There seems to have been so little overt joy in classrooms for so long, for so many decades and centuries. It is as if everyone has been really sad for a long time. Maybe that is why we believe so much in data collection now, because we have had no other, more obvious, indicators to tell us that our students were indeed learning.
For centuries, there have been no obvious and visible signs in students that they were learning. Trying to figure out what a student – who really resembled a robot more than a human being – had learned from us in our classrooms, we naturally turned to our minds to create testing instruments to show us whether we had been successful or not. It was the logical thing to do, since our classrooms more often resembled tombs than anything else. How else could we know what they had learned than to give a test?
The assessment instruments that we devised showed (usual very slight) gains or losses and we interpreted those (slight, one or two percentage points or less) gains or losses as important. We began to make decisions about ourselves as teachers and our students as learner based on those (mostly very slight) fluctuations in numbers. Not only that, learning became about memorization, which, if one thinks about, aren’t indicators of learning at all, because memorized information isn’t retained.
No blame – we just didn’t have any other way to tell if what we were doing was working. If one were to reflect on the entire process of painstakingly devising assessment instruments, administering them and grading them, as if some dark and wonderful secret about our work could be uncovered in them, one would conclude that the entire process was extremely sad.
The process was sad because we were relying on percentage points gains or losses to reveal whether we were doing a good job or not. And the process was doubly sad in that our students, who are just children and therefore completely dependent on the numbers generated by those testing instruments for feedback about themselves, then began the lifelong process of making long term decisions about themselves and their value to society based on the numerical messages we sent them.
Some of the students got great feedback from us when they could get nine of ten questions right, or even ten of ten (they were truly special), and others got messages from us that they were not good when they got seven or even less questions out of ten right. The message to those kids was that they weren’t very smart and therefore not very useful in society. They weren’t really good. They, of course, being children, believed us.
Are we to continue spending our time on bended knee paying homage to the results of tests as ways to indicate to us our own value and to our students their value in our classrooms? Based on the results of testing, can we say that one teacher or student is really better than another? Aren’t there some intangibles at work in the learning process, which, we must admit, is invisible? Is it possible that we are wrong when we assume that a test can make the invisible visible?
Will we continue to be beholden to a belief in numbers and in ranking people to tell us if we are doing a good job and if our students are learning? Can’t we just look into our children’s faces during class to do that? Or is that just a ridiculous question that shouldn’t be asked?
Is it such an outrageous idea to simply leave behind our dependence on the mind and on data collection and instead just walk off the plank into a new ocean of ideas about how to read our successes or failures as teachers? Are there really failures? Can’t we figure out how we are doing ourselves, by talking with our students and our colleagues? Can’t we just feel the timbre and the tone and the energy and the shared looks among the people in the classroom to tell us how we are doing?
Or is how we feel in our hearts in the process of language acquisition (I’m not talking about a math class here) not to be trusted? Do the happy looks and delightful laughter, so unique to each child as they try so hard to live in their heart centers for as long as they can before we forever shift their attention away from their hearts to their minds, count for nothing in making decisions about language gains?
Is it possible that levels of happiness can be indicators of levels of learning? Or is it going to take another hundred years of sadness before we finally accept that how we feel in a classroom can indeed be trusted as a primary indicator of whether we are learning?