How To Raise Test Scores Without Spending Money!
by Jack Farrell
Consultant Teacher
Conejo Valley Unified School District
The initial impact of the “No Child Left Behind legislation” was to increase educational expenses. The Federal Government created a budget to assist states with the implementation of what is termed ‘high stakes testing.’ The stakes are high because schools are judged on their performance on these tests and whether or not targets are met. In extreme cases schools and even districts have been seized by states for failure to improve student performance.
There have also been secondary costs assumed by the state and local districts. Not only is the money provided by the Federal Government inadequate to fund the program, but districts and schools have had to re-tool their teachers and re-organize their curricula to insure these goals are met. Districts and individual schools have provided extensive professional development for their staffs and incurred additional expenses in the form of textbooks and test preparation materials for teachers and students. A budget director at some point should have to report to a school board how much money it took to raise the school-wide score even a point or two.
Scores have risen, and in some cases dramatically, but districts will soon find themselves locked in the inevitable regression to the mean. It is somewhat ironic that at the precise moment that funds have nearly dried up, scores have also risen about as high as they can go and failing budgets will soon be blamed for falling scores and the public recrimination that is sure to follow. So the question becomes, how do schools keep raising scores and how much additional money will it take?
One of the premises of the preceding paragraph is that scores have risen about as high as they can go. I think this premise is correct if the only solution to stalling or falling test scores is to spend money to train more teachers in modern pedagogical theory. I would argue that using research-based strategies and what are termed ‘best practices’ have pushed test scores about as high as they can. Training more teachers and spending more money on materials will not produce any significant rise in test scores in moderate and high performing schools. And yet, a failure to raise scores will risk the label of under-performing, or even failing, on some of our best schools. If spending money will not achieve the desired result, what are schools to do?
How can schools raise test scores without spending any money? The recommendations which follow are virtually all in the area of reading. If followed, though, these recommendations will not only significantly raise reading and language scores, but will also contribute to a rise in math scores. There is good reason for this. All mathematics is language based and to a great extent the solving of an equation combines critical reading skills with a knowledge of the vocabulary of mathematics and the laws of logic which control the steps to a successful solution. A rise in critical reading skills should be accompanied by a rise in mathematical scores as well.
A school can continue to raise its scores without spending any money if it can change its pedagogical focus. Nearly all schools are based on an oral model, and the strategies which support this model can be termed forward teaching. Schools must commit themselves to a text-based model and the strategies that support it I have termed teaching backwards. At its simplest level, most modern pedagogy relies on all knowledge coming out of the mouth of the teacher. The pedagogy that will raise scores assumes that all knowledge begins in silent communication between writer and reader via text. The transition from forward teaching to teaching backwards can begin with a few school-wide steps that cost no money. Here are the steps to transition your school from an oral model to a text-based one (in order from the easiest to the most challenging):
Eliminate the practice of having students take turns orally reading passages from texts.
Virtually every language arts, social science and science classroom I have observed relies on this technique. A student volunteer, or conscript, reads aloud a paragraph from the chapter or story and then either designates another student reader or the teacher does. I have often observed teachers becoming bored themselves with this technique and taking up the reading themselves every few paragraphs. In this fashion, entire chapters of World and U.S. History, as well as significant passages of biology and chemistry, not to mention entire short stories or chapters from novels are rendered orally in the classroom. Many teachers have discovered what an effective management tool this is. I have never seen students act out in class while being read to. What would replace this ubiquitous activity would be silent and independent mastery of grade-level fiction and complex content area text. If this alone were to be instituted by a unified district as early as the 4thgrade and sustained consistently through the 12thgrade, it would have more of an impact on test scores than any other imaginable strategy and would cost nothing to implement.
Teachers often defend this oral practice by admitting their skepticism about student reading in general. They suspect that the bulk of their students do not read assigned materials and an oral classroom rendering of text is assurance that these students were at least exposed to it.
Teachers are skeptical of independent student reading and they should be. Most students I have interviewed consider skimming to be reading. Modern textbooks are codependent in this respect. They display key terms in bold type and add crucial text boxes as marginalia to facilitate the locating of important information in the absence of careful line-by-line reading of the text. It may take considerable effort to return text to its privileged place in the learning cycle.
Eliminate the practice of having students real aloud the information on power point slides or overhead transparencies.
