In education, trauma has become trivialized because it became sexy. It became sexy because, like sex, trauma sells. You only need to do a quick Google search of “educational trauma books” to see a recent explosion of publications. The problem with many (most?, the significant majority?) of these books is that while they do quote research, they tend to carefully frame it in a one-sided manner, and it is always, in every trauma and education book I have read, divorced from the medical research on trauma.
Or, to put the most possible positive spin on my readings, when the authors do use medical research on trauma to show that children have the tendency for resilience, they spend the rest of the book attempting to undermine the medical research by showing how unresilient children are, not by making a cogent argument, but by pulling on your heartstrings.
Here are some examples of the trivialization of trauma.
Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education by Alex Shevrin Venet
This book is written at the popular level for teachers and is extremely popular with 4.8 stars out of 5 with 180 reviews on Amazon.
“Trauma is a normal response to threat” (p. 13)
This is flat out false. What this does is conflates a stress response with trauma. The two are not on and the same. Trauma is not the norm, even in the most extreme adverse experiences. Take a look at a book that chooses to actually value research like George Bonanno’s The End of Trauma, in it he quotes from research showing that after 9/11, only ~7.5% of Manhattan residents met criteria for PTSD and then after 6 months, almost all no longer met the criteria. Or take a look at soldiers who experienced severe combat situations, only 19% did not show a resilience trajectory. So while stress is a normal response to threat, trauma is not. The aim of destigmatizing trauma is good, lying to do so is bad.
“Rather than blaming and punishing students for their reactions to their circumstances, trauma-informed teaching has an embedded social justice perspective that seeks to disassemble oppressive systems within the school” (Thomas, 2018, p.20; as quoted in Venet, 2018, p.10)
This can sound fine, but look more closely and you can begin to see how this perspective destroys student agency. To make this clear, take a look at other quotes from later in the book that applies the above logic.
“I might interpret a student snapping at me as defiance rather than as an appropriate response of anger or rage at those who have harmed him or failed to see his pain. In most schools this elicits a reprimand or consequence from teachers. When we respond in this way, we’re punishing students for their survival skills. If trauma-affected students are to equitably access a high-quality education, we cannot punish them for an automatic body-brain response that is trying to keep them safe….Seclusion and restraint create an untenable cycle. First, children are triggered by a cue of danger in school. Next, they respond to this danger by going into survival mode, which can sometimes take the form of physical aggression…” (Venet, 2021, p. 36)
In practice, this means poor behavior and physical aggression are unpunishable because it is caused by trauma and it is an automatic brain-body response, the student has no agency over their own behavior. And the rest of the class is not important.
“She never engaged with me except to call me a four-letter word I can’t type here. Needless to say, we didn’t get much academic work done…If I disciplined her, I would have been disciplining her trauma, because the walls she put up were there to keep her safe. Because I actively chose to cultivate unconditional positive regard, however, we were able to develop an authentic relationship.”
To be fair and provide necessary context, this was at a therapeutic school, but this is an absurd position to take. It acts to deny the student responsibility (agency) for her actions and then it promotes teachers to simply accept being cussed out as part of the job and the other students in the class should just buck up and deal with it too.
Finally, I want to end with the most absurd example.
“Marta was caught with marijuana twice. She received a warning and then a one-day suspension because of the school’s automatic and nonnegotiable substance use policy…Then Marta came to school high again. She was suspended for a week because of the automatic and nonnegotiable school policy. The individual teachers and staff who had supported Marta were trauma-informed. The school policy was not…a scared teen girl was told she wasn’t welcome in the school because of the coping strategy she used in the face of overwhelming circumstances…What if Marta’s school had a more flexible substance use policy? What if Jasmine and the rest of the teacher team were able to collaborate with Marta and school administrators to determine a path forward that was both fair and caring? Schools, of course, need to have ways to address substance sue among students. But a trauma-informed environment recognizes that substance use may be one coping strategy that students use to survive. We can’t be in the business of punishing a student for trying to survive.” (Venet, 2021, p. 123-124).
If you think a student is traumatized, just let them bring drugs to school and go to classes high, that’s the “trauma-informed” thing to do.
For an academic book, take a look at Educational Trauma: Examples From the School-to-Prison Pipeline by Lee-Anne Gray
This book trivializes trauma by making it omnipresent.
“Stress and anxiety are not “part of life” for growing children to become functional. Logic is faulty and absent when young people are trained in stress at young ages so they learn to tolerate it as adults” (Gray, 2019, p. 14).
Conveniently, there is no citation for this statement that ignores the research on eustress.
“Restricted movement constitutes a mild trauma that impairs the developing nervous system. This is but one example of the mildest end of the traumas students endure in schools” (Gray, 2019, p. 15).
Gray repeatedly ignores the subjective nature of trauma. This quote, with numerous others like it state that “X” causes trauma. The literature does not support this position, but then, the author is not making a research-based argument, she is making a feels-based argument.
“Homework is an example of Spectral Educational Trauma, and secondarily it causes Ex-Situ Educational Trauma by restricting, controlling, and stressing the free time of students, parents, families, and teachers.”
The author seeks to create different categories of trauma in a way that could legitimately be helpful. But, unfortunately, by casting an excessively wide net for what qualifies as trauma, it obviously becomes trivialized.
In addition to the above, both books promote pedagogical choices that will expand educational inequalities in the vain hope of increasing student agency because the authors lack familiarity with the literature of educational psychology.
The above approaches fall woefully short of what is needed and as far as I can tell, no one has offered teachers a plausible way forward. So, I will step into the unknown and attempt to apply my fledgling knowledge of trauma to my knowledge of educational psychology and realworld classroom experience in the next several posts.
I hope you enjoy the ride.
References
Bonanno, G. A. (2021). The end of trauma: How the new science of resilience is changing how we think about PTSD (1st ed.). New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc.
Gray LA. Educational Trauma: Examples from Testing to the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019
Venet, A. S. (2021). Equity-centered trauma-informed education. W.W. Norton & Company.
What role do ethics and morality play in education?
