Increasing the Rigor

8.30.11 By Andrew Rodriguez

Today was our first faculty development meeting of the school year. Getting back into the school groove was fun, but being bombarded with testing/student performance data of every kind for the first 2 hours of the day was not.

Over the past few years, I’ve attended professional development sessions where we’ve spent countless hours analyzing student MCAS data, only to reach a dismal conclusion every time: our students are just not performing well enough on the tests. We are then told how crucial it is that our students meet their targets, and while we’re directed to not teach to the test in order to have our students reach the goals, it’s implied. Our district spends money on testing software that it supposed to predict students’ performance on the actual high-stakes tests and help teachers plan interventions—but in the process, we lose valuable instructional time as we administer those interim assessments. In our classrooms, it is sometimes suggested that we prepare exams that mimic the content and format of the high-stakes test so that our students are comfortable and prepared when they sit for the real thing. This is, sadly, an unfortunate reality.

When I began my first year of teaching last year, my students stepped into my classroom expecting me to tell them how to do math. That is what they actually told me—I’m not making it up: In math class, they said, the teacher does the thinking and the grunt work while the student copies the notes and replicates them on quizzes. Others were convinced that math was over after the MCAS, and questioned why they needed to keep taking math since that “requirement” was finished.

My kids were accustomed to a math experience that goes completely against the nature of the subject. At the beginning of the year, my students were frustrated when I had them collaborate on open-ended problems, talk with each other about mathematical processes, write about how they thought about problems, or make sense of concepts with little guidance from me. It took lots of scaffolding and modeling in the beginning, but I was slowly able to build and instill mathematical habits in my students by the end of the year. I vowed to show them that math was not mindless, but actually relevant, stimulating, and fun. It would also equip them with ways of thinking that would help them in any class and in life.

It scares me that my students had such a passive experience throughout their secondary math careers. Many of them had similar experiences in classes where there were high-stakes tests involved at the end. Essentially, high school became a set of requirements rather than a chance to grow and prepare for the real world. I’m not blaming my colleagues for this—I’m blaming the environment that’s been created by this emphasis on testing.

It’s worrisome to me that inquiry and learning have fallen to the wayside as we teach what’s necessary for the “exam.” We should be cultivating students who take intellectual risks and are creative and critical thinkers/problem solvers.  Our students may enter professions that have a knowledge base that has yet to be created. We should be focusing on what skills will serve our students in the future, not ones that merely prepare them to meet “proficient” and “advanced” targets on the MCAS.

Now, I recognize that the MCAS is crucial to student success because it is needed for graduation and is perhaps one of the few objective ways that we can assess students, because it tests what they should already know. Personally, I don’t neglect preparing my kids for the MCAS because I understand the ramifications if they do fail. I do think, however, that we should strive to tailor our classroom instruction and assessment to ensure that our students truly know the material beyond recall/memorization. We should take care in designing tasks that require students to integrate knowledge and understanding. Providing opportunities for students to actively apply their skills to new problems that make them think outside the box and make their thinking and reasoning visible would give much more compelling information about student proficiency.