I’m reposting this post from a few weeks ago. I’m still working on an emotional level, trying to process it (being attacked in front of 11 colleagues in a vertical alignment meeting. (I will also post my written reaction to it next. It’s just a way to keep my mental health. I will put the part that hurt me in bold below.)
What made me think of it was that just this morning Claire said this on the above topic:
…because Data Turds lie to you and say “You don’t care about assessment?” when they mean “You don’t care about offering affirmation for my brand of inauthentic assessment?”…
Just writing stuff out and sharing it here is so helpful when we get creamed by our colleagues. You’d think one would get used to it but one never does because we try so hard. What everyone needs is a conscious district leader who can shut the data turds up so we can continue to develop this way of teaching without being attacked so often.
Here is the articles from two weeks ago:
We had a grade 6-12 vertical articulation meeting today. Two curriculum specialists from our Office of Learning ran it. The theme of the meeting was about aligning with standards. We talked a lot about assessment, but I had trouble understanding.
When it was my turn to speak, I said that I thought it was more important to align with the research than the standards, that I’m not sure what the standards are based on, and that I wish I knew that so that I could put more heart into the conversation.
So there they were all talking about evaluating what kids should be able do at a certain level, etc. I felt unqualified to be there because the way they were talking was so impressive. They were talking about measuring/evaluating skills and content in kids at various levels and which was better to evaluate, skills or content, and where did they overlap, and where did they not connect.
They got to where they seemed so intent on evaluating what kids could actually do that I felt like I wanted to defend those of my kids whose output skills would emerge later than, say, the kid sitting next to them. I explained why I felt that way in terms of Krashen.
At one point, in a breakout group, one of the curriculum directors said, “Ben, it sounds as if you neither care nor want to know where your students are in terms of what they are learning.” I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
But then later I remembered two things I wish I had thought of to say:
(1) it is very important to me to not judge my kids in terms of what they can do in terms of writing and speech output, especially in the lower levels, but really when they are in the so-called upper levels as well.
(2) and then I should have also responded that when I try to get a student to use, for example, an if clause in the imperfect/conditional format or in any related compound tenses, when that grammar structure is the goal (teaching to that outcome), it is very hard for me to do that because having a grammar objective driving the speech content, as opposed to just letting speech emerge naturally, is very weird ass to me.
I don’t like to judge kids, and having to teach to a certain content objective or even a skill objective (ACTFL benchmarks), instead of naturally letting the discussion go where it will, is really boring.
It was a weird day.