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Meghan Cureton

The Case Against Grades (##) - Alfie Kohn - 2 views

  • Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades.  In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.
  • As I’ve reported elsewhere (Kohn, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c), when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust conclusions:
  • Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
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  • Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.
  • Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. 
  • For example, a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of cheating (Anderman and Murdock, 2007), grades (whether or not accompanied by comments) promote a fear of failure even in high-achieving students (Pulfrey et al., 2011), and the elimination of grades (in favor of a pass/fail system) produces substantial benefits with no apparent disadvantages in medical school (White and Fantone, 2010).
  • Extrinsic motivation, which includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn 1999a). 
  • Achievement:  Two educational psychologists pointed out that “an overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence” (Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7). 
  • There is certainly value in assessing the quality of learning and teaching, but that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary, or even possible, to measure those things — that is, to turn them into numbers.  Indeed, “measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning” (McNeil, 1986, p. xviii)
  • It’s not enough to replace letters or numbers with labels (“exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” and so on).  If you’re sorting students into four or five piles, you’re still grading them.  Rubrics typically include numbers as well as labels, which is only one of several reasons they merit our skepticism (Wilson, 2006; Kohn, 2006).
  • Portfolios, for example, can be constructive if they replace grades rather than being used to yield them.  They offer a way to thoughtfully gather a variety of meaningful examples of learning for the students to review.  But what’s the point, “if instruction is dominated by worksheets so that every portfolio looks the same”? (Neill et al. 1995, p. 4).
  • Once we’re compelled to focus only on what can be reduced to numbers, such as how many grammatical errors are present in a composition or how many mathematical algorithms have been committed to memory, thinking has been severely compromised.  And that is exactly what happens when we try to fit learning into a four- or five- or (heaven help us) 100-point scale.
  • It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line.  There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006).  In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
  • It’s not enough to add narrative reports.  “When comments and grades coexist, the comments are written to justify the grade” (Wilson, 2009, p. 60).  Teachers report that students, for their part, often just turn to the grade and ignore the comment, but “when there’s only a comment, they read it,”
  • It’s not enough to use “standards-based” grading.
  • Sometimes it’s only after grading has ended that we realize just how harmful it’s been.
  • To address one common fear, the graduates of grade-free high schools are indeed accepted by selective private colleges and large public universities — on the basis of narrative reports and detailed descriptions of the curriculum (as well as recommendations, essays, and interviews), which collectively offer a fuller picture of the applicant than does a grade-point average.  Moreover, these schools point out that their students are often more motivated and proficient learners, thus better prepared for college, than their counterparts at traditional schools who have been preoccupied with grades.
  • Even when administrators aren’t ready to abandon traditional report cards, individual teachers can help to rescue learning in their own classrooms with a two-pronged strategy to “neuter grades,” as one teacher described it.  First, they can stop putting letter or number grades on individual assignments and instead offer only qualitative feedback.
  • Second, although teachers may be required to submit a final grade, there’s no requirement for them to decide unilaterally what that grade will be.  Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting students to grade themselves.
  • Without grades, “I think my relationships with students are better,” Drier says.  “Their writing improves more quickly and the things they learn stay with them longer.
  • Drier’s final grades are based on students’ written self-assessments, which, in turn, are based on their review of items in their portfolios. 
  • A key element of authentic assessment for these and other teachers is the opportunity for students to help design the assessment and reflect on its purposes — individually and as a class. 
  • Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant.  Nor are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking extended dictation could be described that way.  Still, it takes courage to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be valuable.  We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them once and for all.
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    HT @tedwards
Nicole Martin

