The following piece is a response from Scott Filkins to an article in TIME magazine.
At the end of her article 鈥�,鈥� Haley Sweetland Edwards offers the possibility that 鈥渋t鈥檚 time to think outside the margins鈥� of using now ubiquitous large-scale standardized assessment to try to understand how well our students are learning. 鈥淧erhaps the origami-frog unit in Tosiello鈥檚 third-grade class,鈥� she suggests, 鈥渙ffers all the insight we need.鈥�
Maybe not ALL the insight we need, but it鈥檚 a significant start. 聽Indeed, it is time to think outside the margins; continuing to focus the debate around how to ensure equitable education through standardized testing is like trying to drive a car by looking only at the fuel gauge. 聽Such information may be important (or it may not be, depending on what you鈥檙e trying to do), but over-relying on one piece of data is just as useless in a classroom.
The portrait of Tosiello鈥檚 prac tice, portraying a teacher involved in authentic assessment motivated by his inquiry into students鈥� learning in context (not by externally mandated accountability structures) is precisely the type of work that educational policymakers and administrators should seek out and support.
Working as Mr. Tosiello is, taking what some call a , requires a much more complicated view toward students, their performance, and their development. 聽The powers of observation, knowledge of content and how students learn it, and time to consider how observation should shape instruction are not easy to come by–a significant reason why we鈥檝e become so addicted to the seeming efficiency of testing in the first place.
But apparent efficiency and actual effectiveness are worlds apart, in much the same way the information a teacher learns from a bubbled-in answer sheet is nothing like what a teacher learns from actively seeking out the complex information he or she needs to adjust instruction to students鈥� current understanding or performance. 聽聽聽