Trust the Test

As much as it would please almost everyone in the country with any first-hand knowledge of education, high-stakes, government-mandated testing isn’t going away anytime soon. Standardized testing is a reality, and, unfortunately, it’s a yardstick against which districts, campuses, and even individual teachers are judged.

In response to the testing onslaught, publishers have rushed to the rescue with test-prep booklets, computer programs, and websites, all designed to help students get ready for the dreaded test. Teachers have latched onto test-prep methodologies such as assigning daily openers containing released test questions, giving practice tests in class, teaching vocabulary lists of high-frequency words gleaned from past assessments, and requiring after-school and on-the-weekend attendance at test-prep boot camps designed to give struggling students more exposure to what they can expect to see in the spring on their state tests.

The result of all this hullabaloo is that kids aren’t really doing much better on these tests and—no surprise—they hate school. When every day of the school year is another tedious encounter with test-prep materials, students have nothing to look forward to but soon learn that there’s lots to dread.

I’m led to believe that the companies we pay millions to construct and field test these state assessments have some expertise in the art of test design. They build these tests to measure student mastery of a subset of the state objectives for the course.    

What would happen if we trusted that the test is actually measuring what it claims to measure and that if we simply taught the skills the state asks us to teach, our students would be fine on the test? I’m willing to take that chance for the sake of students’ love of learning.

The STAAR end-of-course exams in English, for instance, measure, in a fake way, many of the things we do naturally in a well-taught English class. They ask students to comprehend and analyze a variety of texts, to make judgments about the author’s intention, to connect ideas or techniques between texts, and to find textual evidence that supports an assertion. These tests require students to make corrections to errors in essays, just like they would do when editing a classmate’s paper in a writer’s workshop environment. They ask students to examine an essay and make recommendations about organization, word choice, transitions, and clarity, as they would in a writing conference with a peer. Finally, they ask students to come up with an idea and support it in an organized, focused, clearly-written essay of their own—something I hope every English student is doing frequently in class.

It seems to me that if we just teach our students the state objectives, formatively assess to adjust instruction and target students who need extra attention, and build up students’ self-efficacy and dispositions toward the subject, they ought to do fine on the test when spring rolls around.

Taking a practice test that asks students to analyze a poem doesn’t teach students how to analyze a poem. Answering revision and editing multiple choice questions about an imaginary student’s fake essay doesn’t teach more about how to give feedback on a paper than actual writing conference does. A practice test takes hours that could be used in active instruction: teaching state standards, informally gauging student understanding, and reteaching or extending as needed. Taking a practice test is boring. Good instruction isn’t.

Maybe we should trust the test— trust that the test is indeed assessing the knowledge and skills it claims to assess—and devote more of our time and energy to familiarizing ourselves with the standards the test is testing, pinpointing the places where the standards align with our curriculum, strategizing about how to teach the standards and assess our students’ mastery, and developing authentic ways to remediate during class time instead of asking struggling students to carve out time from their busy schedules to get help outside of class.   

Teaching our students how to take the test won’t help them if we haven’t taught them how to do what the test is asking them to do.

Outsourcing Discipline

We’ve all taught that kid that knows how to push your buttons and that, after the first few days of school, is on strike two before ever entering the room. This is the kid who makes your stomach get a little queasy each day before class starts, the one who haunts your dreams at night and turns your days into living nightmares. The one who makes you pray, “Please, please, please, please let him be sick today,” as you are driving to school in the morning. 

For me, that student was Horton (For the sake of anonymity, I’m using a name of no student I ever actually taught). Horton was in my English class, and he was trouble from day one. As soon as I had an inkling he was going to be difficult (probably day two), I promptly called home to establish a relationship with his parent early on. The next day Horton showed up in class more unpleasant than ever and announced belligerently, “You called my mom last night.” He then proceeded to make my day even more miserable. Frustratedly, I pulled Horton into the hall and, in the heat of anger, gave him a big ol’ adult lecture, which made absolutely no difference when we re-entered the classroom and he had to save face in front of his peers. I gave him a warning, followed by a second warning, followed by a detention. 

He failed to show up for the detention, much to my delight, because that meant a double detention, which I immediately issued, and which was also unserved. Good, I thought to myself. This is out of my hands now. I get to send him to Saturday School and make this kid someone else’s problem.  Before the first month of school had ended, Horton had been assigned two Saturday Schools and had received three or four office referrals. He even got to spend a few days out of my class in in-school suspension, but the ISS only served to give me a day or two of rest and to make sure Horton fell impossibly behind, which made him even more of a problem when he returned to class. 