Ethics and morality play a substantial, unavoidable role in education. The popular idea that there can be a morally neutral education is an urban legend. It simply doesn’t exist. Often, the aims of a “neutral” education more or less favor a continuation of the status quo, a decidedly unneutral situation.
A variety of thinkers from diverse philosophical traditions have come to this conclusion.
Abraham Kuyper, a Christian politician in the Netherlands during the early 1900s said, “How can a teacher nurture and form character,” he asked, “and at the same time be neutral?” After all, “there is no neutral education that is not governed by a spirit of its own. And precisely that spirit of the religiously neutral school militates against every positive faith” (Kuyper, 2019, pp 47-48).
This quote helps show that when we teach and enforce rules, we are not being neutral because we are forming character, we are seeking to change not only their future actions, but their future thought processes. We are instructing students on ethics when we remind them to say please and thank you. We are instructing our students on morals when we discipline them for cheating on an assignment or stealing from another student.
Wayne Au, from the decidedly different worldview of Marxist dialectical materialism said,
“A truth that I’ve felt and understood since my early days as a public school teacher is that there are no neutral classrooms and that there is no neutral knowledge. My students are bombarded daily with commonsense, hegemonic views of education, culture, and politics through social media, the news, each other, and even other professors. In this context, I see my courses as my chance (perhaps my only chance) to introduce them to ideas, concepts, and realities that might contradict their commonsense understandings of the world generally and, hopefully, develop some critical consciousness about the politics of education policy and practice specifically” (Au, 2017, Location No. 3724-3728).
This quote shows that even teaching content involves ethics. What we choose to teach and what we choose to leave out has ethical components. In addition, our framing of what we teach matters. I think this is most apparent in English and history classes when they engage in racism. However, it also shows itself in my science classes. How do I teach and frame climate change? How do I teach and frame my teaching on the coronavirus?
Some like to say, “all teaching is political”, but I think this misses the mark a bit because politics are downstream from worldview, from morals. To improve the phrase, I would change it to, “All teaching is moral.” This is moral in a broad sense, so it includes both moral and immoral. Whether we are teaching behavior or content, all our decisions are wrought with morals.
Reference List
Kuyper, A., Naylor, W., Dyke, V. H., & Glenn, C. L. (2019). On education. Lexham Press. Au, W. (2018). A Marxist education: Learning to change the world. Haymarket Books.
Picture this, you live in Taiwan and are living a normal life while the rest of the world is plunged into utter chaos. You think, man switching to online teaching during a pandemic must be rough. I’m glad it is situation normal over here. And so you get on with life, and follow the sob and glory stories of online learning. You start getting a vague idea of what it may be like, you even begin to wonder, “Should I prepare for the pandemics’ arrival in Taiwan? Nah, we’re good, I’m good.”
You can imagine my chagrin when, a year later, the pandemic finally comes to me. Suddenly I’m violently thrown into online learning. I bought this book to survive, because whoo boy, I was drowning in the rapids. Online teaching and in-person teaching are rather similar, but the differences matter.
I thought this book would dive right into the practicalities of online learning, what it was, how not to do it, how to do it, etc. But I was wrong, thankfully. Courtney Ostaff uses her 20+ years experience in online education and vast knowledge of educational research to take you through a wonderful tour of educational psychology research ranging from curriculum to special needs to teaching methodologies to copyright law. All of this is applied through the lens of online education, so you do not need to struggle to figure out how to apply the research to online learning, it already is. And that is one of the book’s great strengths, it is research based and experienced informed.
With this book, instead of wrestling with how to apply the research, you can wrestle with how to format your online teaching to be in-line with the research.
Synchronous or Asynchronous?
On top of all the research, the book is chock-full of practical insights. For example, self-paced courses have very poor completion rates (10%) and the students who do complete the course can rarely (10%) pass a proficiency test (p 21). So, for us teachers, the moral of the story is to not rely too heavily on asynchronous lessons. However, even when teaching synchronously, it is important to record your lessons.
We should record them for students who have internet access issues. Another bit of practical advice, have clear rules for how students engage with the teacher and with each other. A common complaint online students have is other students creating distractions either in the chat or by talking. You can minimize this common issue by giving students dedicated times to ask questions. This helps keep the lesson moving and for students who watch the recorded lesson, it helps them focus. They won’t be distracted by all the rabbit trails students can bring up. This isn’t to say you should discourage questions and rebuke curiosity. It is saying to direct student questions and curiosity to the appropriate time and place.
Scheduling Work
With in-person teaching, it is easy to tell when a student is lost or confused. However, we do not have the same cues with online teaching. Students may not have a camera or they may watch the recorded session later. So we need to be extra clear with our assignments. We will not necessarily be able to re-explain in the moment.
A way to avoid this conundrum is to have recurring assignment types. The repetition is key because, once students are used to the format they are able to fully focus on the content.
In addition to recurring assignment types, we should, wherever possible post work in advance. This helps parents and children with their schedules. If internet access is an issue, a child can download everything they need one day, work on it at home and then sometime the next week, upload their work. Assigning work during a synchronous session all too often results in parents needing to reschedule their days. Plan in advance so families can plan in advance.
Learning Management Systems
There is a lot to learning management systems. I was able to learn, through the book, what I was learning in real life, namely that Google Classroom is not a great online learning management system. It is lacking because it functions like a social media feed.
Think about that for a moment. How easy is it to find that insightful post your friend made two days ago? How easy would it be for a student to find where to submit that late assignment from two weeks ago? How easy would it be for you to find where they submitted it?
If you are able to choose a learning management system, here are some things to look for.
Easy to use on a variety of devices (computer, phone, tablet)
Easy uploads/downloads
Compatible with a variety of file types
Allows students to complete work offline
Easy content creation, saving, and reusing features
Old material easy to find for students (late work/review)
Accessible for students with disabilities
Variety of grading features
Final Word
If you are struggling with online teaching or considering going into it by choice, get this book. My review is just skimming the surface. When you and your students signed-up for in-person learning there is no good transition to online learning, it will be brutal. You, and them, both online learning novices will be thrown into Class 5 rapids. So it would behoove you to find an experienced guide. I doubt you could do better than Ms. Ostaff’s The Online Teaching Handbook.
