, and thus teacher performance, simply cannot be evaluated."
How is testing or not testing students a "labour issue"??
More specifically, how is expecting that students will be tested on what they may or may not have learned "antagonistic" to labour??
I think you're crying wolf.
Sven, you've been shown that an myopic focus on testing and/or evaluating has all kinds of problems associated with it. The evidence is really quite overwhelming.
Maybe you could better use your time by reading what people who actually spend time in the classroom think about all this stuff. Try to put aside any knuckle-dragging instincts and - gulp - see what real teachers actually think about all this.
What is presumably "antagonistic" to labor is that student evaluations could be used to evaluate teacher performance -- which is, of course, something to be avoided at all costs (even if the costs include less-educated students).
Teacher jobs über alles!!
Your contribution is belittling to those who are educators, who have obviously stated a position that you are mocking with that example. It is quite obvious that you are trying to score a cheap shot against the positions of educators on this board with that little addition - or was it just a randomly placed joke?
I have already articulated how standardized testers are trying to find fault within the classroom by trying to reduce student performance to the ability of teachers to reproduce and teach the curriculum. This is anti-educational, and it is an attempt to attack teachers who do not conform to unrealistic expectations placed upon them.
Yawn. Got any more articles under that greasy jacket of yours that you want to import from the US?
I'm rather curious about knowing more about the Finnish method of student evaluation alluded to in Beltov's post #74. Unfortunately the linked article was fairly brief. Does anyone know more details about this specific evaluation method or alternative methods in general?