Our high school is one of the few remaining in our district that has not implemented some aspect of redesign. As a result, our new principle (who replaced one that was at the school for 7 years) created a position for a coordinating teacher that would work as a liaison and facilitate professional development for this initiative. This is the position that I will be starting in September, and the one I created my inquiry goal on.
The biggest challenge with this type of change is to get teachers to change their current traditional practices in order to engage students in more innovative and creative ways; ones that will lead to greater student success. While there are many ways to approach redesign, the admin team decided to focus on assessment. This is a huge task because of the 30% provincial diploma exams for the core subjects. My problem of practice is teachers focusing on the diploma and teaching to the exam, leaving little room for creativity and innovation because schools and teachers held accountable based on results.
What is disheartening about this reality is that core teachers do little to engage students because they believe the only way to get good results is to focus on summative assessment. They have lost sight of the importance of teaching and learning, and what we should really be doing to help our students succeed. Unfortunately, this often results in teachers pushing students to take the lower stream courses, or even dropping the class all together.
When the opportunity came up to redesign assessment at our school, I jumped on it. Speaking to a retired teacher and a present colleague, we agree that the problem at our school is that teachers have set up kingdoms. They are comfortable and do not try new things because they are sitting in their kingdom, impervious to scrutiny. I believe that we are in the minority feeling that we are putting our students at a disadvantage creating this type of culture. I go back to the quote: “Learning depends on assessment of both product and process to know what is known, what requires additional effort, and what skills are effective” (Paris & Paris 2001)”. Learning is not a product, and should not be treated as such. I hope that with my inquiry goal, and my new position teaching colleagues about the different innovative and creative ways to engage students , I can help change the current data driven culture at our school and contribute to greater student success.
Paris, S. 2. G., & Paris, A. H. (2001). Classroom applications of research on self-regulated learning. Educational psychologist, 36(2), 89-101.