On love, the Bible is extreme. It goes so far as to say if you do not have love, you do not have anything, even if you happen to have all knowledge (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). When we think about and express the virtues of compassion, meekness, patience, and forgiveness, our thoughts and actions should be infused with love (Colossians 3:12-14). We must love God with all our heart, soul, and mind (Deuteronomy 6:5). We are to love our neighbor as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18).
In short, you are to “let all that you do be done in love,” (1 Corinthians 16:14).
As the citations above make abundantly clear, love is foundational for the Christian life. If you are a Christian teacher, it ought to be foundational to your practice. But before we can apply love to our teaching we need to know what love is.
Defining Love
There are many perspectives on love. We will be focusing on the concept of love in general and love applied to education. The Bible does define love, however, this definition on its own is not particularly helpful.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:7-17).
What does this mean?
In short, the trinitarian God is love. In love, God the Father sent God the Son into the world to be the propitiation for our sins, that’s how we know what love is (1 John 3:16-20). It is important to note that the Son, Jesus willingly chose this path (John 10:18) and he chose it out of love for us (John 15:13) and through this love, he has sent God the Spirit to us. It is through knowing God the Spirit that we grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22).
Love finds its meaning in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. As 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.” Understanding the depths of what this means will always be somewhat shrouded in mystery simply because God is God and we are not. In no way does this imply that we cannot know what love or God is. We have the above examples along with many more in the Bible and our own life experiences.
One More Thing
Before we apply this to education, there is one more aspect of love that we need to make abundantly clear. If it isn’t true, it isn’t love. Love and truth are intertwined. “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16).
“Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). “Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6) Love cannot be limited to words. Love requires action.
Education: Love in Action
So, let’s put it into action. Love starts with the heart which inevitably moves the body. Every human is created in the image of God and therefore every human has the same intrinsic dignity, every human is worthy of love. To lack love not only dishonors the person, it dishonors God himself.
So, we must love all of our students. This love is not to be generic. Your students were not created as the image of God only in a group where individualism is muted. They are individuals each made in the image of God. So we must love them as individuals.
This is challenging and takes effort. We must learn their broader, group culture without pigeonholing them, meaning we must seek to understand both the culture and the individual within said culture. This is similar in meaning to the phrase “Do the work.”
Doing the Work
I touched on this briefly in my last post, see the Rubber, Meet Road section. Using the same categories, I will extend on what I previously wrote here. For all the below categories, this stands: You can’t love what you don’t know and that which you love, you want to know better.
We should know the broad histories each of the below categories brings with it. This will better allow us to be empathic and make connections from the past to the present.
Love and Ethnicity, Sexuality, Religion
I decided to combine ethnicity, sexuality, and religion because broadly speaking, the way to love students within these categories is the same. When you get down to the specifics, it differs, but the specifics are too long for a blogpost.
Knowing the broad histories of different ethnicities, sexualities, and religions allows you to be more sensitive and empathetic. If another student gives an ignorant comment, you can correct them. If you don’t know the history, you will be forced to rely on stereotypes, and therefore will only be able to correct the most egregious comments or actions.
But more than providing correction, knowing the history will better enable you to love your students. Is a significant time of the year coming up? You can acknowledge it, even if you disagree with what is being celebrated. You can ask how they are celebrating, ask about their traditions, etc. This shows that you value them as individuals. It shows that you see their worth as something beyond academics.
Knowing the broad histories of different ethnicities, sexualities, and religions allows you to be more inclusive. Where appropriate, you can include diverse figures and readings into your curriculum. If you don’t know the history, you won’t know significant figures and any diversity you bring into your curriculum will be incidental. Representation is not the be all end all, but it does matter. Knowing the histories will help you understand that your experiences are not necessarily the same as theirs, encouraging empathy. Let this empathy bleed into your teaching.
Love and Abilities
Do not shrink your students’ worth down to their intellect. Whether students are academically brilliant or mentally challenged they are of the same inherent worth, they are each made in the image of God. They should be treated with the dignity their position as image bearers demands.
This involves meeting them where they are academically, challenging them to improve, and providing them with the scaffolding needed in order to succeed.
This means seeking ways students of all abilities can meaningfully contribute in class. It means fostering a class culture that gives honor to both high- and low-achievers, a culture that values persons more than academics.
Love and Disposition
It is easy to love students with a kindly disposition but it is much harder to love students with an angry disposition. It is harder to still love those who are regularly rude and disruptive. But, as Christians, we are called to love. One important way to love all our students is to discipline them. We must discipline in love. We don’t discipline for revenge or to show our authority. We do it to love our students.
This happens when the rules are fair, clear to all, and consistently enforced. This happens when we seek to enforce rules by causing the least possible disruption to the student’s and the class’s learning.
An important aspect of love is in giving time. After we discipline our students, we should spend some break or prep time talking with them in order to make sure they understand why they were disciplined, to restore the relationship, and to encourage them. This should be a conversation.
Your student’s thoughts matter. If they disagree with you still, hear them out as long as they are being respectful. You will likely need to help them learn how to respectfully disagree. If so, give them grace and teach them. Model what it looks like. Give them some phrases to guide their frustration. In short, don’t just teach the curriculum, teach the behavior.
Done right, this type of love will get through to most students over time because it is with time that your fairness and kindness becomes clear.
An Implication of God’s Love
Understanding God’s love means liberally applying our own. Doing this gives dignity to our students. It recognizes that they are made in the image of God and that they are valuable, inherently, they matter. They matter just as much as you, because you, like them, are made in the image of God. You are worthy of love because you are made in the image of God. Your students are worthy of love because your students are made in the image of God.
