What twelve year-olds can teach you when you give them a bunch of tests, Part 2: Pits and gaps
This is part 2 of a 2-part post.
Kids need a climbing rope.
Knowing what to do when you get stuck is just as important as knowing the right answers.
There were students this year who spent entire days in my classroom, because the time allocated for them in their usual class just wasn’t enough. Most of us will empathize with a student who needs an extra hour or so to work through a high-stakes essay question. But by the third hour, and the seventh hour, it gets painful. Are a few of these students trying to get out of class? Sometimes. Have they memorized every curtain, every poster frame in my classroom while they stare off into space and wonder what to do next? Probably. Are there a few who wreak havoc with their neighbors while they alternate between pencil-tapping and cat naps? Ugh. Totally, yes. Was there any learning happening between hour one and hour five? Not usually.
What I noticed about a few dozen of the teenagers who made their home in my classroom to make up standardized tests last spring was that, contrary to the far-away look in their eyes, they really were trying hard. (Coincidentally, on our school’s California Healthy Kids Survey, most of them report that they try to always to their best in school. In turn, I’ve watched their teachers reel in their seats and ask, Are you kidding me? You guys spent the whole class period trying to unblock video games!) They just happened to come to a question they couldn’t answer, and felt paralyzed.
Education researcher James Nottingham has built a tome of resources explaining how to prepare students for what he calls “The Learning Pit”. They need to know what it feels like to not know the answer. But more importantly, they need to know what to do to get themselves out of that “pit”. Similarly, in John Hattie’s Visible Learning Protocol, teachers ask students, “What do you do when you get stuck?” (Handy video example here.) As adults, I’d like to think we grow more comfortable with not knowing everything, and the most well-adjusted of us grow equally comfortable with knowing how to move forward from those “pits”. Teaching kids how to get un-stuck is like throwing them a rope they can use for the rest of their life. And it might make test-taking a little less brutal, too.
Language support classes are not a punishment.
I will always have a bias in favor of the arts. I want more people exposed to more visual and performing arts, in the highest quality and quantity that our tax dollars can buy. As school budgets shrink, however, arts can be luxury only afforded those students who don’t need an academic support class. When I see long term English learners enrolled in language support classes for year after year, our “support” seems like an arbitrary punishment. It takes a proficient score on the California state language exam (ELPAC) to exit language support class and free up their schedules for a more engaging elective.
The students I work with have plenty to say to their friends, and have very few qualms with gabbing their way through instructional minutes. They are just as likely to dole out polite “pleases” and “thank yous”, or mouth off to an adult, as their monolingual peers. These are the students whose teachers look up from their rosters and say, “Her? I’ve had her all year; I thought her English was fine.” Until a student is asked to discuss very specific situations in a language test, it can be difficult to see that they actually are operating around language gaps.
Most of the teenagers at my school have been navigating California public schools for years, and in their daily conversations, they rarely miss a beat. It’s “school words”, however, that have them stumped. When asked to justify an opinion, or summarize an academic presentation, an otherwise chatty kid will awkwardly spurt and stumble their way through choppy sentences. I recognize their technique because it’s something I do when I don’t know a word in Spanish: say about six basic words to describe the one more precise word I haven’t learned yet. And maybe point or act it out. I also recognize the apologetic grin and the way they shake their head after their roundabout way of describing something, because it’s the same move I make when I can only get part of my point across in Spanish, my beloved but obviously-second language.
To paraphrase Sir Ken Robinson, an education that goes beyond teaching young people only from the neck up is more crucial than ever. (And it’s just more fun. More of that, please.) Arts classes are not mutually exclusive of language support, but master schedules will often allow for only one or the other. What I learned from last year’s round of language assessments is that our students really do have gaps- the challenge is that their gaps are incredibly varied in depth and content area. How do we quickly identify where those gaps are and get students to flourish right out of them? While I’m at it, the greater challenge is figuring out how to add to our students’ storehouse of words and at the same time celebrate the fact that, Hello? They speak (at least) two languages! That’s amazing!
Challenges aside, I did not realize until spending twelve minutes at a time (the task was repetitive- we got really good at our timing) with lots and lots of bilingual middle schoolers that my teacher assumptions were wrong. By casual observation, I couldn’t catch what a standardized test set out to measure- there really were places they were “stuck” with their English. Support classes are not a punishment, they are actually intended to fulfill a need. We need to do right by those students, so they can get out there and write some killer proposals for their next art project.
If you find standardized tests a bore, don’t worry- we all do. But if you look closely, there’s a lot to learn from the young humans who muscle through them every year.
Re-posted with love and permission from The Napa Wife.
