What are students learning?

        "After all these years of common schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning"... I would have to disagree with this statement.  I think that we, as educators, know whether or not our students are learning without necessarily having to give out a formal assessment.


        I think one of  the biggest problems that we have created is that we focus way too much on numbers and statistics.  It is unfortunate (if it  is true) that teacher's salaries will begin to be based on the way that students perform on tests.  This is just going to cause more teachers to focus on numbers that the state says are acceptable.  This isn't the biggest problem though...this whole situation leads to many other underlying issues.


        Like Delpit states, we need to let students have a voice in the classroom.  We need to give them the opportunity to share and open up and be themselves to prevent them from feeling like they are just a bunch of uniform little soldiers or robots.  I was in a school where they were required to have a morning meeting where students all had to greet one another, then a couple of children each day would share something that was going on in their lives.  This was the most liked part of the day because, unfortunately, students came to realize that this was the only time throughout the day that they would be able to speak their mind and talk about things that they were into or that specifically interested them. 


        I feel that this also goes hand in hand with Luna's perspectives on creativity.  Students need to be given the opportunity to expand their minds sort of on their on.  Or maybe not necessarily on their own, but in their own individual way.  During one of my fieldwork observations, I actually witnessed a teacher who was insistent that each of the students in her class do things exactly the same way.  I asked her what he reason for doing this was.  In her mind, she was keeping her classroom organized and uniform but I think that in reality she was really limiting a lot of students.  Not all students learn and explore things the same way.  In my mind, I feel like, with most things, if they are producing the right outcome or answer, why does it matter how they get there and why should we limit that?


        Overall, I think that we need to track the progress that students are making and the growth that has occurred over a given period of time instead of simply being concerned about how they scored on one or two state mandated tests.  I think that we are aware and we know this, but we are so concerned by the things that are being held over out heads, are far as student performance in concerned, that we sort of ignore that or it at least definitely isn't the first thing that we look at when we consider an assessment.


I thought this website was a good example of some of the issues that I discussed and it had some interesting ideas about assessments and student progress:  http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/assessment/studentprogress.htm