There are two types of standardized tests, criterion referenced and norm-referenced. Criterion referenced tests are based on some standard (criteria). The current standards based movement would be a proponent of this approach, and, the tests you make in class likely qualify as criterion based too. It allows you to measure learning based on an external standard that is stable from year to year. Norm-referenced tests are based on the norm for that particular year. In English, this means that students are compared with each other. So, a score in the 51% percentile, means that the student scored higher than 51% of the test takers for that particular year.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
According to Daniel Koontz, the NAEP is “widely considered to be a gold standard for evaluating educational trends” (The Testing Charade, Ch 5). One reason it is a gold standard is that its results are not particularly vulnerable to corruption because it is a low-stakes test. This means that students and teachers are not held accountable for the results, so there is little incentive to cheat or overly rely on test prep.
This is important because many state achievement tests are higher stakes for schools and students and are vulnerable to the aforementioned corruption. So, the NAEP can be used almost as a way to audit the state tests. For example, if students show remarkable growth on the state test, you would also expect to see a level of growth on the NAEP. If there is little or no growth on the corresponding sections of the NAEP, then it is fair to question whether the state is gaming their own test in order to look good and score political points.
One example of this is New York City. In 2007, Joel Klein was chancellor of the New York school system and, based on the results of the state achievement test, students made excellent progress. However, “when scores on the NAEP were released in 2007, they showed that New York City’s eight-graders had made no progress whatsoever in mathematics on that test over the previous two years, despite their huge gains on the state test” (Koretz, The Testing Charade, Ch. 5).
A sample of nationally representative groups of grade 4, 8, and 12 students take the NAEP every four years. Each participating state selects 2,500 students per subject to take the test. The NAEP is a criterion-referenced test, so students are not directly compared with each other. Instead, students are compared with an external standard. The NAEP essentially has three achievement levels: Basic, Proficient, and Advanced.
The Proficient level is a bit misleading because it does not correspond with grade level performance, in order to reach Proficient on the NAEP, a student will need to perform higher than grade level. With this high standard, only about ⅓ of American students are considered to be proficient or better.
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)
TIMSS is an international test put on by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) at Boston College and that is taken in over 60 countries. In America, it is taken by a nationally representative sampling of about 10,000 students in fourth grade and 10,000 in eighth grade (FAQ). As it is based on voluntary participation and sampling, this is a low stakes test for both schools and students.
TIMSS is a low-stakes criterion referenced exam, it uses the International Baccalaureate (IB) standard and divides achievement into four levels: Advanced, High, Intermediate, and Low (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Hooper, 2016). If you are interested in what each benchmark means, check out page 19 of this report. Based on my understanding, I’d say that intermediate should be the minimum acceptable level, meaning that we should essentially be aiming for 100% of students to be at this level or better.
The results of TIMSS paint a much more favorable picture of U.S. education than the NAEP. Though, we should expect better results, since the standard (criterion) of TIMSS is more aligned with grade-level expectations. In the past 20 years, Math, for both 4th and 8th grade, the U.S. has increased the percentage of students achieving at Intermediate or better by nearly 10%. This is good progress. However, we have seen less gains in science. We have essentially remained stagnant in 4th grade and seen moderate improvements in 8th grade.
When we compare the U.S. with other countries that took the TIMSS, we see that we are above average, but below the top tier.
Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)
Like TIMSS, PIRLS is put on by IEA at Boston College and is considered to be a low-stakes test that is criterion-referenced, with the same benchmarks of Advanced, High, Intermediate, and Low. If you are interested in what each benchmark means, click here. Unlike TIMSS, PIRLS is given every 5 years instead of every 4. A sample of nationally representative fourth graders take the test. Students are assessed on an informational text and literary text. In 2016, there were 61 participating countries.
When compared with the NAEP, PIRLS was found to have readings that were easier by about one grade level (FAQ). So, we should expect better results and that is exactly what we find.
While 35% of fourth grade students are deemed proficient by the NAEP, PIRLS found that 83% of students achieved at the Intermediate benchmark or better (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Hooper, 2017).
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)
PISA is a low-stakes, norm-referenced international test started by the OECD in 2000 and assesses a sampling of 15 year olds’ reading, math, and science literacy every three years. 600,000 students took the test in 2018, representing 79 countries or education systems.
It has also been divided into various norm-referenced proficiency levels in an attempt to classify students. Being norm-referenced, these proficiency levels will differ slightly from year to year because the cohorts of students will be different, meaning that the average scores will be different.
The test makers note that, “There are no natural breaking points to mark borderlines between stages along this continuum. Dividing the continuum into levels, though useful for communication about students’ development, is essentially arbitrary. Like the definition of units on, for example, a scale of length, there is no fundamental difference between 1 metre and 1.5 metres – it is a matter of degree. It is useful, however, to define stages, or levels along the continua, because they enable us to communicate about the proficiency of students in terms other than continuous numbers. This is a rather common concept, an approach we all know from categorising shoes or shirts by size (S, M, L, XL, etc.).”
When you look at America’s results, you see that they are more or less in line with the OECD average, while lagging a bit in math. One thing that makes the PISA useful, beyond comparing different education systems, is that it breaks the data down by the student’s socioeconomic status. This is important because it helps us see how well we are teaching different groups of students. The OECD’s report found that the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in America is 11 points larger than the OECD average. It also breaks down performance based on gender. In 2018, girls performed 24 points better than boys in reading. This “gender gap” is better than the OECD average of 30 points. The performance gender gap in math favored boys by 9 points, larger than the OECD average of 5 points. In science, American boys and girls performed roughly the same.
In reading, 81% of American students were able to at least reach level 2 proficiency, compared with the OECD average of 77%. Essentially, this means that 81% of our students can “At a minimum, these students can identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit, though sometimes complex criteria, and can reflect on the purpose and form of texts when explicitly directed to do so.”
In math, 73% of our students reached level 2 proficiency or higher, slightly lower than the OECD average of 76%. Essentially, this means that 73% of our students can “interpret and recognise, without direct instructions, how a (simple) situation can be represented mathematically (e.g. comparing the total distance across two alternative routes, or converting prices into a different currency).”
In science, 81% of our students reached level 2 proficiency or higher, slightly better than the OECD average of 78%. Essentially, this means that 81% of our students can, “recognise the correct explanation for familiar scientific phenomena and can use such knowledge to identify, in simple cases, whether a conclusion is valid based on the data provided.”
