Pymgalion (and Caesar!) in the Classroom

My school district uses a computer testing program called the Measured Assessment of Progress, or MAP. It's really a pretty amazing computer application, an online test given three times a year that provides immediate feedback on student learning. The following description comes from the Parent Toolkit on the MAP website:

MAP assessments are used to measure your student's progress or growth in school....MAP assessments...measure your child's growth in mathematics, reading, language usage, and science skills. The scale used to measure your child's progress is called the RIT scale (Rash UnIT). The RIT scale is an equal-interval scale much like feet and inches on a yardstick. It is used to chart your child's academic growth from year to year.

In essence, then, MAP gives teachers very exact information about the ability levels of students and what are appropriate "next lessons" for the student. There wasn't anything like that available for me when I was a classroom teacher eight years ago. Sure, students took standardized state tests and normed national tests, but we didn't get results back for months, often (read "usually") not until the following school year when the student was no longer in that class. So I would have LOVED to have had something like the MAP test to let me know where my students were.

Or so I used to think...

I'm not so sure anymore. What changed my mind? Last week I sat in on a meeting with the current English department at my district's high school. They were meeting with some outside experts about an initiative underway in the department, and the English teachers were sharing their successes, their struggles, and their concerns. And one of the things that I heard mentioned over and over again was the tremendous difficulty it was trying to balance the skills students had coming into class with what state and federal standards say those students should be able to do when they leave a class. One of the teachers said something to the effect of, "When I get my MAP scores back and see that--of the 24 students in my sophomore English class--17 of them are reading at a 4th grade level or lower, I understand that I can't expect them to read at the level they're supposed to read at. So I have to modify my assignments."

I'm not sure what her point was, as I honestly quit listening to her for a moment and started thinking about my own experience as a teacher. And what I thought was this: For each of the 14 years that I taught, I had at least one section of sophomores, and most of the time I had several. And I taught all levels of English II, from the basic kids to the Pre-AP kids.

I actually preferred the basic kids--I felt my talents as a teacher were better suited to them. If nothing else, I was an entertaining teacher, or at least I tried to be, my philosophy always being that students would pay attention if class were fun. So in class we told jokes. We acted out plays. We made movies. We laughed EVERY day. And I was shameless in my efforts to keep student attention. I'd sing. I'd dance. I'd reference whatever pop culture icons were relevant to the kids in the class. I was even known to do the worm across the floor from time to time. And whether my students knew it or not, we learned while we were doing these things. That kind of a teacher is great for students who struggle, students who have been beaten down by our educational system and want nothing more than to be left alone to fail. A high energy teacher who occasionally--okay, often--wanders off task to talk about boogers works for them.

Not so much for the advanced kids. They needed a no nonsense teacher who was going to push, push, push them. That wasn't me, no matter how hard I tried, and at the end of the year I always felt like I had performed a disservice for those advanced kids. I'm sure they learned (The thing about advanced students is you really don't need a good teacher anyway because they will learn regardless of the quality of the teaching), but they'd learned less than they would have from a different teacher.

I'm off task, though (just as often happened in class!). What I'm getting at is that, over the years, I taught A LOT of lower level sophomores, and as much as I wished then that I'd had a test like MAP, I'm glad now that I didn't. Because I didn't know what those kids weren't capable of! I didn't know they were operating at a fourth grade reading level (Okay, I knew it was pretty low, but I don't think I would have guessed it was that low). I didn't know that they couldn't handle more advanced work like Shakespeare, that it was too much for them. And since I didn't know they couldn't do it, I assumed that they could, and so we did it. Sure, we struggled to read JULIUS CAESAR or KING LEAR or AS YOUR LIKE IT, but we read it, and I think it actually was a great teaching tool because--unlike other class novels, which I knew full well some of the students weren't reading for homework--we read these plays aloud in class, and the lower level students, I think, benefited from seeing that everyone in class, even the brightest kids in the class, struggled to understand Shakespeare. Throughout the first act everyone reading sounded like the lowest level reader ("Truly...sir...in respect of...a fine...workman...I am a...cobbler."), but by the third act more and more students were getting the hang of it ("I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives after them...The good is...oft?...interred?...with their bones.") and by the final scene even the struggling reader was catching on and could read "This was the noblest Roman of them all" without much of a struggle.

I'm not writing this to criticize the teachers in the current English department. They're all doing a great job as far as I can tell. I know the demographics of the district has actually changed a tremendous amount in the last few years, that their students are not my students, and I know that I'm not in their classrooms working with their kids. I don't mean to suggest ANYTHING about THEIR classes. I'm not writing about them. I'm writing about me. I'm just writing to say that I'm second guessing the usefulness of formative assessments like MAP. If they're being used to help a teacher understand where his/her students are now so that instruction can be adjusted to correct deficits, that's fine. But I'd hate to think that I might have used them in my classroom to lower the expectations for my class.

(Confused by the blog title? Then you're probably not an educator, as I think every college student studying to be a teacher is required to learn about this piece of educational research.)