Eliminate the Need for Surveillance: Lessons from a Middle School in Oakland
By Anthony Cody.
We have been seeing the fallout from heavy handed monitoring and enforcement that is coming to us with the new Common Core tests. As I pointed out Sunday, this sort of security is made necessary when you have created a system where heavy consequences are attached to success on these tests. Everyone involved – from top administrator down to kindergartener, is affected by these consequences, so the high stakes systems must be designed to include the capacity to monitor everyone involved. And since the corporations that publish the tests are distant, they seek to deputize administrators and teachers in their surveillance and enforcement system.
But there are ways to design an educational system that is resistant to cheating. It will require some major shifts in our thinking, but we can do that. All it takes is a bit of imagination, and some investment of trust in our teachers and students.
Just as high stakes testing makes surveillance and enforcement necessary, its replacement with a different approach to accountability will allow us to escape such onerous systems.
As a sort of model, I would like to describe one of the most effective classroom interventions I have ever seen. It was carried out by two teachers, Gabe Jenkins and Fay Pisciotta, who taught science at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, California, about eight years ago.
Jenkins and Pisciotta were struggling with a problem at their school. They had some students who were very well prepared and motivated, and others who were not as prepared academically. Their instruction tended to target the middle, with the result being that the more capable students were not challenged, and the less prepared students were not really inspired either. The two of them happened to attend a workshop led by Dr. Kathie Nunley, focused on a teaching strategy called Layered Curriculum (see here for more information.)
The basic idea of Layered Curriculum is that you give all students a set of “bronze level” assignments to choose from. There might be five or six options, and the students must choose to do three of them. These might include taking notes from the chapter in the text, or from a lecture. They might choose to create a poster, or write a little play acting out the important concepts. As a result of completing these three Eliminate the Need for Surveillance: Lessons from a Middle School in Oakland - Living in Dialogue:
