School v’s learning … and more on assessment
Posted by: greg.carroll in Learning and Teaching, opinionSeth Godin has his crap detector turned up high. I like some of the things he says:
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.
For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.
An interesting distinction I reckon.
It is easy to assess the ‘hard’ products that flow from the first list …. but how do you assess “getting it”. As teachers how do we prove we are doing a good job for all the children? Can we really do a good job for them all?
As a conversation in the staffroom today related SOMEONE has to be at the bottom irrespective of how high the overall achievement of the group is. One of the hardest positions to be in is often at the bottom of a high performing group. High achievement seems so unattainable. My own experience of Intermediate was coloured by this …. I hated it.
I have never had too many problems ‘getting it’ at school as a consumer. Proving it was not always as easy. Anyone who knows me will know I have taken the same handwriting course as the stereotypical doctor. I know it takes a new Office person a while to learn to decipher it 
. My teachers have had the same challenge since early primary school. I must have been one of those kids it was difficult to assess …. the content was there if you could decipher it. I had it in my head, why would I need to write it down was my overriding attitude to any sort of written work.
We have quite a few kids like this in our schools. One of the real challenges is ensuring we assess getting-it-ness not simply cognitive hurdle-jumping ability.
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Hurdles are a good analogy… no matter how high they’re set, you still come down to the same level you started at. I really see the problem of ’someone HAS to be at the bottom’ when we consider setting delusional goals of consistently expecting all students to achieve above average results. Average has a meaning.. and it hangs out with the bell curve. You move that curve…. you move everything… you move the middle.. you move the top.. AND you move the bottom. But the bottom’s still there.
I DO think we can set bold goals, and that we can strive to do better than other comparative averages such as National norms, but we need to keep that in check. Above average means just that. It’s ABOVE where we expect most kids to achieve.