I've made it fairly well known that I have changed my career path from photojournalist to teacher. But let's just make that switch official, okay? No more photojournalist-y crap (okay, maybe sometimes). Let's start talking about education. In particular, testing. I just took my first test of the semester. It was for a journalism course and pretty much all short answer. I didn't study as much as I should have, especially with respects to a few sections of content, but I think I did fairly well. Yay me! One of the things that really helped me was having a test the teacher used two years ago to study from. Yeah. Fairly sure if I didn't have that, I would have failed. Basically. So that got me thinking.
I'm going to be a high school English teacher, right? And part of that will be testing my students. How far should I go to make sure they're prepared for the tests? Testing isn't just a reflection of the students' performance, it is a reflection of my performance. If I'm not teaching something properly, it will show in the tests and I will have to adjust my teaching style for that. Does offering a study guide help the students or does it just hurt them? Like I said, had I not had the test from a few years ago to guide my studying, I probably would have failed. The questions I got right were basically verbatim ones from her old tests. So should I offer old tests to students as study guides? Should I even have study guides?
The student in me panics thinking of taking a course without study guides, or poorly constructed study guides. I love study guides. I know what professors want me to focus on then. I know what they want from me and what I should take from this course. And isn't that the part of testing? To make sure students know what you need them to know? But the teacher part of me wonders how much students learn if you're guiding them with such a heavy hand. I took a statistics course my first semester in college and the professor made at least 4 years of tests available to us. And I diligently worked my way through all of them before each test as an alternative to conventional studying. It worked well. I got an A in that class without much effort outside of taking all those tests. But now? I'm not sure how helpful I'd be to someone struggling in that course. I don't remember much.
It's because I never had to think critically about the content of the course. So then my challenge as a teacher is to get my students to think critically but also simply regurgitate what I need them to do for the standardized tests. Can this be accomplished through short answer tests alone? I think not. So can I get them to regurgitate by taking tests and critically think by writing essays? Is it fair to break the course down like that? When I think back to my favorite English courses, I remember them being structured similarly. I remember learning the most this way. But that's just how I learn, not how everyone learns. If I structure my course in the way I learned best, how can I make sure that everyone learns well? Projects and group work and fun little time fillers only do so much to help the rest of the class learn. It's a difficult balance to find, but if I can identify all this after only a month in the teaching program, I think I'm off to a solid start. Besides, the school district will have so many restrictions on what and how I can teach, I doubt most of this will matter (jk...kinda...a little bit...tongue in cheek? yes).
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