Resources for Alleghany Quest 2010

Alleghany Quest Resources

Standardized Tests

I have had the opportunity to volunteer at my daughter's school these past two weeks. Subscribing to the volunteer ideal that it's not what I want to do but what they need me to do, I do what I'm asked, which is how I found myself volunteering to proctor standardized tests. I do not support the use of standardized test as a major decision making factor for funding schools and their teachers. So I was quick to recognize the irony of my position as I sat, passing the time by reading Mark Prensky's book Teaching Digital Natives. In my head I was enacting partnering pedagogy with teacher education students and in professional development workshops. Physically, I was  practicing a banking model of teaching by complicity supervising this test. What a contradiction  I was in!
The testing reality of the public school system is antithetical to the student-centered, passion-driven pedagogy encouraged by writers and researchers such as Prensky, Gee, and Schaefer. Weeks of time at the end of school are spent preparing and testing. In some places, benchmark tests are given every week to assess student's progress. These tests take time and energy. Take a week when there are 5 school days. Assuming that the course or class meets every day, which is not necessarily the norm, a test a week means that there are only 4 instructional days left. However, some teachers spend significant time doing test prep during those 4 days and sometimes use the day after the test is taken to go over the test. This is not teaching. This is assessment-driven drill and skill. Most teachers I know do not like this at all. In fact a teacher recently said to me that she wished parents would do something about this.
I am a parent and a teacher educator and researcher. I am in a perfect position to do something, to raise voices against the tyranny of the test. Yet, I don't. Maybe next year I won't volunteer to proctor. Maybe next year I will say, "I can't support testing by being there to help you with it." But that doesn't seem right to me. They need help, but I'd rather be of help by volunteering to lead an exploratory class. Well, my conscience nags me and surely will not let this rest.
At least it gave me time to read.

Verb study of writing/composing

Why I care about poetry

No, they do not ask your students to write poems on the end of course test. But writing poetry can do so much more for you than writing about integrity in a 5 paragraph essay. When you use poetry in your classroom, students get to play with language. They get to feel the shape of the word, hold onto the meaning for a while, weighing whether it is really what they mean to say. The sub genres of poetry are endless. Villanelles, sonnets, free verse, and our students' favorite, haiku's. Poetry writers tell stories, paint pictures, explain situations. With shape poetry they get to mold the form of the poem, perhaps into a house or a flower or a spiral. They get to listen to the sounds of words for staccato, vibrato, innuendo. Writing poetry allows them to push themselves into places they can't go in the essay.
I hope that the future teachers of writing I work with will see poetry as not just something to consume, dissect, and critique, but also as something to create, finesse, and read aloud. Teach students to write poetry, then when the time comes for them to write that sterile essay on the end of course test, maybe they'll remember some of the lessons of language learned in writing poems.

Lesuco in a nutshell