Lose Weight Fast
From the desk of Alice…
There is an advertisement in one of my favorite magazines that suggests you can lose weight fast “and safely” by replacing all your meals for an entire week with a liquid concoction. Hmmm- I don’t think replacing my meals for a week with just liquid sounds safe. It is not something I would ever choose under normal circumstances and it defies common sense.
However, I can see people choosing this if they want a quick way to lose weight. I can see people choosing this if they want to lose weight instead of improve their overall health. I can see people trying this because they are desperate for results.
Are we doing this in our classrooms? Are we trying the liquid diet in an effort to raise test scores? I am seeing test prep in our classrooms more and more and there are plenty of people defending it despite the current shift in standards and assessments. Are we replacing the balanced meal with a poor liquid imitation? Are we taking books/manipulatives out of children’s hands and replacing them with test selections and passages? Are we openly suggesting to teachers that they should “stop” instruction (even for part of the day) and teach to the test?
Yes. I know we are. I have seen it and heard the excuses. It’s coming from all sides. Well meaning parents want to see the skill worksheets and the numbers on top, fearful administrators block off instructional time to “mock assess”, and teachers constantly worry about what will happen if they don’t do the test prep workbooks.
Instead of continuing down the road we have gone down many times, why don’t we stop, take a breath and tap into our common sense? Let’s think about what would really help our students. The very best test prep any person could ever use is authentic instruction. Why would we ever think we are going to get results any other way than by actually teaching?
We are kidding ourselves if we continue to think this generation of students needs test sophistication. Many of them have been tested each quarter since 3rd grade on top of end of the year tests and other required tests from the districts and states. This adds up to about 25-30 tests that the current 9th grader has taken since 3rd grade. I am pretty sure they know how to bubble and choose answers in a secure environment.
What they may not know is how to think. If we keep trimming instructional time to do test prep work, exactly when are we going to teach them?
The research shows that students who know how to think critically tend to achieve more on assessments. Yep- just imagine that students will actually learn to think and apply thinking in on a high stakes assessment if they received quality instruction daily. I think we all would instinctively agree with this. If we want students to practice thinking, assessing them and “pretend assessing” them is NOT going to get us there. If we want them to practice thinking then we have to teach them.
On the TV show The Biggest Loser, Jillian recommends you eat right and exercise to improve the quality of your life. There is research to support this and there are few healthy short cuts that get lasting results. I am recommending we actually use quality instruction to improve the thinking of our students. There is research to support this. There is no healthy shortcut that is going to impact true learning more than actual teaching. We have to go in our rooms and execute high quality instruction daily if we want students to learn and think critically.
So here it is. The year is 2013 and we have a legion of students who are going to be tested to death by the time they graduate. That is not an order to stop teaching. In fact, common sense would tell us the opposite. It’s time to teach.
Abandon the test prep workbooks you were hoodwinked into buying or have on hand because that is what we did in 1996. Stop referencing “the test” in every meeting, email, or discussion. Replace these behaviors with healthy instructional behaviors like immersing students in authentic critical thinking and respond based on what you are noticing about your learners. Switch the marathon meetings to discussions about student work samples and offer suggestions to each other instead of beating each other up over numbers.
And speaking of numbers, make sure you understand them. Be very clear about what each piece of data can tell you, cannot tell you and if you aren’t using it to drive a conversation about instruction, then why are you talking about it?
Educate parents so they understand the assessment cycle and where the data really fits. Educate parents so they begin to value authentic learning tasks as opposed to worksheets and test prep passages. Find your inner strength, stand firm in your beliefs and enlist the community to support what you are trying to accomplish through authentic teaching and learning.
I am suggesting you take the bull by the horns here. You don’t need a liquid diet in order to get results. You need to authentically instruct students each day and stop worrying that if you “only teach” they might not do well on the test. Even Weight Watchers suggests people eat to lose weight-no liquid diet needed.