Texas is gifted with some superintendents who are visionaries. They know that what the feds and the legislature now mandate is not good education. They want something better to prepare students to live in the world. They were leaders in the pushback against high-stakes testing in Texas. And they continue to write their vision for the future.
Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News is live-tweeting their conference this year, and I thought you would enjoy reading his latest report. One of the speakers he enjoyed most was George Couros from Canada, who believes that students should be able to use their smartphones and computers during exams. The line of the day: “If I can look up the answers to the questions on your test on Google, your questions suck.”
Another speaker talked about a program with no grades. It reminded me that when I attended my college reunion, I learned about courses where students are not graded, which encourage them to take risks, to explore their interests without fear of ruining their grade point average. I thought about it and wished I had had that opportunity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well golly, Diane, whoever would have thought that you and Alfie Kohn could be friends? 😉
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I am not certain that a “results only” philosophy and “mastery-based” program goes with the idea of nurturing creativity and imagination, even if the teacher and student conference with “data” and reach some sort of joint decision on whether mastery has been achieved. That sounds like a version of programmed instruction with a high degree of specificity about the intended outcomes and with criteria for mastery established by others.
I will grant that skills and some forms of mastery can fuel imagination and creativity, but it is also true that habits of thought and mind can be so instilled toward mastery that they become a real problem, especially if the aim is to cultivate imagination and some thinking out of the box. This usually means that students are asked to question or give up what they’ve have learned, rearrange their mindings, move out of their comfort zone, try some experiments, wander, muddle, fail to get closure as in “mastery.”
The idea of “mastery” is certainly a big problem when you are teaching in the visual arts where almost everyone has preconceptions about talent, training, what art should look like, where you can find it, and so on. Even preschoolers have picked up ideas that can be counterproductive for further learning.
There are thousands of “tricks of the trade” to address creative thinking and imagination, not only on behalf of teaching and learning in the arts but almost every subject. The problem in formal education in schools is usually that many of these tricks lose their magic because they must to be so closely monitored for outcomes, often same-day outcomes, and many are constrained by perceived risks, matters of feasibility, classroom facilities, schedules, and so on.
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yes yes yes
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“If I can look up the answers to the questions on your test on Google, your questions suck.”
I would add that the test also sucks if one is not allowed to look up information on Google when formulating one’s answers.
Imagine a contemporary Algebra test requiring the use of a slide rule or an abacus, or imagine one requiring that the calculations be done in Roman numerals. Imagine a contemporary writing test requiring the use of a stylus and a clay tablet. Tests that do not allow one to make use of electronic mental prostheses are irredeemably backward–they cannot test what people are actually, now, capable of. (Are you listening, Pearson, AIR, CTB McGraw-Hill, PAARC, SBAC, College Board, etc.?)
Since before one of the Ptolemys built the Library of Alexandria, scholars have dreamed of having the knowledge of the world immediately accessible at a single location. This was the dream of the Arab, Greek, and Persian encyclopedists; of Diderot; of Twain and Wells, who both wrote stories about a future in which all the knowledge of the world was available “over wires”; of Truman’s science adviser Vannevar Bush, with his Memex (memory index); of Feynman, with his information cube (See his essay “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”). It’s an ancient, beautiful dream–that of the universal library–now, finally, realized. And even better, one has access, now, not only to all that information but also to electronic tools for analysis and synthesis of that information.
I’ve been a writer most of my life, and I’ve spent much of my time wandering in the stacks of libraries, attempting, painfully, slowly to locate specific bits of information: Truman’s middle name was S, so should there be a period after it? Yes, says the Truman Library. Time to search that: 2 seconds. Today, an industrious kid can do in a couple evenings a literature search of the kind that used to take scholars many months. (Go to PLOS and do a search on “effects of vegan diet,” and you’ll see what I mean.)
A person has a certain degree of intelligence. A person with that extension of his or her neural system that we call the World Wide Web CAN HAVE a VASTLY augmented intelligence, if he or she knows how to use the tool.
I recently took a test (on a computer) as a certification requirement. The question I had to answer could not be answered at all properly without reference to research that would have been readily available–at my fingertips–IF I had had access to the Web. But the test was backward, an anachronism, a bad joke.
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If I could go back and do my undergrad again, I’d seriously consider Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Narratives rather than letter grades.
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I’ll consider them maverick when they “just say no” and refuse to implement either the fed,s or the state department’s of ed educational malpractices. Until then they’re still just GAGA adminimals from my point of view.
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