The Power of Hidden Teams - 0 views

  • the most powerful factor was simply whether or not respondents reported doing most of their work on a team. Those who did were more than twice as likely to be fully engaged as those who said they did most of their work alone. The local, ground-level experience of work — the people they worked with and their interactions with them — trumped everything else.
  • The team is the reality of your experience at work.
  • The quality of this team experience is the quality of your work experience.
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  • by finally being able to see dynamic, ephemeral, local teams, we would better fight the real war for talent: not just attracting the best people, but getting from them the best that they, uniquely, have to offer.
  • the biggest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams: trust in the team leader.
  • we discovered that strong agreement with two statements from our survey, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me” and “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work,” corresponds with a high level of trust in the team leader. This suggests that despite the fluidity of today’s working world, the best team leaders can help each team member feel both understood and focused. Know me for my best, and then focus my work around that: These are the fundamental needs of every team member, and the foundation of any high-performing team.
  • frequent attention to the work of each team member is what we might call the anchor ritual of team leadership. These organizations have all instituted a simple weekly conversation between team leaders and each of their team members and have been able to measure increases in engagement as a function of the frequency of these check-ins.
  • The fundamental lesson of the research is that work happens on teams, whether they are overlapping, dynamic, spontaneous or designed, long-lived or short-lived. The real world of work is messy. We must push into the richness of real teams doing real work, and we must ask new questions: Do large successful teams have the same habits and rhythms as small successful teams? In how many ways do teams start? Do the best ways for team members to share information vary according to the type of team they’re on? Are some ways demonstrably better than others, in terms of their impact on team engagement? Do virtual teams adopt a cadence different from that of colocated teams?
  • frequency of conversations is critical
  • The research reveals that for people to be engaged, the span of control must allow each team leader to check-in, one on one, with each team member every week of the year. Any relayering, delayering, or org redesign that prevents such frequent attention will ultimately lead to disengagement, burnout, and turnover.
  • to engage your people, you should avoid mandating that they show up at the office every day, and also that all the time you spend helping your remote workers join, get to know the other members of, and feel supported by their teams will pay off in the form of more-engaged workers. Engagement is about who you work with, not where.
  • Employees should have more control over their work and a greater chance to do work they love. They should have the best of both worlds: one predictable, stable role with a “home team” (more often than not, the static team depicted on the org chart) and one “side hustle” — a series of opportunities to join dynamic teams inside the same organization. Their greatest value to any of these teams may well be the particular, wonderful, and weird set of strengths they possess.
  • Thus we should select, train, reward, and promote leaders not on the basis of an abstract list of generic leadership competencies but, rather, on their appetite for team leadership and their demonstrable track record as team leaders.
  • What are your priorities this week, and How can I help?
  • For team leaders, the emphasis needs to shift from the generic to the specific. We need to be clear that the job of a team leader is simply, and challengingly, this: to create, day in and day out, an experience on the team that allows each person to offer his or her unique best, and then to meld those contributions into something no individual could do alone. We need to anchor this job in rituals and measures, all designed to help magnify what the best teams do: the weekly check-in; frequent discussion with each person and with the team as a whole about where people can employ their strengths; and use of the eight items in our methodology to gauge progress, not for the purpose of accountability but, rather, for illumination and course correction.
  • nd here, finally, we see the core purpose of teams: They are the best method we humans have ever devised to make each person’s uniqueness useful. We know that the frequent use of strengths leads to high performance, and we know that strengths vary from person to person. High-functioning teams are essential to a high-functioning organization because they create more opportunities for each person to use his or her strengths by enabling the tasks at hand to be divided according to the strengths on offer. Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems. Ultimately, then, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies, and that only they can do it.
  • The eight statements (taken verbatim from the ADPRI study) capture the emotional and attitudinal precursors to engagement and the productive employee behaviors that flow as a result. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. My teammates have my back. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. I have great confidence in my company’s future. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
Meghan Cureton

Learning and the Brain Stories, #2 - Learning and the Brain blogLearning and the Brain ... - 1 views

  • the role of education is to help our children become who they are meant to be instead of  working towards an average which testing promotes.
  • We take this narrowed, biased model of success and try to replicate it in schools; yet these models further reduce diversity of thought, experience and creativity among our students.
  • If we are to support our children to become creative problem-solvers, then we need to move away from pursuing averages that are based on a single prescribed profile for all learners.
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  • By creating norms and averages we are drawn to comparison and rank–rather than to our children’s curiosities about what they want to learn, become or aspire to be.
  • If praise is tied to the child’s perception of success, and success is tied to narrow definitions of achievement, then children work towards that common standard against which Zhao cautioned us. If they are less likely to take risks then they will seek a single right answer rather than embrace both creativity and curiosity. The standardized test will always be the measure of success.
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    HT @kkelly
T.J. Edwards