Summary of International Standardized Tests
When we look over results from the international standardized tests, we can take a level of comfort. Even though America has substantial room for improvement, no matter which test you are looking at, we are roughly in line with other higher performing countries. We should recognize this. It is not only doom and gloom.
But, we should also take a good hard look at the criterion referenced ones (NAEP, TIMSS, PIRLS). The NAEP is a very high standard, so there is not necessarily a need to fret about the low percentage of students who are measured proficient in that test. But both TIMSS and PIRLS are aligned to grade level standards and both show that we fail to get 20-30% of students to achieve at an acceptable level.
Iowa Assessments, formerly Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS)
While the Iowa Assessments started in Iowa, hence the “Iowa” in its name, it has a national reach. The Iowa Assessments are taken every year from kindergarten through eighth grade and they assess Language Arts, Reading, Math, Science, and Social Studies. The test underwent a transformation between the 2011-2012 school year in order to be better aligned with the Common Core Standards and the Smarter Balanced Exam (other state standardized tests). To go along with the change in focus, the ITBS was renamed Iowa Assessments.
This is a norm-referenced test, meaning that students are compared with each other, not to an outside standard, which allows for comparisons between students by using a percentile score. Essentially, if your child receives a score in the 50th percentile, then he/she scored higher than 50% of the test takers in that year, if your child scored in the 86% percentile, then he/she scored higher than 86% of the test takers in that year.
Given the norm-referenced format, the Iowa Assessments are not so easy to compare with each other over time, because each year involves a different set of students, and therefore, a different norm. They are best used to compare with students in the same year who took the same test. If you are looking at the test results over time, I would suggest taking them with a grain of salt.
The Iowa test is not high stakes, but it does have more of an impact on the students than the NAEP, TIMSS, PIRLS, or PISA. Schools will commonly use results from the Iowa Assessments as one factor to place students in talented and gifted programs. As this test has real-life impacts on students, it is particularly important that the test makers check for content bias.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)
The PARCC is given to a representative sample of students in grades 3-11 annually and assesses mathematics along with English/Language Arts and is in alignment with the Common Core Standards.
PARCC is a criterion referenced test (the Common Core is the criterion) and students are assigned performance levels between 1 and 5 with Level 3 and above considered to be passing. Level 1: Did not yet meet expectations Level 2: Partially met expectations Level 3: Approached expectations Level 4: Met expectations Level 5: Exceeded expectations
If you want more information about what these performance levels actually mean, click here. If you want to really nerd out, check out this nearly 500 page technical report. Section 9.5, section 10 and section 11 are most relevant.
The PARCC results do not paint a particularly pretty picture of American education. For the 2015-2016 school year, the percent of students who met or exceeded expectations hovered around 40% at all grade levels for ELA and Math starts at 42.5% who at least meet expectations, but that lowly result plummets over time, finishing at 25.9% in 8th grade. Go ahead and look at the graphs. If you are interested in a breakdown by state or ethnicity, check out this pdf.
This is all the more concerning because the PARCC is aligned with the Common Core Standards, meaning that the tests are at grade level.
PARCC is a high-stakes test. Students may be held back if they do poorly. This makes concerns about bias extremely important.
The Classic Learning Test (CLT)
Meet CLT, the new kid on the block. It was started in 2015 with the intention of providing an alternative to the bigger, more famous standardized tests. It features, “passages selected from great works across a variety of disciplines, the CLT suite of assessments provide a highly accurate and rigorous measure of reasoning, aptitude, and academic formation for students from diverse educational backgrounds.”
The CLT is offered as an alternative to the SAT and ACT, so the CLT is high stakes. However, our focus will be on their other tests. The CLT8 and CLT10 are standardized tests for 8th and 10th graders. These tests are norm-referenced, with the norm being based on a nationally representative sample of the CLT10 population.
Content wise, the CLT10 and CLT8 cover verbal reasoning (reading comprehension), grammar, writing, and quantitative reasoning (math). These exams are designed to be comparable to the PSAT, and the scores between the tests can be compared. If you are interested in comparing the scores, look at pages 29-33 of this link. If you are interested in how students performed based on income or race, look at Chapter 10 of the technical report. Unfortunately the scores for race are only broken down into two categories, white and non-white. I would guess that this is due to sample size issues and that future reports will offer more detailed breakdowns, sample allowing.
There Are No Better Options
The data we get from the NAEP, TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA, and PARCC leaves plenty of room for concern. Internationally, we are essentially average in education, nothing to brag about. But, when we look at how our students perform at grade level assessments, there is real cause for concern according to the PARCC exam, only around 40% of our students meet or exceed the standard from grades 3-8 in English Language Arts. In math, the story is much worse. Without these standardized tests we would only have a vague idea about these problems, so, until there is a better option, I am for standardized tests. It is important for us to know where educational inequalities and inefficiencies exist. Currently, if we were to replace standardized tests with any alternative, at best we would get fuzzier data.
Sources:
Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. University of Chicago Press.
Mullis, I. V. S., Martin, M. O., Foy, P., & Hooper, M. (2016). TIMSS 2015 International Results in Mathematics. Retrieved from Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center website: http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/international-results/
Mullis, I. V. S., Martin, M. O., Foy, P., & Hooper, M. (2017). PIRLS 2016 International Results in Reading. Retrieved from Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center website: http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls2016/international-results/
Standardized testing comes with a sordid history of intentional discrimination, perverse incentives, suspicious discrepancies in scores, and outright cheating. What are the alternatives?
