Teachers frequently complain about debate the need for the plethora of tests that we administer on a regular basis, and I have to admit I’m right in there with them. It seems like there is so much testing going on that we have little time left for instruction.

The reality of course is that there is plenty of instruction going on, we just don’t have time to teach everything we would like or even are supposed to teach.

In this article, Scott McCleod proposes doing more testing, not less. I can almost hear you saying, “You have got to be kidding!” But hold on. He has a great point, and in fact if we do more of the right kind of testing, we can actually save time and have more time for the quality instruction we want to do.

Pretesting like Scott is suggesting is something that I heartily advocate. As a teacher of gifted students, I’m often called on to help classroom teachers figure out how to meet the needs of students who have already mastered a large chunk of the material they are about to cover in class. Though some teachers are open and willing to learn how to compact the curriculum by letting kids “test out” of some things they’ve already learned, many are reluctant. They are afraid they won’t have enough “scores” for the child to adequately calculate a report card grade, for example. They have a hard time justifying allowing a child to “skip” an assignment that others have to do because it’s “unfair.”

But as Scott points out, how fair is it to the child who has to sit through instruction they don’t need? Consider taking the time to pretest every unit you teach, and you will gain much:

• Pretesting can help you identify content that everyone in the class has mastered, which means you can skim over or skip it completely.
• You will also note the areas that are most broadly misunderstood so you can plan the most intensive instruction around those topics and avoid skimming over things you “knew” they already had last year.
• You can identify patterns in the errors that students make so you can select specific exercises and instruction that will correct those misconceptions.
• You can use the data to group students according to need, designing small group instruction or learning center assignments that are targeted to supporting their particular weaknesses.
• If you team teach or co-teach with someone who isn’t in the classroom with you every day, pretest results can give that co-teacher a more complete picture of your students
• If you are basing instructional decisions on pretest data, you have something objective you can point back to if you are challenged by a parent or administrator about why you are doing a particular lesson, activity or assignment.

What have been your experiences with pretesting? When is it most useful? When do you find it not as helpful?

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Grandé With Room.)

Image by kevindooley via Flickr

Yesterday, I shared some questions that I often use to help create an atmosphere of thinking in my classroom. Unfortunately, when I ask a student to explain their reasoning, they often aren’t able to reflect back on their thought process and verbalize what took place. In some cases, the best they can come up with is “it just popped into my head.”

In order to train students how to do this, I scaffold the process for them at first to give them a structure within which they can build their own responses. They need to learn three skills to allow this to happen:

1. Focus on the process before they start
2. Monitor their reasoning as they are working
3. Reflect back and explain to someone else what they were thinking

Each of these skills needs to be modeled and practiced, and students need many opportunities to use them. These thinking skills are learned best when they are integrated into the regular flow of instruction rather than explicitly taught as discrete topics. One way to do that is to build one or more of these scaffolding activities into every lesson:

• Think-Alouds
• Leveled problems
• Graphic organizers (e.g. T-chart)
• Using “magic words” that students can use which require explanation of reasoning
• Asking prompt questions (such as those in yesterday’s post)
• Give part of the solution, then have students complete it
• Give the answer, students write the solution
• Give the explanation, students write the solution
• Give the solution, students write the explanation
• Checklists or mnemonics to aid recall of processes
• Journals to practice informal writing about problem solving
• Vocabulary games to build language skills and improve communication about reasoning
• Allow students to rewrite weak explanations to improve them
• Show sample student papers that demonstrate good skills
• Teach students to score responses using a rubric
• Have students score their own work or a partner’s work
• Trade papers with another class and have students score

Image by gutter via Flickr

One of the things that I frequently see in classrooms that I visit is students who can mechanically produce an answer to a question or problem but who don’t really understand how or why the process they used works. As teachers, we need to focus more on the thinking process that a student used to get to an answer rather than on the answer itself.

Certainly there are times when simple recall is important, and when it’s best to give students a brief indication of whether their response is correct or incorrect. But for any question that involves reasoning, judgment, assimilation, synthesis, or similar higher level thinking, I like to ask follow-up questions like these:

• “Why did you do that?”
• “How did you get that?”
• “How do you know?”
• “What does that number/fact/word represent?”
• “What does that mean?”
• “Can you justify your answer?”
• “Can you prove it?”

I ask these regardless of whether the initial answer is right or wrong. This has several benefits:

1. I can get a better understanding of both the right and wrong answers a student gives. Was it simply an automatic application of a rote process? Is there valid reasoning going on with simple mistakes? Was the right answer a guess or a fluke? Does the students have a misconception that happens to work right in this instance?
2. Occasionally a student will have a good justification for an alternative answer I hadn’t considered, and asking for the rationale saves me from a hasty dismissal.
3. It makes it clear to the student that they are responsible for their answers, not me.
4. It creates an atmostphere that is simultaneously more rigorous and more open. It becomes safer to be “wrong”, because when they can explain their thinking, we focus on the process instead of the result. It is rare that a student does nothing right in that thinking process, and so we can begin with “I understand where you are coming from. This part was really good thinking, but here is where you got off track and how you can fix it next time.”

So many times I have been in a classroom where a student gives an incorrect answer to a question, the teacher gets a correct answer from another student (or simply provides it him- or herself), and moves on. I’ll sometimes go to that student’s desk and privately ask for the explanation. “Show me how you got that,” I’ll say, and they’ll walk me through the process. It rarely takes me more than a few moments to explain the flaw in the thinking and help the student understand.

Take the time to question everything your students do. Create an environment for thinking in your classroom.

In my job as a gifted teacher, parents often come to me with concerns about their children having appropriate learning experiences in school. Many times, the first clue that a student is bright or gifted and needs extra challenge is when he or she says, “I’m bored.”

As adults, when we are in a learning situation that’s boring, it is often because the content is something we already know and don’t need to practice more.

It’s important for us as parents to remember that children often don’t have the vocabulary or introspective ability to explain what they are feeling, so they may fall back on “boring” as the closest approximation. They also may not understand the root causes of their feelings to be able to describe for you where they are coming from.

Certainly students will be bored when the work they are asked to do is too easy and they have already mastered it, and it is one of the first things we need to consider. But there are many other things that might be contributing to the feeling that a child associates with boredom. When a child says, “I’m bored…,” it could also mean…

• The work is too hard
• The work isn’t interesting to me
• The work is…work
• I’m afraid I can’t do it
• I don’t like the subject
• I don’t like the assignment
• I don’t like the teacher
• I don’t like my classmates
• I don’t understand
• I don’t want to understand
• I’m tired
• I’m distracted
• I’m preoccupied
• I’m uncomfortable
• I’m angry about something that happened this morning
• I’m worried about something that might happen tomorrow
• I’d rather be at recess
• I’d rather be at home
• I’d rather be at the movies/pool/park/etc.

If we are too quick to assume that “bored” always means “too easy,” then it won’t take long for our children to learn that when they don’t like doing something, just saying those magic words will make it go away

It’s up to us, then, to be sure we don’t take this kind of statement at immediate face value. Instead, ask questions and probe deeper into the situation to find out more about what is going on and why. Then we will have the information we need to address the problem and fix it.

(Originally posted June 5, 2008 at Grandé With Room)