High Stakes & Stress
Increased testing in our classrooms has significantly increased stress
levels in our students (Willis, 2006). This is having an effect on student
brains. Neuroimaging and neuroscientific research have exposed the negative
impact stress and anxiousness have on the brain’s neurotransmitters.
Stress and stressful learning environments block learning. Alfie Kohn writes in
his article Feel- Bad Education: The cult
of rigor and the loss of joy (2004), that the deepest critical thinking
occurs when students are at their most creative, making connections in an
atmosphere of “exuberant discovery”. In other words, teachers need to bring the joy back into learning. Recent studies
have shown that ‘cognitive playfulness’ is aligned to a willingness to engage
with new ideas, creativity and innovation - skills highly valued in a 21st
Century economy. It was also found that if more emphasis is placed on the learning
goals rather than performance goals, then strategic thinking and
cognitive playfulness is a more likely outcome (Tan & MacWilliam, 2008,
p.7).
In other words, if we take away performance-based anxiety and replace it
with a focus on the actual learning, our
students’ creative capacity will increase.
Dylan Wiliam
argues that assessment should be central to education (2011, p.46).
Specifically, Wiliam points to formative assessment, (gathering
evidence about what students have learned in order to inform teaching practice
and decide what to do next) as the most effective way of bridging teaching and
learning. He shows that the same
assessment task used formatively, rather than in a summative way, has a far
greater impact upon student learning.
Indeed,
in many cases, internal summative
and performance-based tasks can often be replaced with formative assessment
strategies that are ongoing, diagnostic and from a student’s perspective,
non-threatening. Summative assessment often takes the form of a grade or mark
on a page with a few accompanying teacher comments. For most adolescents (and
many other students for that matter), grading practices only serve to emphasize
competition and this feedback often has a negative impact. We know that students
often go straight to the score and ignore the comments. By using comments as
feedback (what works well- what needs improving) in the absence of a score or
grade, students are encouraged to improve upon their work and teachers are
given an ideal opportunity to enhance their learning (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall & Wiliam, 2004).
Tapping
Into Technology
In
many cases, middle schools have been slow to embrace technology in their
classrooms and multiliteracies are still
being “understood as ‘garnish’ to the ‘pedagogical roast’ of traditional
code-based and print-based academic literacies” (Tan & McWilliam, 2009,
p.213). Schools are meant to be educating students for their digital
future, but are still faced with a standardized testing culture that is driven
by flat literacy practices. A growing body of evidence suggests that digital
and Intelligent Web technologies can have a profound impact upon student
learning. Even more importantly, these technologies can be used to work with
the enormous changes that adolescents are undergoing at this particular stage
of their development.
Digital
tools can be used by students to pursue passionate interests. They can engage
students on an emotional level, build metacognitive skills and provide a social
context for learning. Students could be encouraged to write about what they are
passionate about on publically accessible blogs. They could be analysing and
creating genre features and hybrid genres across a vast array of multimedia
forms, while at the same time, communicating with each other via social media
to critique what they see as good and bad examples (critical literacy). Over
time, such deep learning experiences fire their creativity and knowledge of the
genre so that they are much better placed to create their own genre specific
texts (Armstrong, 2006).
Learning
is not just about the retention of content. If students do not come up with
their own answers, learning is superficial (multiple choice tests are a good
example of this). Using tools like the SAMR Model (Puentedura, 2014)
to guide them, teachers should be attempting to incorporate technology as a
means of providing an
alternative to the high stakes, top down approach to pedagogy. Digital
technologies offer interactivity, informative feedback and intrinsic motivation
(Shapiro, 2014). Students can work
collaboratively and interdependently to explore content curiously, deepen their
understanding through imaginative activities, create new content by adapting to
new situations and scenarios and passionately express their learning in new and
creative ways. It is through these collaborative approaches to learning that
students’ metacognition and social skills are sharpened and they become more
self-directed, critical thinkers.