In my research for this blog series, a 2015 article by NPR about alternatives to standardized testing was referenced repeatedly. There were four main alternatives. 1. Sampling Summary: This is essentially the same as standardized testing, but instead of testing all students, it would test a statistically representative group of students. This is what the NAEP and PISA do. My Thoughts: I am not completely against this approach. It could be a decent compromise. But I would want my child to be assessed each year. I think it is valuable to see where my child stands in relation to children in the school, district, state, and nationally. This isn’t an attempt to boast about the score, it gives valuable information to parents because the tests give a reference point that is beyond the classroom grades and that is comparable with other locations. Does the test score roughly match my child’s grades? This ERIC Digest provides an excellent summary of how to use/interpret the results of a standardized test. 2. Stealth Assessment Summary: This is basically gamification. Assessing students with their performance on a computer program. My Thoughts: Technology can be amazing. But I don’t think this would be a wise direction to move towards. I have not seen any data on the validity of stealth assessment (I don’t think there is much research here yet). It would also bring up even more equity issues than the current set of standardized tests. 3. Multiple Measures Summary: Instead of measuring based on one assessment (the test) it could use social and emotional skills surveys, game-based assessments (stealth assessment) and performance or portfolio-based assessments. My Thoughts: There is important data here that would help parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers, and it would seem obvious to me that we should assess schools and teachers on multiple measures. But wouldn’t the same accusations of bias involved in standardized testing be there for the surveys as well? And, since they are about social and emotional skills/norms, wouldn’t that be even more controversial than standardized academic tests? Portfolio assessments should not be considered as a replacement for standardized tests because, based on what they are, it is impossible to standardize them. They can be great tools at the teacher/school level though. I’ll spend some space talking about performance assessments later. They are the most promising alternative. 4. Inspections Summary: An inspector will come and assess a variety of factors in the school. My Thoughts: Even with observations, we cannot reliably assess individual teachers because there are so many variables (Wiliam, Leadership for Teacher Learning, Ch 2). Evaluating an entire school or school system in this manner would be exponentially more difficult. Using inspections would give us good data (we should have some sort of inspection data as part of a multiple measures approach), but it would be much more expensive than standardized testing due to the required man hours and would be a very different type of data. It would not tell us much about what students are or are not learning.
The Most Promising Alternative
The specific alternative to standardized tests I find most promising is a type of performance based assessment. Though there are very significant challenges that performance assessments will have to hurdle before I would be willing to consider replacing standardized tests with performance assessments.
The performance assessment would have to be externally imposed on schools in a similar way standardized tests currently are. The assessment would also have to be standardized. The purpose here is two-fold. Standardization allows for comparisons between different groups of students and it helps control the bias.
If the assessment is not standardized and given in a standardized manner, then the data generated will not be very useful for anything broader than the context the assessment was given in. There would be too many variables. The performance assessment should also be externally imposed because these assessments should function as a type of audit on the system. Is it working? Are all students being educated?
The last hurdle may be the largest. There is a paucity of research on performance assessments, and alternatives to standardized tests in general (Garcia & Pearson, 1994). I was not able to find anything more recent. It could be that I just don’t know the right search terms. If you are aware of more recent research on possible replacements for standardized tests, please send it my way either in the comments below or on Twitter (@Teacher_Fulton). We should not replace standardized tests with performance assessments until they have developed a track record at least as reliable as standardized tests.
The next post in this series will give an overview of several common standardized tests. (coming soon)
Sources: William, D. (2016). Leadership for Teacher Learning: Creating a Culture Where All Teachers Improve So That All Students Succeed. Learning Sciences International.
This series of articles is primarily concerned with standardized tests in compulsory education (Iowa Test of Basic Skills, PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, NAEP). These tests differ from college entrance exams (ACT, SAT) in that, except for some state achievement tests, the tests tend to be low or no stakes for both the students and schools.
Many educators have an aversion to standardized testing, and this is not without reason. Teachers spend an inordinate amount of time preparing their students for many of these tests and beyond that, these tests have led to a narrowing of the curriculum. This happens in the misguided attempt to focus on reading and math by reducing the time spent on science, social studies, art, etc (sometimes drastically!). This is misguided because, while it makes sense that you could increase these scores by spending more time on said subjects, doing so actually reduces background knowledge, which, after decoding, is the key to comprehension.
But It Gets Worse
Standardized tests have been intentionally used by educators to exclude minorities. For one example, you can look into the case of Larry P, a black student in California who was wrongly sent into special education. You can also read this article from Time Magazine for an overview of the negatives.
Other times, the blind spots of the test writers caused them to discriminate against girls as Garcia and Pearson (1994) note,
“When girls outscored boys on the 1916 version of the test designers, apparently operating under the assumption that girls could not be more intelligent than boys, concluded that the test had serious faults. When they revised the 1937 version, they eliminated those items on which girls outperformed boys. By contrast, they did not revise or eliminate items that favored urban over rural children or children of professional fathers over children day laborers (Mercer, 1989); these cultural differences apparently matched developers’ expectations of how intelligence and achievement ought to be distributed across groups (Kamin, 1974; Karier, 1973a, 1973b; Mercer, 1989).”
Whether these blind spots are willful or simply ignorant is irrelevant for our purposes. What is important is that we acknowledge that this type of discriminatory bias is still a possibility in standardized tests today.
Content Bias
This is the type of bias that is most often pointed out in standardized tests. Content bias is simply when the content of the test favors one particular culture over another, typically favoring the majority culture. This, by default, disadvantages minorities and so it is important to be able to counter content bias if we want standardized tests to be meaningful.
Thankfully, modern standardized test creators take bias seriously.
They “have used a variety of techniques to create unbiased tests (Cole & Moss, 1989; Linn, 1983; Oakland & Matuszek, 1977). Among others, they have examined item selection procedures, examiner characteristics, and language used on the tests as possible sources of bias. One of the most common methods used to control for test bias is that of examining the concurrent or predictive validity of individual tests for different groups through correlational or regression analysis.” (Garcia and Pearson, 1994).
For more detail on what this looks like in practice, read this EdSurge article. Managing content bias will always be a challenge, even with knowledge of history, advanced statistical tools, and a good heart.
Perverse Incentives
Many standardized tests also suffer from the Cambell effect. This simply means that when tests are important (high-stakes) for students or teachers, then it is more likely for the results to be corrupted by any number of means.
Think about it, when teachers and schools are assessed based on their students’ performance, they will do what they can to look good. And when your job is on the line, you may be driven to take certain….“shortcuts”.
