Category: Standardized Testing

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

7/10/2019

Here I am, for the seventh time, at the annual Chappaqua Children's Book Festival. I'm holding a poster for my two newest books in a series called STEM Play. They are literately "hot-off-the-press" and this was my first view of the finished books. What a thrill! Chappaqua, in Westchester County, NY, is a town that values education and reading and attracts the same kind of crowd at their Festival. Last year we had 7,000 visitors, but there were more this year and it was a joy to meet so many families with the interest and money to invest in their children's education.

The public schools here are excellent and the students take the standardized tests. Even so it creates anxiety for good readers. At the end of the Festival, Alexandra Siy and I presented a program on "Slaying the Standardized Testing Dragon." We made a bookmark with the help of our pal Jan Adkins. And we prepared a handout with a strategy for creating life-long learners who love to read books. I'm hoping that you find this useful.

iNK Think Tank’s Strategy or “Secret Sauce”

*Go to www.nonfictionminute.org
*Scroll down the “Categories” on the right to find a topic that interests you.
*Choose a Nonfiction Minute to read. If you are not a strong reader, click on the arrow on the player when it is blue and listen to the author read his/her Minute aloud.
*Plan to keep reading Nonfiction Minutes on a regular basis.
*Click on the T2T icon to see what the Minutes can teach you.
*Make a list of the subjects you have to learn at school.
*Go to iNK Database and register. Use the database to search for lists of books on the subjects you have to learn about in school. http://inkthinktank.org/search/register.cfm
*Go to the library and take out books on those subjects. Read the first paragraph. If the book doesn’t grab you, don’t read it. Pick another.
*Only read books you like to read even if they seem hard at first.
TO BECOME A READER, YOU MUST READ WIDELY (NONFICTION MINUTES) AND DEEPLY (BOOKS ON SUBJECTS THAT INTEREST YOU).

Reading is the most intimate way to connect your mind to another person’s mind. In time, reading will become a life-long habit that you cannot live without. The standardized test will become easy. No sweat at all!!!

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

19/9/2019

wikimedia commons

I wrote this post last year and normally don't republish any posts. But this one is an excellent reminder of the insanity of standardized testing as we begin a new year.

First, you have to read a paragraph: (Note, this is for a grade 6 test)

The modern wood pencil was created by Joseph Dixon, born in Massachusetts in 1799. When he was thirteen years old he made his first pencil in his mother's kitchen. His sea-going father would return from voyages with graphite in the hull of his ship, which was used simply as ballast, or weight, when there was no cargo to transport. This graphite was later dumped overboard to make room for shipments for export. Joseph Dixon got some of this excess graphite, pounded it into powder, mixed it with clay and rolled it into long strips that he baked in his mother's oven to make the "lead" for his pencil. This dried the "lead" and made it firm. He then put a strip of "lead" between two grooved sticks of cedar and glued them together to make a sandwich. He chose cedar because it is soft, can be easily sharpened, and is relatively free of knots. All you had to do was sharpen the pencil with a knife and it was ready to write.

Then you have to answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. You can tell from the passage that it was important for ships to be
a.) heavy enough b.) fast enough c.)wet enough d.) big enough

2. Dixon got some graphite that had been used to replace
a.)cargo b.)powder c.)clay d.) wood

3. What happened to the graphite that Dixon didn't use?
a.)It was thrown away b.)It was used for ballast c.)It was shipped as an export 4.) It was used to build houses

4. Why did Dixon heat the mixture of graphite and clay?
a) To harden it b.) To melt it c.)To turn it into a powder d) To make it dark.

5. Dixon chose cedar because it was
a.) easy to shape b.) firm c.) long d.) cheap

6. How did Dixon get the "lead" inside the pencil?
a.) He glued it between two pieces of wood. b.) He poured it in when it was melted c.) He slide it into a hole he had drilled.) He rolled it in a mixture of sawdust and glue

7. In this passage the word knots refers to
a.) hard spots in wood b.) difficult problems c.) a measure of the speed of ships d.) tying ropes

Now, here are some questions that might interest you about the test questions.
1. Where did I get this information? From a contract asking permission to use the passage from a book I wrote (The Secret Life of School Supplies.)
2. What are the chances that the students read the actual book in their test prep? Nil Ever? Close to nil.
3. Did the students find the passage riveting reading? Probably not. It was taken out of context.
4. Why is it important for students to regurgitate information from the passage in their responses? I have no idea. If they have no real interest in the invention of the pencil, if the story isn't interesting enough to repeat to someone else, it is a manufactured trap to give anxiety to students, parents and teachers. It's the previous paragraph in the book that describes the problem that the invention of Dixon's pencil solved that makes the test paragraph more interesting and memorable.

I would hope that the passages selected by the test creators would be stand-alone attention grabbers. But apparently two paragraphs would be too long. FYI, The pencil happened to be an extremely useful invention for land surveyors. They had to be able to write outside with a permanent dry writing instrument, since at that time, most writing was done with quill and ink, which wasn't suited to noting down critical information in the wind and the rain.

Do you think preparing to answer this kind of question is a good use of your time or your students? I can tell you it's not one of my better paragraphs. Maybe, if they had read more of the book, they wouldn't need test prep to get the answers right.

One other thought. I wonder how well I and my colleague authors who have also had excerpts from their books used as reading passages would perform on such a test. Would we ace it? Somehow I think not.