This is an easy one and follows closely the first recommendation. This is another attempt to transfer learning from an oral model to a text-based one. All students should have to read the information on the slides and transparencies, not just listen to one student’s oral reading of the material. This transition privileges written discourse and places the emphasis once again on text-based, as opposed to oral, learning.
Eliminate the practice of reading test directions aloud, or having student volunteers read them to the class.
Many students are confounded by high stakes standardized tests because it represents the first time that teachers do not explain in minute detail how to respond to each section of the test. For the most part, students are left to their own native skills to read the directions and then answer the questions. It seems only obvious that students should practice this with every single quiz and test they take in their regular classes. Teachers should pass out tests and let the students proceed on their own. Teachers should wait until there are questions and not anticipate that students will not be able to negotiate the testing instrument on their own. Students should arrive at high stakes testing with years of practice on mastering a test, from start to finish, on their own.
Eliminate oral reviews of all the material to be tested a day or two before the test.
This is another example of ‘forward teaching.’ Most students know by the 4thor 5thgrade that they only need concern themselves with things the teacher says. In fact, many teachers have uttered some version of the following the day before the test: “If I don’t say it, it won’t be on the test.” What the teacher means is, “you may have not paid much attention in class until now, but if you can just focus closely for this one class period, you will do all right on tomorrow’s test.” Translation: Here are the questions and answers for the test. The teacher may disguise this information cleverly in some form of Jeopardy, or 20 Questions format, but the message is unmistakably clear: “don’t worry about what’s in the text; what’s really important is about to come out of my mouth.” If schools eliminated these pre-test reviews from as early as the 4thgrade, students would be sent a powerful message that they have to pay attention to every part of every lesson and take good notes. They won’t really know what is on the test, but they will learn to review the entire unit on their own before the test. This recommendation will sound heretical at best, perhaps draconian in the extreme, but learning will improve and test scores will rise and not a dime will have been spent and the students’ will be exposed to more curricula because no days will be wasted in review.
This is an especially important recommendation in light of the current state-wide budget shortfall that will likely lead to the elimination of school days in the coming years. If the school year is reduced 5-7 days in a given district, I would recommend the immediate implementation of this recommendation.
Eliminate the use of graphic organizers, except with the lowest performing students.
Language is linear, time-bound and rule governed. Words, whether spoken aloud, or encoded on the page, march by one after another in sequence and each sentence marks elapsed time. The only way these words make sense is that they follow grammatical and usage rules. The problem with graphic organizers is that, by their display, they attempt to turn the linear nature of language into a simultaneous, visual representation of the ideas embodied in the language. They have the unintended consequences of de-contextualizing the ideas and unmooring them from the grammar that links them together. Students can be taught outlining techniques, the use of bullets and dashes as well, but the words themselves should follow manuscript conventions and should be able to be read from left to right and down the page the way text has traditionally been organized. Note-taking supports text-based learning. Graphic organizers support an oral/visual model.
Eliminate the practice of introducing each lesson with an anticipatory set.
This may be my most controversial recommendation. Nothing is more entrenched in modern pedagogical practice than the 7-step lesson plan with its anticipatory set. Teachers use this introductory exercise for all kinds of purposes, but primarily to activate prior knowledge and to motivate the learning that will follow. Over time students have learned to ignore this step in the lesson plan. That is why when the teacher instructs the students to turn to p. 73, the majority wake from their reverie and the teacher is greeted with this question: “What page do we turn to?” Students know that there is no real learning in this part of the lesson and that no part of it will appear on any test. When the teacher announces the page to turn to, the students know the anticipatory set is over and the real lesson is about to begin. Beyond being a waste of class time, the anticipatory set is the most egregious example of forward teaching, for virtually every part of it is out of the teacher’s mouth. Since teaching backwards places its greatest emphasis on text-based learning, a writer should handle any introduction; thus, students should engage any new concept via text first. It is, after all, the writer’s job to engage his reader, activate his prior knowledge, and set the path for learning. The anticipatory set, in the traditional sense, should be reserved for the beginning of units, or fairly large blocks of learning. They do not need to precede every discrete lesson. Most lessons are linked in a logical chain and all the teacher really needs to do is make explicit the transition from one to the other.