Redmond High School's Build-It-Yourself Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Bullock and his kitchen-table colleagues wanted to build a program that was loose enough to encourage each student to work in their own way to best suit their own learning. This means that students have great liberty to choose the classes they want, even to show up at class or not, to find a groove of learning they’re comfortable with, and to have their success be measured in terms of proficiency or mastery for the content and skills.
  • weekly podcasts
  • not attending class can have consequences.
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  • There are also safety nets built into the system, including January and June terms, which offer a chance to make up uncompleted work, but also offer the opportunity to pursue some of the many electives the school offers. These range from wilderness preparedness and “remote first aid,” to the science of breadmaking.
  • Teachers at RPA have a tremendous amount of flexibility to design their courses. For example, an ex-policeman teaches history through the lens of his passion, which is the evolution of mobs and gangs in the U.S.; his class is called “mobology.”
  • I commented that this kind of teaching sounded like it involved more individual attention than could be done in traditional public schools. He replied, with a small chuckle, if it would be possible to say it took about 10,000 percent more individual attention.
Bo Adams

Understand How Badges Affect College Admissions - - 0 views

  • Where badging might most upend traditions, however, is in kindergarten through 12th grades, particularly in how students build portfolios for themselves and use those portfolios to apply to college.
  • A world in which everything a student does, whether inside or outside of school, can be measured and categorized by a digital badge would – with a common set of standards and if viewed as legitimate by colleges and universities – greatly change the college admissions process, as well as how students think about learning.
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    Understand How Badges Affect College Admissions - @ChipHouston1976 @MeghanCureton @ErinMVPS @boadams1 @AmyMWilkes https://t.co/6Twl5ILsaU HT Pam Ambler
Jim Tiffin Jr

Go play! It's the key to developing executive function - Hanna Perkins Center for Child... - 0 views

  • “executive function,” the ability to self-regulate, the measurement of which turns out to be a better indicator of success in school than the results of an IQ test. Kids with good self-regulation skills are better able to control their emotions, resist impulsive behavior, and become self-disciplined and self-controlled.
  • how do we reconcile today’s anxious parents and the highly structured environment with our children’s need for unstructured, self-regulated play?
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Key part of this highlight: unstructured and self-regulated
  • The primary requirement for unsupervised play is uninterrupted stretches of time
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  • Even the youngest children are quite capable of entertaining, even educating, themselves.
  • encourage complex imaginative play by offering simple props and play ideas, but then withdraw so the children can plan their own scenarios and act them out.
  • your child is spending precious time at the activity that children need most and love best: playing independently and imaginatively
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    Though this post is written for parents, there are actions and ideas here that teachers can act upon.  The importance of play and its benefits are becoming more and more apparent - plus research is supporting it. Note to self: More research on executive function, and ways of building it in schools, needs to be done. HT: Jackie Gerstein
Jim Tiffin Jr

