Learning by Making Rockets & Robots

[Nemo]

In a hypothetical situation, let's say I was in a state/district/school that forced me to dumb my teaching down to the lowest 25% in order to help the school get more students over a proficiency cut score for a standardized test. I would probably be tempted do one of the following: 1) ignore/break rules until I get fired, 2) move to another state/district/school, 3) quit and go back to engineering. The point: you can drive away teachers if you don't let them teach.

However, I've seen some of the test questions that Iowa is looking at using, and they tend to involve some pretty nice higher level thinking skills. If/when we end up somehow emphasizing those tests more, it is possible that it will actually force better teaching - it depends on how they do it. In my case, I've always been missing feedback from the tests we already do. All we get are the average scores in each subject. That's useless information to me as the teacher. We also are given no information about what's on the tests, because the test makers don't want teachers cheating. I would like to see that situation change. Once we have our set of high school course-specific tests up and running in Iowa, I hope we will have sample exams and concept maps up front to help us plan our teaching, and on the back end we need reports that show how students in our own classes did in each specific content area (not just the overall score). Then I can actually figure out how to change my teaching based on the test results. Otherwise, the entire exercise of testing is masturbatory.