I saw a couple of pictures online that I wanted to share, to follow up on the Standard Core Curriculum post I wrote the other day.
All the assessments students are required to do, this must be how the students feel or at least how the teachers feel the students must be feeling.
However, assessments are important part of decision making processes in education.
How to balance these two?
When we have standards to keep, we need assessments, but tests after tests and just teaching to students to the tests are not the answer. There is so much more to school than what can be tested. As I went through high school and college here, I remember my mother commenting to me on how (compared to those in Japan) the people educated in the US tend to be more creative in their thinking and better able to think critically. I think it's just a small example of what is positive about the US education. Although we may want our students to have certain levels of academic knowledge, we need a balance so that we don't lose sight of those positive aspects of our current education system.
I think tests are necessary and that teaching to the test is unethical. But how do you stop teachers from doing that when their salaries are tied to student performances on these tests?
ReplyDeleteI think one of the saddest failures in a classroom is when students are not allowed to be creative. Creativity is what helps make us individuals. And it makes the teacher's job more exciting instead of reading the same lifeless paper student after student. Like what if our blogs all had to have a default background and we could only write about the opinions of others that were published in an article? No personality whatsoever.