Let 'Em Out! The Many Benefits of Outdoor Play In Kindergarten | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • With no explicit math or literacy taught until first grade, the Swiss have no set goals for kindergartners beyond a few measurements, like using scissors and writing one’s own name. They instead have chosen to focus on the social interaction and emotional well-being found in free play.
  • With many parents and educators overwhelmed by the amount of academics required for kindergartners — and the testing requirements at that age  — it’s no surprise that the forest kindergarten, and the passion for bringing more free play to young children during the school day, is catching on stateside.
  • “So much of what is going on and the kind of play they do, symbolic play, is really pre-reading,” Molomot said. “It’s a very important foundation for reading.
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  • Donnery notices that the gross motor skills of many of her kindergartners are underdeveloped, noting that usually means that fine motor skills are also lacking. “Developing those gross motor skills is just critical, can impact so much of later learning,” she said.
  • Scenes of rosy-faced children building forts in the snow are presented in sharp contrast to the academic (and mostly indoor) kindergarten in New Haven, Connecticut, where a normal day is packed full of orderly activities: morning meeting, readers’ workshop, writers’ workshop, a special activity (like art, gym, and music), lunch and recess, storytime, “choice” (a fancy word for play), math centers, then closing meeting.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      I would like to see this movie.
  • You’d be surprised at the importance of play.
  • lacking in the attention needed to learn, with more than 10 percent of the school population diagnosed with some kind of attention disorder.
  • occupational therapist Angela Hanscom opined in the Washington Post that there’s good reason our kids are so fidgety: more and more students come to class without having enough core strength and balance to hold their bodies still long enough to learn.
  • “In order for children to learn, they need to be able to pay attention. In order to pay attention, we need to let them move.”
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      But this has to be more than just a wiggle stool or yoga ball... HMW get greater movement into Kindergarten? (and it need not just be in the Kindergarten classroom)
  • A recent study by psychologists at the University of Colorado shows an even stronger reason for free play: children who experienced more undirected free play showed signs of stronger executive function, a strong predictor of success in school. “The more time that children spent in less-structured activities,” wrote researchers, “the better their self-directed executive functioning.”
  • Reading and recess are important enough that we need to do both.
  • While this kind of adult-led movement is a far cry from the nearly unstructured free play of a forest kindergarten, it does serve the school’s purpose of high academic standards for their kindergartners, in hopes this prepares them for future academic success.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Note that it says "hope"...
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    Article contrasting two different approaches to Kindergarten - one outdoor-based and one indoor-based. Full of links to the research regarding the claims made in the article. Additionally, more language around executive function, and its importance for students, is used.
T.J. Edwards

Competency based learning key characteristic: Outcomes-based - Blackboard Blog - 0 views

  • The old concepts of quizzes, mid-term exams and final exams change from methods of judgment to an assessment system designed to help learners construct knowledge through a learn-practice-assess pathway.
  • Achieve short-term and long-term academic performance improvements focused on outcomes rather than inputs
  • Student learning outcomes are generally at the same level of granularity as competencies, and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. A competency is a specific skill, knowledge, or ability that is both observable and measurable
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  • Institutional outcomes
  • Program outcomes
  • Student learning outcomes
  • For example, a team project that requires analyzing the business impacts of population shifts demonstrates realistic problem solving, and the assessment could even be embedded in a work context. This type of assessment requires more thorough demonstration of competencies than an objective assessment, which is typically delivered as a test with pre-determined right and wrong answers. Authentic assessment also provides learner-centric benefits such as collaboration with peers and genuinely valuable evidence of learning that can be used in a professional profile.
  • For example, an assessment could be aligned to competencies, occupational skills, program outcomes, and accreditation standards. The same assessment can award a badge for mastery achievement, show students the occupational skills they’ve demonstrated, and also roll up into evidence collection for accreditation and program improvement purposes
  • can optionally be shown to students
  • Consistent use of rubrics enables learner choice, since learners could be working on different assessments to master the same competencies
  • And when competency based education programs differentiate instructional roles, such that faculty subject matter experts might not be evaluating assessments, specialized assessors can all apply the same definitions of competencies by using the same rubrics.
Meghan Cureton

Creating an Ecology of Wonder | Edutopia - 0 views

  • I believe that our most precious natural resources are imagination and wonder
  • Wonder leaves us with a sense of fascination about mysteries yet unsolved or questions yet unanswered.
  • Art reveals patterns and connections that would otherwise remain unnoticed.
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  • In a learning ecology that focuses on wonder, an artful approach can be introduced in any subject area
  • Create Assessments That Reward Good Questions, Not Just Good Answers
  • Develop Different Ways for Measuring Success
Meghan Cureton

