In Defense of Teaching to the Test
I’ve spent practically t
he whole summer vacation planning for next school year. I started by evaluating the standards and goals from last year and revising them based on what worked and what didn’t. Now I am in the process of writing our interim assessments that will measure student progress throughout the year. Because my school calls itself a ‘data driven’ school, this has huge implications for the entire year.
Being a data driven school means that the teaching framework is based off of the model outlined in Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction. Being a preschool teacher doesn’t exempt me from working with data or administering standardized tests–in fact, my pay and job security are directly linked to my student’s standardized test scores. In some ways, this model creates a lot of unnecessary pressure for me as a teacher, and I need to do my best not to pass that pressure onto my students. But on the whole, I think working with data in this way makes me a better teacher. Any good teacher should have an idea of what concepts his/her class is struggling with and which students are ahead or behind in certain areas, but working with data allows me to take this intuition to another level. I can pinpoint trends in test scores to figure out exactly which skills and subskills students are struggling with, how using certain teaching methods might affect student learning, and which students are ready to be pushed to the next level.
Being data driven also means we operate under the following principles/assumptions:
- We spend a lot of time thinking about the most important standards for students to master
- We write/choose the tests that require rigorous mastery of those important standards
- We implement rigorous lesson plans and interim assessments in order to drive students towards our goals.
As a result, the interim assessments I write will have a huge impact in determining what we teach and the rigor to which we teach it.
In some ways I love this focus on data. I know exactly how my students are progressing on each skill at all times. By writing rigorous assessments, I can ensure that ‘teaching to the test’ means that my students are learning to think deeply and articulate their thoughts and opinions. However, I know that this is a controversial issue. Many teachers do not get to choose the tests that are administered to their classes, which means that the skills being tested are not necessarily the skills that are most important. Other teachers think that standardized tests are not rigorous enough and therefore encourage teaching to the lowest common denominator. What do you think?
