Test

Today was my first staff development day as a student teacher. It went something like this:

I woke up at 5:30am to run five miles. This probably has nothing to do with student teaching. I enjoy running, and as the Fall semester starts up, I understand that I will have less and less time for things non-MAC related. I've also been told that there must be certain things that I should refuse to give up, activities or hobbies that I must maintain as a means of preserving my sanity. I'd like to believe running is one of those things. I've also been told to try and be optimistic.

I arrived at Thurston High School on time. I had visited twice in the past to interface with my mentor teacher, so there weren't any problems getting there. I was more or less ushered into the school cafeteria, where much of the day's agenda would be held. School cafeterias carry a large significance for me. They are the school's social proving grounds. Real life experience and "High School Musical" has taught me that population is segregated by lunch table. Popular kids sat at the popular table. Jocks sat with other jocks. Just as we are tracked academically, schools have a peculiar way of sorting us socially as well.

Being a student teacher, I was neither popular nor jock. I found myself latching onto a fellow MACer and meandering over to an empty table, surrounded by veteran teachers and other school officials engaged in their own conversations, sitting at their own tables. I was essentially a freshmen. The superintendent came over to me to introduce himself and welcome me to the district. I asked him if he could smell my fear. He said yes.

After a morning of speeches and an ACT practice test (I got one wrong), we broke off into our departments in order to incorporate more literacy practice into our summative assessments. In plain terms, we took passages out of the textbook and wrote three questions that would require students to practice reading strategies with course relevant content.

I want to relate how extremely difficult it is to write test questions. Before my hands-on experience, I thought that the hardest part about designing questions was applying Bloom's Taxonomy via Anderson and Krathwohl's theoretical framework. I was surprised to realize that requiring students to use higher order thinking when answering questions was not necessarily the most difficult part. That honor belongs to thinking up the answer options for multiple choice questions.

It's like this: ideally, we already know what the students should know, since we designed the curriculum. Sit-down tests are opportunities for students to confirm they know what they should know. Yet, the test questions and answer options must be chosen carefully. If the options make the correct answer too obvious, students are not being effectively tested. If the question and options are hard to understand or misleading, students may still answer incorrectly even if they can recall and transfer the knowledge being tested.

But that brings me to another point. After learning about the inconsistencies of standardized testing, I found it unsettling to learn that teachers are almost obligated to "teach to the test." As I mentioned earlier, I spent the morning writing and rewriting questions that simulated the questions found in the ACT. This Fall and Winter, I will be student teaching for a mentor teacher who teaches advanced placement courses -- courses literally made for the sake of doing well on a standardized test.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I understand that because so many advantages are born out of scoring high on standardized tests, it would undermine student success to NOT teach according to the test. However, as a teacher, how can we be instruments of reform if there is greater incentive for perpetuating inadequate systems of instruction and assessment?

Or maybe, this is as adequate as we can get?

I'll let you know in six months or so.