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

10/9/2019

What happens to behavior when living beings dwell in paradise? Where everything an individual could possible want is at hand? Plenty to eat and drink. It's not too hot, not too cold. Lethal danger is at a distance. I saw it for myself when I visited the Masai Mara in Kenya many years ago. Kenya is on the equator but the Masai plains of Kenya are elevated so the average temperature is 75 degrees every day. There are no seasons. Both night and day are 12 hours long. Nature provided this part of the world enough space and food and water for the largest land-dwelling mammals to evolve. For elephants, hippos, water buffaloes, giraffes life exists in a serene landscape that is interrupted every so often with a scurry of activity when a predator gets hungry. But for the most part, it is a peaceable kingdom. Beasts wander through their day, not moving too fast, sleeping when they feel like it. A Kenyan professor told me that there is little or no incentive for the human population in this environment to become inventive or technological. A subsistence life-style is not difficult. People who live in the moderate latitudes were motivated to invent ways to make life more comfortable. That's why those places are the source for innovation and technology.

When I was young, I heard a lecture by Nicholas Negroponte, a futurist and co-founder of what is now the MIT Media Lab. He described a future where people would never have to leave their homes-- everything they needed could come to them with the push of a button. (It was before we knew about the click of a mouse). The only reason to leave home, he stated emphatically, would be to find a mate or get buried. Many skills by which people currently made a living would become obsolete. The picture he painted horrified me. But, I reasoned, people would still need to know how to read.

That, too, is on the decline. Note the graph on the left.   Except for the reading of cell phones, which is definitely on the upswing. Note the graph on the right.  In 2017 the average adult spend 2 hours and 51 minutes per day on a mobile phone.

Reading for pleasure, to fill up the day, has been pre-empted by a plethora of entertaining activities that require little else than watching. It seems as if the human race is devolving into doing the minimum to exist. As per Negroponte's prediction, we are getting fat and lazy. Negroponte went on to found a movement One Laptop per Child, hoping to reach all children including those who live in the third world. It failed for a variety of reasons, mainly because his manufactured product was poorly designed. In recent years, Negroponte has shifted focus and now says: "If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop."

I'm not sure that's true. I think that the problem in education stems from the lack of reading and thinking regardless of the device. Reading is the only way to get into the minds of educated people who know how to write well and think clearly. Learning to read takes practice. It should not be separated from thinking. That is why my tribe of award-winning authors of nonfiction for children have created the Nonfiction Minute. . We don't just write a readable essay, we also speak it aloud. This exposes less fluent readers the magic of content. The Minutes just happen to be the same length as the reading passages on the standardized tests. But each Minute is a self-contained essay with a beginning, a middle and an end not an excerpt from a larger work taken out of context for the test-taker to struggle with. Our Minutes are not leveled because leveling makes text flat and eliminates voice, the humanity that makes the content come alive. But the Nonfiction Minute is not enough to produce readers and thinkers. They need to tackle fuller works.

For this reason, iNK has opened a bookstore, iNK Books & Media Store. The categories that the books cover are illustrated above. Most of our books are interdisciplinary. They are also beautifully illustrated, carefully designed and edited to make them into learning experiences with the real world. We will be adding books all year. Pick a topic from the icons above that you're required to teach. Help your students discover the pleasure of learning from a good book. Let them build self esteem by doing something that requires effort and perseverance that is also a pleasure. Let them experience the work of people who have spent a lifetime thinking and perfecting their craft of putting words together to make meaning.

Otherwise, writers who think and care about educating children will also go the way of the typewriter manufacturers.

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

11/3/2019

Last week my post "The New Era of Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction" discussed children's nonfiction literature that is finally coming into its own. It had a HUGE response!
I was presenting it as something new but, I must confess, nonfiction children's trade books have been noticed for quite a long time. Who, exactly, has discovered these wonderful books? First, the creators of standardized tests. They excerpt our writing for reading comprehension passages. Second, educators of kids with learning challenges and the gifted. My question is: if these books are used by educators at each end of the learning spectrum, what are the great masses of "average or normal" kids in between compelled to read in school?

Textbooks with worksheets, study questions, and quizzes
Schoolbooks with worksheets, study questions and quizzes.

I put an illustration above from Wikimedia commons to show you what these books look like. Compare it to the picture I used last week. (It's not far; scroll down.)

How come this is happening?

If we're going to give standardized tests to compete with the way kids perform in other parts of the world, we have to standardize education, right?
In order to standardize education we have to make it teacher proof. We have to assume that teachers can't be trusted to seek out their own study materials to fit curricula. We've stopped giving them creative autonomy. (Ask a public school teacher, " So, how's that working for you, lately?")

What happens when you give kids a taste of writing that is compelling, (not compelled)? Let's experiment and find out.

(Drum roll) Presenting the Nonfiction Minute --Short, self-contained essays written by award-winning children's book authors with an audio file so that the more challenged readers have access to content. Make them multi-media by including art and video as appropriate plus information about the author so students can get books at the library by an author whose Minute has whetted their appetite for more.

What are the results?
Five million page views and counting. Lots of letters and comments from teachers and students. We've added a Transfer to Teaching for each Minute (T2Ts), giving suggestions for using the material with students. (Don't know if any real kids actually went to the library, maybe someone can fill me in.)

March is Standardized Test Month. It creates so much anxiety that teachers are given instructions on how to preserve test answer-sheets with vomit on them. We hear our Minutes are used for test prep. That was not our intention.

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education. It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively. Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers. His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention. As an author, I don’t know much about school administration. Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages. It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools. Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day. He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision. He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority. He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond. All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause. Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education. Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for. His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad. Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves. What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations. ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced. Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in. He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.

Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them. This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

Vicki Cobb

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

Vicki Cobb

​​​​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

Categories