An article by the Vice Chancellor of Massey University, and published in the Herald on September 25, has provided the opportunity to reflect on a number of things. The article is worth a read, though I'll pick the key points and put them below for further reflection. the majority of these young people did not do well at school. In most cases they left early disillusioned and all too often with the feeling that they were failures. As Sir Richard points out, they are far from being failures. The reference is to Sir Richard Taylor from WETA Workshop staying that many of their employees are creative, articulate, intelligent ... but did not go too well in the traditional classroom environment. We shouldn't be surprised at that - Sir Ken Robinson tells the delightful story of the music teacher who told 50% of the Beatles that they were no good at music. And the often dragged out story of Bill gates and Steve Jobs as being high school drop outs. But then, so were Mark Zuckerberg, James Cameron, Tom Hanks, Frank Lloyd Wright plus many others. The point, as Vice Chancellor Maharey says, is that the "one size fits all" approach doesn't work for everyone. Unless of course your predetermined goal is to rank according to performance on a limited range of testing techniques. And this is the issue. The limited range of testing techniques is, well, limited. In a time and place where teamwork is most valued, we assess at the "high stakes" end of the schooling system with rigidly individual assessment regimes. What we need to be talking about is the kind of learning that we think is appropriate before we get to assessment. Good learning begins with the curriculum. Over recent weeks I have had four guest speakers talk with one of my classes of Year 11 students. They are an IT class studying the NCEA Digital Technologies curriculum (more or less). All of the speakers were at pains to explain that they all worked as part of a much wider team of people and they planned and executed their plans together with everyone else knowing what was being done by whom and by when, and that any individual can get help from anyone else to solve any problem. But in the environment that is this particular assessment regime, student collaboration is forbidden. Yet ... and go figure this one... a student can use the web to "self solve" a problem. So - let's just expand on this a little. Let's assume that I have posted a video on my Youtube channel showing how to use a particular bit of code to solve a problem. Let's assume that some other students in the class have done the same. The student in the class who is struggling with a concept can use these resources quite happily - but they can't ask the person sitting next to them in the room for the same help ... This is simply a case where curriculum and assessment fail to keep pace with what technology affords. And it is a fair bet that any system of assessment that is rooted in tradition will suffer the same issues. The fact, of course, that universities (like the one Maharey is VC of) lay down entry requirements to many of their undergraduate courses means that some form of ranking or hierarchy is perpetuated. This is a world that will belong to flexible, innovative creative life-long learners; people who will judged not on what they know but on what they can do with what they know. So, how would you feel if you had just told John Lennon and George Harrison that they had no musical talent? What about if you were the head of school that saw the likes of Harrison Ford, Lady Gaga, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs drop out to do something else because what you were offering wasn't for them. Maybe Maharey is on the right track with this comment .. For my money, the kind of assessment system that will assist with these outcomes would be a 'learning record' that stays with a student throughout their life - something that has been talked about in New Zealand and elsewhere in the world. I wonder what that might look like and where it would be housed. And who would have access to it? Is it like the A4 binders my kids have at their primary school each year? Is it like the "learning log" that our Junior School students carry with them? Is it like an e-portfolio?
I'm not advocating the abolition of testing as we know it, but I am certainly of the view that it is not the answer to "what is the best way to show student learning?" And ultimately our current desire to assess student knowledge in the manner we do is a major part of the answer to the title of this post ... "Whats up, Doc?"
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