I wish I could tell you that I executed some phenomenal teacher move that got Horton back on my side and that he ended up being my star student by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Horton and I spent an entire semester antagonizing one another, his mom and I became BFFs over the phone, and I finally convinced the counselor to move Horton to another teacher at the semester so “he could get a fresh start.” I passed him off to a colleague and then commiserated with her from time to time about the challenges of dealing with this unruly miscreant, all the while thinking to myself, “Better you than me!”  In hindsight, I was the worst in so many ways. 

For some reason, I had forgotten something taught to me by a very wise Assistant Principal my first year of teaching, Scott Potter. Mr. Potter insisted that we not outsource our discipline, not send our students away to detention halls, not assign Saturday School sessions, and not write stacks of office referrals. When a student was having a problem in our class, it was our responsibility to schedule a detention with that student. The detention wasn’t meant to be a punishment—no scraping gum off desks or pounding erasers. Instead, we were supposed to spend some quality time, one on one, with the student, talking about the problem and thinking together about ways to remedy it.  

As a young teacher, I thought this was a ridiculous torture designed to make me have to spend an agonizing 30 extra minutes with someone I didn’t even want to see during the time I had to see him in class each day. Now that I’m older and perhaps a little wiser, I see the brilliance in this approach. 

Teaching is all about relationships. So is discipline. If a student doesn’t have a relationship with the teacher and feels antagonized, adversarial, or unsafe, the student has little incentive to cooperate in class. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to sit down with a teenager who dislikes you and your class and try to break the ice, but over time, when you put down the authority persona and adopt the ally stance instead, the student eventually learns that you’re on the same side and that you want him or her to succeed. Punishment does little to improve behaviors; building a relationship with a student leads to positive change.

Students know when you don’t like them. They sometime even assume you don’t like them, even when you do. Sitting down in a one-to-one with a student gives you a chance to find things you like about that student and discover ways to make positive connections with him or her. 

Misbehavior happens for a reason. Most often, a student is seeking attention—from you or from peers—and doesn’t do it in ways that are in sync with your lesson plans. Frequently, a student walks into your class carrying excess emotional baggage from home, from parents, from peers, and from other teachers. If you’re just one more angry adult adding to the noise in that student’s life, you can’t expect cooperation or engagement. Your tête-à-tête with that student may allow you to find ways to give that student positive attention and to help that student learn to deal with the baggage. 

When you spend time with students individually and empathize with them, they become more receptive to what you want them to know. Life is hard. Growing up is tough. Being a teenager is pretty terrible sometimes, or at least it feels that way for many. Let your students know that you know that; it may surprise some of them who believe no one understands them or knows what they are going through. Resisting your impulse to lecture, just listen to them. You may be the only one who does, and that listening might be a breakthrough. 

Adult brains are more developed than teenagers’ brains. We are also presumably more skilled at regulating our emotions, adapting our behaviors to various situations, navigating social norms, and solving problems. To expect kids to think and reason like adults is extremely short sighted. Students who come from difficult backgrounds may be even less equipped to handle the emotional and behavioral demands of school. The best teachers are the ones who understand this and are willing to teach problem solving, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation to their students. If we teach students what is expected in our classrooms, how to respond in difficult situations, and which techniques can be used to level things out when their emotions get out of whack, we are giving them tools they can use forever. But they won’t learn them when we lecture, issue consequences, and stack punishment on top of punishment. 

So when you’re faced with your own Hortons and your first inclination is to get them as far away from you as possible and make them someone else’s problem, consider a different approach. Transform detentions from punishment to productivity. Take the difficult steps to form a relationship with that student, become an ally rather than an adversary, and teach the problem-solving and social skills to help Horton handle the stressors that life will hurl at him.  

I heard from another former student—not Horton—the other day. He’s an adult now and doing quite well, traveling the world and writing. When he was a high school freshman, I suspect some of his teachers had their doubts because he couldn’t sit still, was prone to blurt things out, asked incessant questions, lacked impulse control, didn’t pick up on social cues, and always seemed to be talking when it was time to be quiet. He was also incredibly bright, though sometimes his behaviors masked that intelligence. He is a student I didn’t let frustrate me. Instead, I did what I could to build a relationship. In his note to me, he wrote, “Having a teacher who could joke with me, but also point out my shortcomings and how to fix them, but also endeavor to understand what I was all about, but also inspire me to grow bigger than that, etc….super valuable.” I’m glad I took the time to know this young person because he’s become an adult who inspires me with what he’s done. 

Giving your students ways to fix their shortcomings and grow bigger than what they are all about right now—that’s the hidden curriculum that may be more important than the content the state tells us we have to teach. If we outsource our discipline, we are leaving those most essential lessons untaught.