A concrete example of the harm perpetuated by standardized testing: Mandatory assessments report students lack adequate vocabulary. A committee is told to form. Educators must sacrifice classroom or personal time to develop a vocabulary-based curriculum. It includes explicit, scripted, daily instruction, practice worksheets from Pearson, and bi-weekly quizzes from which data must be collected to assess and determine remediation if needed. Remediation is often additional worksheets. Students have no vested interest in this and become disengaged. Some teachers are upset that there is now less time to have book talks and share ideas from authentic reading, but the vocabulary-based curriculum has now become solidified in the school wide plan sent to the state. Emerson taught us this a century and a half ago: But this function of opening and feeding the human mind is not to be fulfilled by any mechanical or military method; is not to be trusted to any skill less large than Nature itself. You must not neglect the form, but you must secure the essentials. It is curious how perverse and intermeddling we are, and what vast pains and cost we incur to do wrong. What is the Nature of reading in which Emerson speaks? skrashen.blogspot/…/pleasure-reading-is-very-goo…
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:40:52 +0000
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