A More Complete Picture of Student Learning | Edutopia - 0 views

  • I’m really excited to see that educators are clear about the use of formative and summative assessment.
  • At the same time, by naming assessments, we may be falling into a trap of being too rigid.
  • Our current assessments are geared toward reporting on mastery—often what the grade measures—rather than learning. But we could create assessments that value the learning along the way. Such a system would record not just quizzes, tests, written work, and presentations, but also exit tickets, and even conversations between student and teacher.
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  • Instead of being rigid, we should be able to change the purpose and use of an assessment in order to meet the needs of our students.
  • It’s important to remember that assessments and their purpose can change.
  • student learning as a photo album or a body of evidence rather than as one or the other of two things, either formative or summative.
  • Assessment should be more like a photo album, capturing many moments of learning.
  • A photo album is celebratory and powerful, and assessment should be the same.
  • As the teachers I work with plan units, I encourage them to not be tied down to rigid structures of assessment.
  • Consider the idea of a body of evidence. When we focus on a body of evidence, we don’t have to limit ourselves to a set number of assessments.
  • So students might have different numbers of assessments.
  • Here are some questions to reflect upon as we consider this approach to assessment:How can students generate their own assessment tasks? Where can I be flexible in using assessments to report on student learning? Can I use a variety of types of assessment to create an album of student learning? Can I rely on a body of evidence rather than a set number of assessments? How can I report on the most current data of my students? How should I communicate this approach to parents and students?
Bo Adams

How Good Is Good Enough? - Educational Leadership - 0 views

  • Mastery is effective transfer of learning in authentic and worthy performance. Students have mastered a subject when they are fluent, even creative, in using their knowledge, skills, and understanding in key performance challenges and contexts at the heart of that subject, as measured against valid and high standards
  • Wooden described his overall method like this: "I tried to teach according to the whole–part method. I would show them the whole thing to begin with. Then I'm going to break it down into the parts and work on the individual parts and then eventually bring them together"
  • The constant process of bringing the parts back together in complex performance is what's routinely missing from many so-called mastery learning programs.
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  • Regardless of what particular solution we come up with for linking local grades to wider-world standards, this must be our motto: No surprises; complete transparency as to where the student stands in terms of performance.
  • This is the crux of the matter: how to set school-level standards (and give grades, scores, or judgments in relation to them) in terms of valid external standards. If local tests are less rigorous than state and national tests, and if teachers' scoring and grading of student work reflect only local norms and not wider-world standards, then the school is not standards-based.
T.J. Edwards

What IS the difference between competencies and standards? | reDesign - 2 views

  • Competencies, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the application of skills, knowledge and dispositions rather than content knowledge.
  • Competency-based models approach content as the backdrop, while putting essential skills and dispositions front and center. In this way, content serves as the context for practicing and demonstrating “transferable” competencies that can be applied in different contexts.
  • In competency-based models, the entire system must change. Students advance upon mastery  when they are ready, not when an arbitrary academic calendar suggests that they should be.
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  • Optimally, competencies are broad enough that student pathways and demonstrations of proficiency can be vastly different, organized to encourage and nurture student passions and questions.
  • Competencies sit above standards in terms of grain size.
  • competencies tend to encompass an interrelated set of skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and/or capacities.
  • competencies are often constructed as groupings of related skills or attributes that are purposefully designed to be explicit, measurable, transferable, and empowering to students
  • Competencies define skills that are practiced and developed continuously. They are not “one and done,” like many standards, which are course-based and attached to specific grade levels or bands.
  • in truly competency-based systems, PLDs are not attached to specific grade levels
  • we believe strongly that we must guard against tying PLDs to age-based grades or cohorts.
  • PLDs are guideposts to mastery
  • When learning outcomes are defined in terms of the application of skills or the synthesis and creation of new knowledge, we’re then talking about a much more sophisticated assessment type
  • competence is about successful application of skills and knowledge to achieve a particular purpose, not simply to show basic levels of understanding
  • In a true competency-based system, students can’t fail. Instead, students receive concrete and specific feedback on their work, and are provided with opportunities for additional practice and support in order to develop and demonstrate growth in their competencies.
  • Mastery-based grading and promotion policies are radically different in competency-based systems because promotion is based on mastery of specific skills, not on completion of courses made up of arbitrary and highly varied bundles of content, skills, and concepts.
  • As competency-based education gains ground in formal K-12 schooling, there is a very real chance that the movement could lose the “spirit” of its intent and become yet another, albeit more refined, form of standards-based learning
  • In competency-based models, performance level descriptors (PLDs) clarify the developmental journey from novice-to-expert or to "mastery."
  • Quite differently, competency-based models reach back centuries, with early apprenticeship learning that created pathways for mastery and gainful employment. Think: Medieval craft guilds, masonry, baking, carpentry, shoemaking.
Meghan Cureton