The preceding recommendations exclusively attack modern classroom practices and urge their eradication. If staffs agree to do this, the question becomes what will replace all the time now spent on oral introductions, oral reading and extensive oral reviews before exams? My recommendation would be to have nearly all learning begin in text. This would even be true in the mathematics classroom, for, after all, mathematics is language and logic based. Over the last 30 years I have witnessed the text portion of mathematics textbooks shrink until modern textbooks are virtually nothing more than problem sets with information boxes, like comic book balloons, hovering nearby. Math teachers should compose their own text for the students to read. When a teacher places an algorithm on the board, his oral teaching of the steps to solution involves primarily words organized in logical sentences that follow certain rules he wants his students to place on the appropriate cognitive hook. The following are additional steps schools can take to raise test scores without spending any money:
Reduce teacher and student talk. Replace it with text-based communication wherever possible.
To keep this step from costing money will be extremely difficult. To do this teachers will have to make the best possible use of existing textbooks before better ones can be published. Teachers who have a visual display device in their room may be able to display text rather economically. The most economical is to use a computer in conjunction with an LCD projector. If a classroom already has this equipment, it becomes very easy and completely inexpensive to begin a lesson by displaying text. The start-up costs, if a classroom lacks this equipment, are decreasing over time, but still significant. A less expensive alternative is to create transparencies and display them on an overhead projector, a piece of technology now available in nearly every classroom. Many teachers use dittoed hand-outs to engage their students through text, but copies are routinely limited by schools and districts and most teachers cannot afford to duplicate materials not found in the textbook for daily use. If these alternatives are not available to a teacher, the use of the class text is the default. Unfortunately most classroom teachers find modern texts to be seriously deficient and that is one of the prime reasons the oral model has achieved such hegemony.
Add non-narrative content area reading to the sustained silent reading program.
Virtually the only independent reading I have observed in upper elementary, middle and high school classrooms has been fiction, either self-chosen or assigned by the teacher. This reading usually occurs during a regular period of sustained silent reading. I have rarely seen students engaged in content area reading, or even encouraged in this direction. The bias of language arts teachers is in favor of fiction and there is a popular belief that fiction is more engaging for students than non-fiction and that any kind of reading is a good thing. Using this logic, I have observed students reading children’s stories in middle and high school and even graphic novels and comic books. Yet the architecture of non-fiction is often radically different, especially non-narrative non-fiction. Biography and autobiography often have the same basic narrative structure as fiction, but content area books are organized logically rather than chronologically. This is a huge leap in reading demand for emergent readers. If students were to replace at least 50% of their reading with content area reading instead of fiction, the pay-off in increased test scores would, over time, be dramatic.
Use authentic text whenever possible.
Diane Ravitch has chronicled the dilemma textbook publishers have found themselves in while attempting to run the dual gauntlets of bias committees on the left in California and on the right in Texas in her book The Language Police. The results are books so scrubbed free of controversy that they are anything but authentic in nature. In fact, many publishers have thrown up their hands and just had their in-house writers produce the passages for their texts. This is partly the reason that classroom teachers have largely given up on these texts. The value of authentic text cannot be over-estimated. Text scrubbed by bias committees tend to lack both tone and voice. They certainly also lack passion and irony, two of the most valuable tools of the professional writer. Whenever possible, teachers should use authentic text produced by professional writers who did not have an educational use in mind when they produced their texts. Authentic texts, written for real-word audiences, are the best teaching tools in the classroom.
Greatly reduce the use of objective tests (multiple choice, etc.)
Educational reformers have been railing against the bubble test for at least the last 25 years. Ironically, during this period the use of such tests have increased manifold. They are cheap, yield predictable and verifiable results and reduce the correction load of teachers with large class sizes. Secondary teachers who must record-keep on 150-200 students on a daily basis would be hard-pressed to replace the scantron test with any conceivable alternative. These tests have the ancillary benefit of seeming to prepare students for high stakes testing since the bubble test is the preferred method for holding students, teachers and schools accountable during this period of “No Child Left Behind.” I know from preparing students for 22 years for the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition Examination how intellectually challenging a well-written set of objective questions can be. But this kind of testing is peculiarly American. It is an example of an American idea we have not been able to export to the rest of the civilized world. Foreign Exchange students have regularly informed me that they had never seen a bubble test before arriving in the United States. When I ask them how they are tested in their home countries, it is invariably by writing answers to specific questions.
