Educational Leadership - September 2009

and nothing which goes is lost. —Anne Sophie Swetchine

with what they are doing.

Writing and speaking are valuable because they require making thought and feeling public; unless we are required to articulate to others what we think, feel, and believe—and receive timely and appropriate feedback from teachers and peers—most of us convince ourselves that we understand something even when we do not.

Asking students investigating the water example above to share with their group, orally or in writing, their analyses and recommendations is just one example of such engagement. Sharing first, second, and even third drafts of papers with peers and one’s teacher on various assignments in any content area makes learning public and provides opportunity for peer teaching, a strategy strongly supported by learning research. More than that, critiquing one another’s work helps students learn to provide civil and constructive feedback, receive criticism, internalize standards and criteria for excellence, and reflect on their own work in progress.

Rethinking Assessment Because feedback during learning is crucial, we must rethink the importance and role of assessment. Final and midterm tests are not enough; nor are standardized tests helpful as learning tools. Assessment must be timely and appropriate to inform students and teachers during, not after, learning—in time and in ways that allow for correction and celebration. We need to understand assessment as a powerful form of teaching and learning that signals to students what knowledge and skills they need to master and what standards they need to achieve. Ultimately, we want students not to please us or to simply get good grades, but rather to please themselves by achieving worthwhile goals and reaching standards of excellence, thus becoming long-term learners.

Increased Urgency

What we are reaping from the K– 12 system today is not good enough. The dropout rate, especially in urban areas, is tragic. And even a high school diploma hardly signals that one is “educated.” Students coming to college are far more intellectually and emotionally fragile than ever before, far less able to make sense of things (Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, 2006).

The content and
skills needed are
not really new,
but in these times
they have become
far more necessary
and urgent.

I hasten to add that schools are hardly the sole cause of the problems. The larger cultural forces with which children and adolescents must cope— coarsening television and Internet content; family economic distress; absent parents; the paradox of the electronic umbilical computer and cell phone “connections,” with their insidious psychological and emotional disconnecting effects; and the dumbing down of K– 12 education through a focus on reductionist standardized tests—are cumulatively having adverse and perverse effects on students before and during college.

The good news is that we know far more about effective education than we are using. Education and brain-based research point to the power of the same elements of education quality for which

many reformers are calling: high expectations and standards, sufficient time devoted to learning, timely and appropriate feedback, talented teachers, and engagement of students. These key variables are not new. What we have increasingly come to understand, however, is that none of these is particularly powerful in isolation. Each school, indeed each classroom, has its own ecology in which systemic and systematic change must take place, so each teacher and school must purposefully combine all of these factors to create a synergistic and cumulative effect. We have to do many things at once to achieve significant learning.

We cannot purchase a well-rounded education for a flat world with new technology, a new standardized test, or an SAT prep course. We cannot achieve it by abandoning the rigorous teaching of reading, writing, science, math, history, and literature. Indeed, we need to teach these subjects far more effectively, along with the 21st century skills mentioned above, in ways that respect what we know about learning.

And we need to move in this direction at flat-out speed. EL

References

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education and other essays. New York: Macmillan.

Friedman, T. (2007). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. (2006). A test of leadership: Charting the future of U.S. higher education. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Richard H. Hersh is Senior Consultant at Keeling and Associates, a higher education consulting firm in New York, New York. He is former president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, New York, and of Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut; rhersh@keeling associates.com.