Why I Don't Grade | Jesse Stommel - 2 views

  • grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education.
  • Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another.
  • Certainly, metacognition, and the ability to self-assess, must be developed, but I see it as one of the most important skills we can teach in any educational environment.
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  • You should consider this course a “busy-work-free zone.” If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions.
  • I find it strange that teachers and institutions would pre-determine outcomes before students even arrive upon the scene.
  • As educators, we have helped build (or are complicit in) a system that creates a great deal of pressure around grades. We shouldn't blame (or worse, degrade) students for the failures of that system.
  • Authentic feedback (and evaluation) means honoring subjectivity and requires that we show up as our full selves, both teachers and learners, to the work of education. Grades can't be “normed” if we recognize the complexity of learners and learning contexts. Bias can't be accounted for unless we acknowledge it.
  • Because I put myself outside of the grading loop, I can focus all my efforts on feedback and encouragement — on teaching, not grading.” Which leads me to wonder whether “graded participation” is actually an oxymoron. We can't participate authentically, can't dialogue, without first disrupting the power dynamics of grading.
  • “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself.”
  • “There is an extreme mismatch between what we value and how we count.”
  • a mixture of things assessed and a mixture of kinds of assessment, because the work of being a doctor (or engineer, sociologist, teacher, etc.) is sufficiently complex that any one system of measurement or indicator of supposed mastery will necessarily fail.
  • “When the how’s of assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the shadows.” Grades are not something we should have ever allowed to be naturalized. Assessment should be, by its nature, an open question.
Bo Adams

Educational Leadership:The Constructivist Classroom:The Courage to Be Constructivist - 1 views

  • The search for understanding motivates students to learn. When students want to know more about an idea, a topic, or an entire discipline, they put more cognitive energy into classroom investigations and discussions and study more on their own.
  • First, constructivist teachers seek and value students' points of view. Knowing what students think about concepts helps teachers formulate classroom lessons and differentiate instruction on the basis of students' needs and interests
  • Second, constructivist teachers structure lessons to challenge students' suppositions. All students, whether they are 6 or 16 or 60, come to the classroom with life experiences that shape their views about how their worlds work. When educators permit students to construct knowledge that challenges their current suppositions, learning occurs. Only through asking students what they think they know and why they think they know it are we and they able to confront their suppositions
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  • Third, constructivist teachers recognize that students must attach relevance to the curriculum. As students see relevance in their daily activities, their interest in learning grows.
  • Fourth, constructivist teachers structure lessons around big ideas, not small bits of information. Exposing students to wholes first helps them determine the relevant parts as they refine their understandings of the wholes.
  • Finally, constructivist teachers assess student learning in the context of daily classroom investigations, not as separate events. Students demonstrate their knowledge every day in a variety of ways. Defining understanding as only that which is capable of being measured by paper-and-pencil assessments administered under strict security perpetuates false and counterproductive myths about academia, intelligence, creativity, accountability, and knowledge.
  • Organizing a constructivist classroom is difficult work for the teacher and requires the rigorous intellectual commitment and perseverance of students. Constructivist teachers recognize that students bring their prior experiences with them to each school activity and that it is crucial to connect lessons to their students' experiential repertoires. Initial relevance and interest are largely a function of the learner's experiences, not of the teacher's planning. Therefore, it is educationally counterproductive to ignore students' suppositions and points of view.
  • Constructivist classrooms demand far more from teachers and students than lockstep obeisance to prepackaged lessons.
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