Let’s take the best-case scenario with regard to a bubble test. A student reads an objective question and after ruling out a couple of the choices, settles on “B” as the correct answer and he is right. The most you can deduce from his answer is that he agrees with a statement written by someone else, the teacher or a writer for a test publication company. It is not even words he has written, or chosen, himself. Even if the teacher is convinced that the student understands the concept, he cannot be sure that the student could express it in his own words. Where is the proof that he can? With annual statewide and district testing using the bubble method, the student will have ample opportunity to understand how this testing instrument works. The advantages gained in critical thinking and content area writing will far outweigh the perceived benefits of blackening circles on papers for years on end.
Secondary teachers who abandon the bubble test, but still keep records on 150 or more students per day will need to adopt the ‘tip of the iceberg’ approach; that is, they will have to accurately assess the totality of a student’s work from a glimpse at a chosen part. They must adopt the view that if they are only assigning the amount of writing that they can read and assess, students are not writing enough. If they are only assigning the amount or reading that they can discuss, quiz and test, students are not reading enough. This is the part of the plan most likely to cost a district money: training teachers to assign a greater volume of student work and yet accurately infer the whole from an in-depth examination of only a part of the work.
I would like to describe what a visitor might observe in a district that had decided to raise test scores without spending any money by instituting a ‘teaching backwards’ model. These observable behaviors would be most apparent in the upper elementary grades, middle and high school. A visitor would be struck by how much quieter the classrooms in this district were in comparison with most modern schools. He would also note the students engaged in reading and writing about half the time, even in mathematics and science classrooms. A careful observer would witness students engaged in reading and re-reading content area text. Teachers would spend a good deal of class time sending students back to the text for another go at it. Teachers would continually remind students of their skills in understanding not just what a text means, but how it means what it means.
Over time students in such an environment will grow into sophisticated, independent learners, which, of course, should be the goal of every school. The very mission of our schools should be to sever the bond of dependency modern schools have nurtured in most students. That school is most successful which reaches a stage in the student’s life where he no longer needs it.
This may appear a utopian view of the relationship between student and teacher. But it’s more realistic than it sounds. Teachers would still be there to support students in their learning, to check for understanding and to offer scaffolding for those students who actually need it and only for as long as they need it. All the elements of forward teaching still remain, including explicit direct instruction. Teaching backwards only calls for text to precede talk and for students to continually test the power of their own independence.
There have also been secondary costs assumed by the state and local districts. Not only is the money provided by the Federal Government inadequate to fund the program, but districts and schools have had to re-tool their teachers and re-organize their curricula to insure these goals are met. Districts and individual schools have provided extensive professional development for their staffs and incurred additional expenses in the form of textbooks and test preparation materials for teachers and students. A budget director at some point should have to report to a school board how much money it took to raise the school-wide score even a point or two.
Scores have risen, and in some cases dramatically, but districts will soon find themselves locked in the inevitable regression to the mean. It is somewhat ironic that at the precise moment that funds have nearly dried up, scores have also risen about as high as they can go and failing budgets will soon be blamed for falling scores and the public recrimination that is sure to follow. So the question becomes, how do schools keep raising scores and how much additional money will it take?
One of the premises of the preceding paragraph is that scores have risen about as high as they can go. I think this premise is correct if the only solution to stalling or falling test scores is to spend money to train more teachers in modern pedagogical theory. I would argue that using research-based strategies and what are termed ‘best practices’ have pushed test scores about as high as they can. Training more teachers and spending more money on materials will not produce any significant rise in test scores in moderate and high performing schools. And yet, a failure to raise scores will risk the label of under-performing, or even failing, on some of our best schools. If spending money will not achieve the desired result, what are schools to do?
How can schools raise test scores without spending any money? The recommendations which follow are virtually all in the area of reading. If followed, though, these recommendations will not only significantly raise reading and language scores, but will also contribute to a rise in math scores. There is good reason for this. All mathematics is language based and to a great extent the solving of an equation combines critical reading skills with a knowledge of the vocabulary of mathematics and the laws of logic which control the steps to a successful solution. A rise in critical reading skills should be accompanied by a rise in mathematical scores as well.
