Accountability and teaching

No Child Left Behind as a concept (not as this concept has been enacted) is a great idea. This is the first generation to make a goal of teaching every child and I think that is wonderful.

Along with that idea has come a series of standards, from professional organizations, from states, from districts. Having these standards makes sense, also. Standards challenge teachers to make sure that students get certain types of content. We do have a lot of overturn, with families moving across town or across the country, and standards can help to make sure transient kids don't miss out on important content.

Standards also can be, if used judiciously and wisely, a form of evaluation of teachers. If students are making no discernable progress in relation to standards, it is time to take a look at what is going on in a classroom or school. Maybe there are good teachers with no administrative support or maybe there are burned out teachers who have given up. In any case, these things can be remedied.

The breakdown becomes between the rock of standards and the hard place of planning a class session. It's easy to look at a math goal and then to create a lesson plan where the students are told about the concept and then given a math worksheet to practice and homework on page 56 of their textbook, do the odd-numbered problems. Or, to go onto chapter 4 of the social studies text and have the students write answers to the questions at the end of the chapter. Or to give students facts about scientific method and then a series of scientific facts about biology or geology to be on the midterm test. Or, to do the next phonics worksheet in the series to make sure that all phonics information is covered during a given period of time.

When we plan lessons this way, we can be sure that content is covered. Or can we?

Yes, in every classroom, there is a group of kids (mostly female, but some males) who will do anything the teacher asks--who will do 1000 worksheets in a year (180 days in a school year x 5.5 worksheets per day--math, science, social studies, spelling, grammar, phonics--equals 1000) and some of these kids might even learn some content this way.

But many kids will not learn this way. They don't have the psychological tolerance, for whatever reason, to cooperate with this form of teaching. Some kids are too advanced and are therefore bored and some have critical learning disabilities. Some are from families where "book learning" is less important than common sense. Some are from families (across the economic spectrum, by the way) where there are not enough organizational skills to make sure that homework gets done and then gets in the backpack to go to school. Some have neurological differences that require them to get different types of explanations than those typically given in a textbook. Etc.

What can be done? How can we ensure that content standards are being met?

This is the essential art of teaching: to take a set of content standards and to take a given classroom of individuals and to build a bridge between them. This means knowing, for example, the interests of individual kids and then having the creativity to figure out how to incorporate that interest into a series of learning activities that meet the standards. It means figuring out how students can construct knowledge and how they can take responsibility for their own learning in relation to those standards (it might mean sharing the standards and challenging the students to figure out ways of learning the material).

I do not believe that every lesson has to be a masterpiece of the art of teaching. Everyone has to learn the times tables and this is not exactly fun. But at least one really good, creative lesson a week will help students to stay engaged with the classroom when the learning is less fun.