This often leads to the aforementioned narrowing of the curriculum, which disproportionately affects students in impoverished areas.
On top of this, there are numerous cases of outright illegal behavior. Schools engaged in the practice of scrubbing, unenrolling students or encouraging a temporary truancy. There have also been cases of students being held back in grade 9 and then, after repeating said year, they jump up to grade 11, conveniently skipping the standardized tests (Koretz, The Testing Charade, Ch 5).
And then there are the cases of traditional cheating. The most famous of which is the disaster in Atlanta where 11 educators were given felony convictions and 22 other teachers reached plea agreements.
We know that cheating is unfortunately not an isolated problem, it has been estimated that, on the low end, at least 5% of these high-stakes standardized tests involve cheating in some fashion (Jacob & Levitt, 2003).
Discrepancies in Test Scores
Poor students tend to score lower than wealthy students. Minority students tend to score lower than white students. This certainly should raise some red flags because it shows that there are real problems somewhere, though not necessarily with the test itself. Once we work to reduce the variables and compare students of different ethnicities who share a similar socioeconomic status and language level, the achievement gap is greatly decreased, but still significant (Garcia & Pearson, 1994), showing that there is at least one other, but likely multiple significant problems, somewhere.
The challenge here is two-fold. Is the primary problem with the standardized tests themselves or with unequal schools, differing home situations, etc? Both?
The Importance of Standardization
In America, 80% of teachers are white (NCES, 2019). Even if you choose to assume the best, it is foolish to assume that the average teacher is knowledgeable about every culture and can adequately adjust for content bias.
Standardization allows for a level of control over the bias because you only need to provide oversight to one group, not millions of teachers. In addition the makers of standardized tests are specifically trained to create them and to analyze them for bias. This doesn’t mean they are perfect, but they are certainly better at making tests and adjusting for bias than the average teacher.
The main value provided by standardized tests is that they give data. Without this data, we would not be aware of the discrepancies in performance based on race or income mentioned above.
Now, we tend to use the data in order to make excuses. “These disparities exist because of economic inequality, we really need to fix that.” And, true enough. But economic inequality is not relevant for teachers to do their job. Our job is to teach students as they are. We need to get results with the students we have in the schools we’re at. If you use a student’s social situation to excuse their lack of learning, get out of education. Social situations provide context, not excuses.
The data shows where teachers and schools are failing to educate their students. The data shows where problems are. We should use this to help schools help children. We should use this data as a tool to help us identify successful teaching methods. If we get rid of standardized assessments, we also get rid of this data. To do so is to choose to make ourselves blind, not a wise choice.
The scope of the problem is huge. Are there valid alternatives to standardized testing? (coming soon)
America fails too many of her students, but it isn’t all doom and gloom, though there is a fair share of it. Just take a look at how her students perform (coming soon).
Process and content knowledge are in the foreground because they are what students do or produce. But, both become possible only when structure and routine are operating in the background.
One of the primary ways teachers can shape the structure of their class is by how they manage it. How you choose to reinforce positive behavior and discipline negative behavior has a substantial effect on learning. There are many ways and approaches to this, but the best fall closely in line with the approach of authoritative parenting. Warm/Strict is a popular application of this method. For more, you can read about it here, here, and here.
Some Principles of Classroom Management
Essentially this means teachers should manage the class…
with clear, high expectations (behavioral and academic)
with support students to help them achieve expectations
with clear, fair rules enforced with fair consequences
with an understanding of extenuating circumstances
with everything done in genuine warmth towards the students
The bookends to the above list are the most important because when paired, they make the rest possible. High expectations without genuine warmth all too often leads to more authoritarian approaches. And, to say it simply, genuine warmth towards students without high expectations is flat out impossible. This is a false warmth. If you are treating students “warmly” but not demanding students work towards a high bar, you aren’t being kind or caring for them. Instead, you are actively working to reduce their potential.
Structure Puts Principles Action
Principles are not put into actions by pasting posters on the wall or even by telling students the rules and enforcing them. They are only put into action if you model the principles and support students as they strive towards them, providing discipline when needed.
One simple way to put the first three principles in action is with facial expressions and gestures. It may sound strange, but getting a variety of expressions and gestures down will make your life as a teacher better and will make handling disruptions smoother. These small routines provide structure that gives your students the support they need to reach the high expectations we must have.
When a student is off task, catch their eyes and give them the look. When they acknowledge you, nod and move on. When a student isn’t writing and they should be, catch their eyes and pantomime writing with one hand holding a pen and the other being paper. Etc.
What is key here is that students understand what the signals mean. If students are guessing the purpose, it will not be effective. Introduce the signals and tell students what they mean. Take guesswork out of the equation. This allows you to redirect students quickly, directly, and subtly. *Note: These work best for minor disruptions, you will need other tools to deal with more significant problems.
In addition, these signals make transitions easier. Something as simple as a 3, 2, 1 Stop! (slightly increased pitch on the “Stop”) accompanied with a hand countdown makes it very clear to students that they need to finish and look at you. Whatever you choose to use for transitions, be consistent and make sure students know what the signals mean.
These structures are supports. They allow students to put their efforts towards achieving academically because they provide focus. They allow students to reach that high behavior bar you set because they provide clear direction, making it easier for students to stay on task.
Structure in the Lab
We must bring these established structures and routines to the lab with our class. The strategies are versatile enough to survive the new and exciting environment. As you enter the lab, expect for your students to be excited and to need a bit more correcting and time to settle in/transition than normal.
Stick to your already established structures and routines. Your students will adjust. Labs are naturally a bit more chaotic than a normal class. This makes structure and routines all the more important. Settle your students down by using the countdown or some other method. Then give instructions (verbally and written). It will be best if you can pass out a small sheet of paper with the instructions. This gives students a reminder that stays right in front of them.
Make sure all eyes are on you as you model step one. Be explicit about your directions. Say something like, “You have 15 seconds to set up step one, Go!” Then bring attention back to you with whatever already established method you’ve chosen. Once everyone is refocused, go on to the next step, and so on.
Keep a snappy pace. This will keep faster students focused. And students who move more slowly will be able to follow along just fine because they will have your model for each step.