A school can continue to raise its scores without spending any money if it can change its pedagogical focus. Nearly all schools are based on an oral model, and the strategies which support this model can be termed forward teaching. Schools must commit themselves to a text-based model and the strategies that support it I have termed teaching backwards. At its simplest level, most modern pedagogy relies on all knowledge coming out of the mouth of the teacher. The pedagogy that will raise scores assumes that all knowledge begins in silent communication between writer and reader via text. The transition from forward teaching to teaching backwards can begin with a few school-wide steps that cost no money. Here are the steps to transition your school from an oral model to a text-based one (in order from the easiest to the most challenging):
Eliminate the practice of having students take turns orally reading passages from texts.
Virtually every language arts, social science and science classroom I have observed relies on this technique. A student volunteer, or conscript, reads aloud a paragraph from the chapter or story and then either designates another student reader or the teacher does. I have often observed teachers becoming bored themselves with this technique and taking up the reading themselves every few paragraphs. In this fashion, entire chapters of World and U.S. History, as well as significant passages of biology and chemistry, not to mention entire short stories or chapters from novels are rendered orally in the classroom. Many teachers have discovered what an effective management tool this is. I have never seen students act out in class while being read to. What would replace this ubiquitous activity would be silent and independent mastery of grade-level fiction and complex content area text. If this alone were to be instituted by a unified district as early as the 4thgrade and sustained consistently through the 12thgrade, it would have more of an impact on test scores than any other imaginable strategy and would cost nothing to implement.
Teachers often defend this oral practice by admitting their skepticism about student reading in general. They suspect that the bulk of their students do not read assigned materials and an oral classroom rendering of text is assurance that these students were at least exposed to it.
Teachers are skeptical of independent student reading and they should be. Most students I have interviewed consider skimming to be reading. Modern textbooks are codependent in this respect. They display key terms in bold type and add crucial text boxes as marginalia to facilitate the locating of important information in the absence of careful line-by-line reading of the text. It may take considerable effort to return text to its privileged place in the learning cycle.
Eliminate the practice of having students real aloud the information on power point slides or overhead transparencies.
This is an easy one and follows closely the first recommendation. This is another attempt to transfer learning from an oral model to a text-based one. All students should have to read the information on the slides and transparencies, not just listen to one student’s oral reading of the material. This transition privileges written discourse and places the emphasis once again on text-based, as opposed to oral, learning.
Eliminate the practice of reading test directions aloud, or having student volunteers read them to the class.
Many students are confounded by high stakes standardized tests because it represents the first time that teachers do not explain in minute detail how to respond to each section of the test. For the most part, students are left to their own native skills to read the directions and then answer the questions. It seems only obvious that students should practice this with every single quiz and test they take in their regular classes. Teachers should pass out tests and let the students proceed on their own. Teachers should wait until there are questions and not anticipate that students will not be able to negotiate the testing instrument on their own. Students should arrive at high stakes testing with years of practice on mastering a test, from start to finish, on their own.
Eliminate oral reviews of all the material to be tested a day or two before the test.
This is another example of ‘forward teaching.’ Most students know by the 4thor 5thgrade that they only need concern themselves with things the teacher says. In fact, many teachers have uttered some version of the following the day before the test: “If I don’t say it, it won’t be on the test.” What the teacher means is, “you may have not paid much attention in class until now, but if you can just focus closely for this one class period, you will do all right on tomorrow’s test.” Translation: Here are the questions and answers for the test. The teacher may disguise this information cleverly in some form of Jeopardy, or 20 Questions format, but the message is unmistakably clear: “don’t worry about what’s in the text; what’s really important is about to come out of my mouth.” If schools eliminated these pre-test reviews from as early as the 4thgrade, students would be sent a powerful message that they have to pay attention to every part of every lesson and take good notes. They won’t really know what is on the test, but they will learn to review the entire unit on their own before the test. This recommendation will sound heretical at best, perhaps draconian in the extreme, but learning will improve and test scores will rise and not a dime will have been spent and the students’ will be exposed to more curricula because no days will be wasted in review.
This is an especially important recommendation in light of the current state-wide budget shortfall that will likely lead to the elimination of school days in the coming years. If the school year is reduced 5-7 days in a given district, I would recommend the immediate implementation of this recommendation.
Eliminate the use of graphic organizers, except with the lowest performing students.
