Deborah Meier's education advice to Obama
My guest is renowned educator Deborah Meier, founding principal of Mission Hill School in Boston. She is also a leader of the Forum for Education & Democracy, part of the Rethink Learning Now campaign, a national grass-roots initiative designed to restore the focus of education reform on learning, and the core conditions that best support it. Each month, the campaign is featuring a new issue in K-12 education andproviding things people can read, watch, listen to and do to raise awareness. For May, the topic is performance assessment.
By Deborah Meier
As the Obama administration explores new ways to support a national culture of learning – as opposed to our current national culture of testing – it faces a central dilemma: How to satisfy all of our country’s education stakeholders at once.
By Deborah Meier
As the Obama administration explores new ways to support a national culture of learning – as opposed to our current national culture of testing – it faces a central dilemma: How to satisfy all of our country’s education stakeholders at once.
There are our students, who need timely and instructive feedback that reflects what they really know and are able to do; our parents, who need accurate evidence about their children’s progress; our teachers, who need information that helps them improve the quality of their professional practice and better meet the learning needs of their students; and the general public, which needs to know if schools and teachers are helping children learn how to use their minds well.
Before the conversation progresses any further, I have some unsolicited advice: Don’t expect to satisfy all four needs with the same policy.
For our nation’s students, the evaluative process should be treated less like the part of the driver’s test where we complete a pen-and-paper exam, and more like the part where we actually get in a car and show what we can do on a real road with real traffic and real-time scenarios unfolding all around us.
There’s a term for this sort of approach – performance assessment – and it requires schools to invest in seven interrelated components: active learning; formative and summative documentation; strategies for corrective action; multiple ways for students to express and exhibit learning; graduation-level performance tasks that are aligned with the school’s learning standards; external evaluators of student work; and a focus on professional development. (To learn more about performance assessment, visit http://rethinklearningnow.com/learning.)
For our nation’s parents, we need to afford to all what only the most