Transitioning into Less-Structured Activities
Follow a similar structure when you are moving from one part of the lab to another. Once the setup is done and the experiment is ready to begin, you will still want to have teacher led transitions. This reduces confusion.
Chaos is more susceptible when students are making observations or inferences. There is only so much we can do here. I like to preface these activities by briefly reviewing whatever we have learned and having students reread their hypotheses. I find that this helps transition their minds go from setting up the lab to being ready to actually do it. Then I say, “You will have 2 minutes to make observations. You have to talk to your partners, but you must talk like you are in a library. Do you understand?”
My students are familiar with this routine and know to respond with a whispered, “Yes, we understand.” I often have to repeat this part a second time because they respond at a normal or even excited volume. But, this makes my expectations explicit. There is no guesswork and, as a result, my students work quietly and are focused during observation time. Then I set them loose to make observations or inferences with a hand signal.
Long Term Goals
Remember, we have primary students, they are not experts in the lab. The lab is still relatively new and mysterious to them. The structure is there to help them succeed. As you do more labs, you can gradually give students more freedom. But make sure they can succeed with it. We don’t want free students that drown in freedom. We want them to swim in it. And the best way to do that is for them to internalize the high expectations, structures, and routines you choose to create.
So give your students freedom by ensuring they have the necessary process knowledge and content knowledge for the lab. Give your students freedom by providing structure and routines. When they are ready, let them swim.
Part 1 of this series explains why having a worldview is inevitable and that this shapes your approach to teaching Part 2 makes the case for deeply understanding your worldview and philosophy of education
There are numerous benefits that come along for the ride when you have a well thought out worldview and philosophy of education. For the teacher, most of the benefits are between you and your students.
Clarity and Confidence
We should be relatively confident in applying our philosophy of education. If you are not, then you should search for a more robust one you are able to trust because teaching from a place of doubt isn’t enjoyable. It will also likely lead to inconsistencies in your methods causing confusion for your students and stress for you.
When we understand our philosophy of education, we can move forward with confidence because we have looked it over and found it to be consistent with our worldview, research, and practice. When we trust our philosophy, we are much more likely to consistently apply it. This consistency helps our students understand the rules and routines, which better allows for them to focus on learning.
However, there is one aspect in particular that affects other teachers.
A Clear Discourse
Too often people simply talk past one another and in doing so they each win the argument but everybody ends up being the loser. To improve the discourse, clarify what you believe.
When we have thought out our underlying worldview, we will be able to articulate it in an understandable way. Once we have applied its implications to our teaching, we should also be able to explain our philosophy of education in an accessible manner.
When both parties have done this, there tends to be less talking past each other. Positions are made clear. More clarifying questions are asked. And, even if this only happens on one side, clarity is still gained.
One Sided Clarity
If one side relies upon fallacies or supports their philosophy with inconsistent logic, you still gain clarity by engaging them with your own philosophy. You now know where the other person stands. You have tested your approach against theirs and found theirs to be wanting. We must be humble when we are doing this though. If we lack humility we will only help them see our side as mean or whatever negative adjective they prefer to use.
In addition, we should be humble enough to see the grains of truth in approaches we consider to be wrong. We should use these grains to improve our own philosophy.
If your philosophy never changes you must think it is perfect. But why on Earth would that be a reasonable assumption?
In part 1 of this series I explained that having a worldview is inevitable and that your worldview will profoundly shape your teaching practice. However, while having one is inevitable, we are not guaranteed to have one that is well thought out. In fact, the default is to fall into an unthoughtful fuzzy genericism that works well enough to get us through the day, but would fall apart if we ever cared to inspect it.
Our approach to education, or our educational philosophy is rooted in our broader worldview. So, before we can effectively work out our own teaching philosophy we must work out our worldview.
Appropriated Worldviews Make Poor Anchors
When we don’t analyze what we believe, we lack a sound worldview, we lack an anchor, so we must appropriate one. The place we appropriate a worldview tends to be from whatever subculture we most identify with; whether that’s democrat, republican, religious, environmentalist, etc. Worldview appropriation always causes problems.
Problems arise because we don’t “own” an appropriated worldview, this means we are not anchored to the ground, we are anchored to some larger ship and we will move with it. This causes us to have a fuzzy worldview, because we are simply relying on a larger group for our ethics. This leads to a blind or semi-blind following of the culture. Our morality shifts this way as well (blindly shifting morality is bad). Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
We can skate by with an appropriated worldview (I think most people live like this) but those with an appropriated worldview will likely struggle to produce thought out, internally consistent answers to the following questions.
Does anything objectively matter? Why/why not? What is the purpose in life?
How do you justify your own morality? Is human flourishing good? Why/why not? Is suffering bad? Why/why not? Why is “cultural hot topic” a step in the right/wrong direction?
Appropriated Philosophies of Education
When we don’t think about our philosophy of education, we appropriate one from whatever educational subculture we happen to lean towards. This causes similar problems as an appropriated worldview. Our views and educational approaches will shift with the educational culture around us. We won’t really control the changes because our philosophy will remain vague and fuzzy to us.
Before you can purposefully change and improve your philosophy of education, you must work to remove aspects that are vague and fuzzy by bringing them into focus and defining them because it is nearly impossible to change a vague problem. Think about it. How do you fix something that is bothering you when you don’t know what that something is, but you know you are bothered? You have to figure out what is bothering you first!
Owning Your Philosophy of Education
Work out your worldview so you can own it and be anchored to something more stable than culture. Work out your philosophy of education so you can own it and be anchored to something more stable than an educational subculture.
Make it specific so you can make purposeful changes as you learn more. This process happens through a lot of reading, thinking, and talking.
Here are some questions to think about as you define your philosophy of education.
What is the primary purpose of education? Why?
How do humans learn? How do you encourage creativity? Why? What are your views on having children of all ages memorize information? How should you reinforce rules? What is the best way to manage disruptive behavior? What types of punishments are acceptable? Why?
What role should educational research play into your approach as a teacher? Why?
TeachingScience 