Language is linear, time-bound and rule governed. Words, whether spoken aloud, or encoded on the page, march by one after another in sequence and each sentence marks elapsed time. The only way these words make sense is that they follow grammatical and usage rules. The problem with graphic organizers is that, by their display, they attempt to turn the linear nature of language into a simultaneous, visual representation of the ideas embodied in the language. They have the unintended consequences of de-contextualizing the ideas and unmooring them from the grammar that links them together. Students can be taught outlining techniques, the use of bullets and dashes as well, but the words themselves should follow manuscript conventions and should be able to be read from left to right and down the page the way text has traditionally been organized. Note-taking supports text-based learning. Graphic organizers support an oral/visual model.
Eliminate the practice of introducing each lesson with an anticipatory set.
This may be my most controversial recommendation. Nothing is more entrenched in modern pedagogical practice than the 7-step lesson plan with its anticipatory set. Teachers use this introductory exercise for all kinds of purposes, but primarily to activate prior knowledge and to motivate the learning that will follow. Over time students have learned to ignore this step in the lesson plan. That is why when the teacher instructs the students to turn to p. 73, the majority wake from their reverie and the teacher is greeted with this question: “What page do we turn to?” Students know that there is no real learning in this part of the lesson and that no part of it will appear on any test. When the teacher announces the page to turn to, the students know the anticipatory set is over and the real lesson is about to begin. Beyond being a waste of class time, the anticipatory set is the most egregious example of forward teaching, for virtually every part of it is out of the teacher’s mouth. Since teaching backwards places its greatest emphasis on text-based learning, a writer should handle any introduction; thus, students should engage any new concept via text first. It is, after all, the writer’s job to engage his reader, activate his prior knowledge, and set the path for learning. The anticipatory set, in the traditional sense, should be reserved for the beginning of units, or fairly large blocks of learning. They do not need to precede every discrete lesson. Most lessons are linked in a logical chain and all the teacher really needs to do is make explicit the transition from one to the other.
The preceding recommendations exclusively attack modern classroom practices and urge their eradication. If staffs agree to do this, the question becomes what will replace all the time now spent on oral introductions, oral reading and extensive oral reviews before exams? My recommendation would be to have nearly all learning begin in text. This would even be true in the mathematics classroom, for, after all, mathematics is language and logic based. Over the last 30 years I have witnessed the text portion of mathematics textbooks shrink until modern textbooks are virtually nothing more than problem sets with information boxes, like comic book balloons, hovering nearby. Math teachers should compose their own text for the students to read. When a teacher places an algorithm on the board, his oral teaching of the steps to solution involves primarily words organized in logical sentences that follow certain rules he wants his students to place on the appropriate cognitive hook. The following are additional steps schools can take to raise test scores without spending any money:
Reduce teacher and student talk. Replace it with text-based communication wherever possible.
To keep this step from costing money will be extremely difficult. To do this teachers will have to make the best possible use of existing textbooks before better ones can be published. Teachers who have a visual display device in their room may be able to display text rather economically. The most economical is to use a computer in conjunction with an LCD projector. If a classroom already has this equipment, it becomes very easy and completely inexpensive to begin a lesson by displaying text. The start-up costs, if a classroom lacks this equipment, are decreasing over time, but still significant. A less expensive alternative is to create transparencies and display them on an overhead projector, a piece of technology now available in nearly every classroom. Many teachers use dittoed hand-outs to engage their students through text, but copies are routinely limited by schools and districts and most teachers cannot afford to duplicate materials not found in the textbook for daily use. If these alternatives are not available to a teacher, the use of the class text is the default. Unfortunately most classroom teachers find modern texts to be seriously deficient and that is one of the prime reasons the oral model has achieved such hegemony.
Add non-narrative content area reading to the sustained silent reading program.
Virtually the only independent reading I have observed in upper elementary, middle and high school classrooms has been fiction, either self-chosen or assigned by the teacher. This reading usually occurs during a regular period of sustained silent reading. I have rarely seen students engaged in content area reading, or even encouraged in this direction. The bias of language arts teachers is in favor of fiction and there is a popular belief that fiction is more engaging for students than non-fiction and that any kind of reading is a good thing. Using this logic, I have observed students reading children’s stories in middle and high school and even graphic novels and comic books. Yet the architecture of non-fiction is often radically different, especially non-narrative non-fiction. Biography and autobiography often have the same basic narrative structure as fiction, but content area books are organized logically rather than chronologically. This is a huge leap in reading demand for emergent readers. If students were to replace at least 50% of their reading with content area reading instead of fiction, the pay-off in increased test scores would, over time, be dramatic.
