EdTechTrek

The headline reads: “Colleges spend billions to prep freshman.” The by-line: “High school graduates increasingly unprepared for college work, remediation falls most heavily to community colleges” A study is quoted at reporting that as much as one third of American college students have enrolled in remedial classes. Although this is often done at great expense to colleges, I think the sadder story is that it needs to be done at all for such high percentages of college freshmen. But, to shed some light on a different aspect of the problem, I share the following quotation from the article:

Eric Paris, who earned a 3.8 high school GPA but is finding his freshman year at Virginia Tech much more challenging, says the big difference is “it’s all on my own.” In class, “it’s up to me if I want to sit on Facebook or pay attention.” He, too, wishes he’d taken more challenging high school classes but thought a high GPA was more important.

We lead students to believe that grades are everything, that having a high GPA is critical to getting into a good college (and it is, but it’s not the only determiner), so they then take easy courses to boost their GPAs and end up with this false sense of accomplishment that get stripped away when they are told that they must enroll in remedial writing or remedial math their freshman year. I have had students like this. You wonder how the system has failed them. Actually, I have had graduate students who have never had to write a real research paper. I have had elementary education majors who wanted to teach high school, but could not complete the requisite math courses. They figured since they were not all that good at math that they could at least teach younger students. I want to strangle them at this point of the conversation.

You know, we have a number of highly complex problems that continue to plague American education. This should not be one of them. We desperately need strong math and science teachers at the elementary level. I, myself, am a recovering math disaster, largely due to many of my elementary teachers who did not have a clue as to how to really teach mathematical concepts. Sure, they could teach the rules of regrouping or the definitions of polygons, but all that takes is reading a few statements out of the teacher’s manual. That didn’t meet my needs. Today, I have a much healthier and sound conceptual mathematical understanding and am so thankful for some of my education professors who taught methods of teaching math and remedial math methods. I now reteach my own son when he comes home from school, not understanding the most basic of concepts.

I avoided the hard courses to keep my grades up in high school. I hope that my children do not. I hope that they are both empowered and challenged by their teachers. I hope that their teachers will see areas of need and address those needs ASAP. I hope their teachers will teach to their strenghts and strenthen those areas of weakness. I hope their teachers will value their interests and make learning relevant. I hope that their teachers use all resources and tools at their disposal. I hope that their teachers will fight for resources and tools that they do not have access to and desperately need. I hope that their teachers believe in them.

That’s a lot of hoping, isn’t it.

Should so much at stake be resting in the arms of hope?

The ABC News headline reads, “Teens Prefer Computers to Doctors“. This headline is somewhat deceptive, though. More accurately, teems may be more likely to share sensitive, high-risk and confidential information via a handheld computing system called the Health eTouch than they would in a face-to-face discussion with their doctor.

One quotation that struck me from an article titled, “Waiting room gadget may prove to be a life-saver” reads,

“Our research has found that recent advances in information technology, such as the Health eTouch system, and the immediate reporting of computerized screening results may help overcome barriers to behavioral screening.”

It made me think about the complete opposite in education – the delayed reporting that comes from standardized assessments. I was talking with a teacher the other day and we were discussing the end-of-year paperwork that needs to get done on each child. Her perspective was that it was such a waste of time because nobody really looks at it, making the process even more trivial. It is a vicious circle, because the new teachers who get anecdotal and formal assessment data on their new students know that teachers like themselves just go through the motions of filling out these district-mandated forms and checklists. We also discussed the delayed assessment data results that come from standardized testing. By the time the data arrives, it is so close to the end of the year that teachers don’t really give it attention as they will be passing their students on to other teachers (this is assuming that the teachers can make sense of the data that they are provided with). It gets filed for the next teacher to sort out.

What if standardized assessment data reporting was immediate? Would that change things (assuming that the data was actually useful, valid, and reliable), or is something still missing from the equation like a doctor’s mind – one that understands the data and combs it looking for important information and correlations. Do most teachers really take the data seriously? Do most teachers really know what to do with the data once they receive it. I remember our faculty sitting in on one – yes one “in-service”…groan… where we were told what the data we had just received means. I never had a course in undergrad or Master’s program that helped me understand the data and take action based upon the data. Only during my doctoral program did serious attention to this ever emerge.

So, we have the problem of delayed data receipt, lack of understanding of what the data means, lack of understanding of what action to take based on the data, lack of credibility and respect for the data itself, and disenfranchisement with the whole formal data gathering, reporting, recording, and action process.

Imagine if your teacher was your doctor? What then?

Would a handheld data gathering device really help any more than a handheld computing device put into the hands of a novice or traditional teacher really bring learning innovation and power into the classroom?

As Obama would say, we need change. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Are we just waiting for change, or are we, as Hillary Clinton said, just repackaging things others have tried … “not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.”

We need educational assessment reform in this country as badly as we need healthcare reform.

A few weeks back teacher, Carl Chew, made the headlines for receiving a 2 week without pay suspension for refusing to give the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) standardized test in his Washington State classroom. Here is a reposting of his response explaining his actions. It is a MUST READ!! I am going to continue to process his detailed, response. It is not a political response. It is not a research-based or scholarly response. It is a response grounded in reality, in the personal, social, emotional, and physical learning environment.