Can Openers

Do you know how to use a can opener? Not the fancy electric kind. The old-school hand-held contraption with the twisty-knob on the side.  

Imagine you are a student in a class where the teacher gives everyone a can opener pre-test. Each student gets a can opener and is asked to try to open a can. A handful of students complete the task effortlessly. Some of your classmates just look dumbfounded. Others fumble around a bit and manage to finally get the utensil to latch onto the edge of the can. The lefties in the room gripe about this task being especially difficult for them because the knob has to be twisted with the right hand, but some master the procedure nonetheless. Several minutes later, the teacher takes stock of the situation: some of the students are successful, and others are not. She marks that down in her gradebook and proceeds with the lesson.

It’s time for the can opening lecture and demonstration. The class dutifully takes notes as the teacher explains how to open a can with a can opener. Next, it’s time for the can-opening YouTube video, a five minute thriller in which a voiceover narrator explains in detail how to open a can while showing the process four times, once in slow motion to break it down for everyone. The teacher pauses the video twice to wake up or redirect the off-task behaviors of students who came into class already knowing how to open a can.

Noticing that the bell is about to ring, the teacher announces the homework assignment:  “Go home tonight, get twenty cans out of your pantry and open the odd-numbered ones. Bring the opened cans to class tomorrow so that I can check your work.”

The bell rings, and you are dismissed.

If you were one of the students who already knew how to open a can and demonstrated it during the activity at the beginning of class, how excited are you going to be about this homework assignment? If you’re a compliant pleaser, you’ll go home and waste time (and money) opening 10 cans to bring to school. If you’re one of those kids who is easily bored and isn’t motivated by grades, chances are that you will get a zero on this assignment.

My friend’s son J.T. Is one of those kids who would get a zero on this.

J.T. is a high school junior who has the (mis?)fortune of having two educators as parents. In other words, J.T. sometimes knows too much for his own good.

For instance, J.T. once asked his math teacher why, if he made a 97 on her formative assessment, he was having to do the same homework as the entire class. Instead of getting an answer, J.T. got sent to the office for insubordination.

We can speculate all day about this scenario and the cause of J.T.’s punishment. Maybe the teacher was having a bad day. Perhaps J.T. has a history of misbehavior, and this was the final straw. It could be that the studies are accurate that say that young black males are disciplined disproportionately and that J.T.’s reasonable question was viewed as an attack intended to disrupt the class and derail learning.

I suspect, though, that the real root of the problem was that J.T. asked a question that called out an indefensible practice. If an assessment is truly formative, it is used to inform instruction. If the purpose of homework is to provide practice on content so students can master it, students who have already demonstrated mastery shouldn’t have to do it. And if gradebooks are designed to communicate mastery toward objectives, homework grades of zero for noncompliance don’t give any worthwhile feedback to the person viewing the gradebook.

I can’t even think of an answer to J.T.’s question that makes sense. Because I said so? Because homework builds responsibility? Because it’s good for you? Because it’s not fair to the other students if you don’t have homework?

What answer would you accept from your teacher if you asked why you had to spend your evening opening half the cans in the pantry when you already knew how to open a can?

Formative assessments aren’t any good if we don’t use them to modify our instruction. We can pat ourselves on the back all we want for using exit tickets, pretests, Kahoots, Plickers, Nearpods, quickwrites, and quick quizzes, but all of those tools are useless if they aren’t giving us a guide for what needs to happen next for the class as a whole and, in most cases, for subsets of students within the class.

Formative assessment is one of the most powerful tools in the educator’s toolbox but only if it’s used the way it’s intended.  Don’t use a can opener to floss your teeth.