A colleague in the Social Science department recently shared a New York Times article on the value of student perception data as related to our annual student questionnaires. At the bottom of the article are the following three paragraphs:
One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics.
Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers.
“Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”
That got me thinking about my own lecture-heavy AP Psychology course. Which do I do? Do I teach to the AP test, or do students “work through the key concepts” of Psychology?
My initial emotional response is that we work through the key concepts of Psych in preparation for the AP test. If I think past that emotional response, I notice the pronoun shifts: from teachers working through key concepts in the original article, to my rephrasing as “students” working through key concepts, back to me working through key concepts by way of lecture. Is that some linguistic trickery on my part meant to hide from me the fact that I am doing the work (teaching), and that students are not doing the work (learning)? I think so…
I’ve got to, got to, got to figure out a way to reframe the class so that more time, energy, and emphasis is placed on students learning/ teaching themselves. It has to be less me teaching and them passively receiving.