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Hi All,
It's an interesting discussion. To grossly understate it, learning is a complex event that depends upon genetics, environment and luck. Every teacher, every parent, every human has learned in different ways, and the skill sets vary uniformally. We has humans feel most comfortable finding cause and effect relationships, it orders our world view and let's us function––to obtain resources, find mates, and sustain. The exact nature of an environment, any environment depends upon the composition, actions and behaviors of its components, our history as a species is replete with variant teaching and learning strategies; it's the beauty of our brains and joy of exploration.
Without doing a thorough search, I'll guarantee that for every example of success you can find a counter example of failure, and the methodologies may be approximate. It all depends, and if the answer were obvious we would have solved it.
C
On Jul 7, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Jennie Dusheck wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
>
> James,
> I don't have an entrenched position on any of this. But I think the culture of fear revealed by the Atlanta report is a serious indictment of the ways testing can be misused. As for Brooks, it's not clear to me that single school successes are an indication of anything except blips of enthusiasm. How do we know these schools haven't assembled an unusually motivated set of teachers and administrators? Wouldn't most experimental schools have a good amount of that? How do you deliver [whatever made them successful] to entire school districts, entire states?
>
> If the answer were obvious, I think we would have solved the education problem a long time ago. There's been no shortage of funding for new approaches in education. But how do you deliver the successes reaped from these programs to ordinary schools where (often undereducated) teachers are daily chastised and humiliated (made to crawl under tables) if they don't succeed where others have failed?
>
> I totally agree that this is a systems problem; not one problem but many. Tests aren't bad in themselves. It's how the results are used that can be useful or destructive and, as in an ecological setting, context, scale and timing are everything.
>
> Jennie Dusheck
> Science Writing & Editing
> Santa Cruz, Ca
>
>
>
> At 5:12 AM -0700 7/7/11, James Bell wrote:
>> Thanks for the dialogue, Eric. This is the part of the message that I think we need to keep in mind:
>>
>> "...look at which schools are most distorted by testing. As the education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also the places where students are most likely to participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and physics. In these places, tests are not the end. They are a lever to begin the process of change."
>>
>> And as you (and Brooks) point out tests are one way of measuring change, and only part of a much larger ecology.
>
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The opinions and thoughts expressed here are my own and should in no way be construed or attributed to the Exploratorium or related organization, and do not represent an institutional position.
Charles Carlson
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