As I was reading Devika's post this quotation stood out for me:
"Ultimately, without clear direction, teachers make their own decisions [...]" (Reys and Reys 1998, p. 237)
This quotation that Devika posted reminded me of a discussion we had a while back in this course about what it means to be a professional in the field of education. I remember Indigo pointing out that unlike doctors who ultimately have the same goal of saving a patient's life, the goals of teachers are often dissimilar because educators have different views on what content should be learned and how learning should take place. Part of this may lead to teachers doing amazing things in the classroom and encouraging students to become critical thinkers, while another part of this lack of consistency may lead to teachers acting on a misguided view of what professional judgment means. However, without a clear direction from the Ministry, teachers are truly left on their own to figure out what they should teach, how they should assess but at the same time be able to take responsibility (hence, the accountability piece) if ever a student, a parent, a colleague, or an administrator takes issue with how the teacher is doing his/her job.
My question is, how does this belief (that a teacher should exercise his/her professional judgment in what specific content/topics are taught and how assessments are carried out) align with practices like EQAO? It seems like a much easier and safer path to follow for teachers to "teach to the test" in the case of something like the EQAO if for no other reason than to not have to justify one's professional reasoning skills when, for example, an administrator or a parent asks why another teacher's class spent weeks preparing for the test while this teacher's class carried on with regular lessons not tailored to EQAO. Are there any ways to get around this issue, I wonder? Even if we had more holistically-assessed inquiry tasks as suggested in the Suurtaam (2008) article, would it just bring up more questions about teachers' professional judgment when it comes to assessing a piece of work without a clearly defined marking scheme?
Even if one considered "teaching to the test" as a viable option - it would pose significant problems. While the questions on EQAO are aligned with curriculum expectations, EQAO clearly states that there are many expectations that cannot be addressed in a large-scale assessment and are better assessed by teachers in a classroom. Hence, teaching to the test, at the very least, would mean not teaching all of the Ontario curriculum.
ReplyDeleteChris Suurtamm
Teaching to the test
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Chris. It made me think again about what I meant by teaching to the test. When I wrote that teachers feel safer "teaching to the test," I meant that since there are clear outlines or patterns of the types of questions asked on the EQAO tests, teachers would feel more pressure to cover that material (the pressure coming from, most of the time, the administration). Also, since the previous years' EQAO questions are available for practice then teachers would be able to more easily teach using those questions, more easily covering all of the material they believe will be on the EQAO as well as placating any administrators' or parents' concerns about the preparedness of the students.
I think sacrificing some curriculum content often happens when teachers run out of time. However, when an individual teacher decides to ignore certain curriculum expectations, that teacher is also the one who evaluates the student and so more often than not those topics that were not covered will not appear on any evaluation pieces (i.e. not covering those curriculum expectations does not negatively affect the students' grades). I think in an EQAO year there is definitely more pressure on classroom teachers to use past years' EQAO materials to prepare students for the test...and I think this can lead not only to certain curriculum topics not being covered as extensively as others but also rich inquiry-based tasks being sacrificed to save as much time as possible.