Use authentic text whenever possible.
Diane Ravitch has chronicled the dilemma textbook publishers have found themselves in while attempting to run the dual gauntlets of bias committees on the left in California and on the right in Texas in her book The Language Police. The results are books so scrubbed free of controversy that they are anything but authentic in nature. In fact, many publishers have thrown up their hands and just had their in-house writers produce the passages for their texts. This is partly the reason that classroom teachers have largely given up on these texts. The value of authentic text cannot be over-estimated. Text scrubbed by bias committees tend to lack both tone and voice. They certainly also lack passion and irony, two of the most valuable tools of the professional writer. Whenever possible, teachers should use authentic text produced by professional writers who did not have an educational use in mind when they produced their texts. Authentic texts, written for real-word audiences, are the best teaching tools in the classroom.
Greatly reduce the use of objective tests (multiple choice, etc.)
Educational reformers have been railing against the bubble test for at least the last 25 years. Ironically, during this period the use of such tests have increased manifold. They are cheap, yield predictable and verifiable results and reduce the correction load of teachers with large class sizes. Secondary teachers who must record-keep on 150-200 students on a daily basis would be hard-pressed to replace the scantron test with any conceivable alternative. These tests have the ancillary benefit of seeming to prepare students for high stakes testing since the bubble test is the preferred method for holding students, teachers and schools accountable during this period of “No Child Left Behind.” I know from preparing students for 22 years for the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition Examination how intellectually challenging a well-written set of objective questions can be. But this kind of testing is peculiarly American. It is an example of an American idea we have not been able to export to the rest of the civilized world. Foreign Exchange students have regularly informed me that they had never seen a bubble test before arriving in the United States. When I ask them how they are tested in their home countries, it is invariably by writing answers to specific questions.
Let’s take the best-case scenario with regard to a bubble test. A student reads an objective question and after ruling out a couple of the choices, settles on “B” as the correct answer and he is right. The most you can deduce from his answer is that he agrees with a statement written by someone else, the teacher or a writer for a test publication company. It is not even words he has written, or chosen, himself. Even if the teacher is convinced that the student understands the concept, he cannot be sure that the student could express it in his own words. Where is the proof that he can? With annual statewide and district testing using the bubble method, the student will have ample opportunity to understand how this testing instrument works. The advantages gained in critical thinking and content area writing will far outweigh the perceived benefits of blackening circles on papers for years on end.
Secondary teachers who abandon the bubble test, but still keep records on 150 or more students per day will need to adopt the ‘tip of the iceberg’ approach; that is, they will have to accurately assess the totality of a student’s work from a glimpse at a chosen part. They must adopt the view that if they are only assigning the amount of writing that they can read and assess, students are not writing enough. If they are only assigning the amount or reading that they can discuss, quiz and test, students are not reading enough. This is the part of the plan most likely to cost a district money: training teachers to assign a greater volume of student work and yet accurately infer the whole from an in-depth examination of only a part of the work.
I would like to describe what a visitor might observe in a district that had decided to raise test scores without spending any money by instituting a ‘teaching backwards’ model. These observable behaviors would be most apparent in the upper elementary grades, middle and high school. A visitor would be struck by how much quieter the classrooms in this district were in comparison with most modern schools. He would also note the students engaged in reading and writing about half the time, even in mathematics and science classrooms. A careful observer would witness students engaged in reading and re-reading content area text. Teachers would spend a good deal of class time sending students back to the text for another go at it. Teachers would continually remind students of their skills in understanding not just what a text means, but how it means what it means.
Over time students in such an environment will grow into sophisticated, independent learners, which, of course, should be the goal of every school. The very mission of our schools should be to sever the bond of dependency modern schools have nurtured in most students. That school is most successful which reaches a stage in the student’s life where he no longer needs it.
This may appear a utopian view of the relationship between student and teacher. But it’s more realistic than it sounds. Teachers would still be there to support students in their learning, to check for understanding and to offer scaffolding for those students who actually need it and only for as long as they need it. All the elements of forward teaching still remain, including explicit direct instruction. Teaching backwards only calls for text to precede talk and for students to continually test the power of their own independence.