Narrow measures of learning

Accountability in its current form has an obsession with outputs. And the output that accountability has fallen in love with is test scores.

More and more research is coming out, confirming what Jean Piaget said long ago:

"Anyone can confirm how little the grading that results from examinations corresponds to the final useful work of people in real life."

Whether or not we can or should eliminate testing is a larger and seperate point that I don't wish to try to make here. Rather, I would like to make the argument that we should measure and value educational inputs as much as as we value outputs.

Here are a list of inputs that we could measure and value to determine good schools and good teachers:

• What is the book to student ratio in the school's library? How often are new books bought according to student's interests?
• Is their an intramural program for kids to actively participate in?
• What kinds of opportunities are there for students to go on field trips?
• What kind of inventory does the science department have to facilitate science experiments?
• Are students given the opportunity to learn how to properly use social networking programs such as Facebook, Twitter, wikis, blogs and discussion forums.
• What is the student to computer ratio? Is there reliable internet connection?
• Are there sports teams that take all who tryout and cut no one?
• Are students encouraged and provided time to read for enjoyment?
• Do staff find the time and make the effort to create strong and healthy relationships with their students?

Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind and The Design of Business explains, "the perception that good management is closley linked to good measurement runs deep." Too often we become very comfortable with sayings like "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it". Martin explains in his blog entry Management by Imagination:

"however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a 'reality' that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves."

Our misguided obsessive need for data to drive our decisions has placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on analytical thinking. This is not to say that we should abandon analytical thinking - rather, we simply need to strike a better balance with intuitive thinking (respecting what we know to be true without reasoning)

Until we can strike a better balance between analytical and intuitive thinking, accountability in education will remain on narrow measures of learning.

Analytical vs Intuitive Thinking

Roger Martin's book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage outlines the difference between analytical and intuitive thinking.

Martin explains the two kinds of thinking:

No good product was ever created from quantitative market research. Great products spring from the heart and soul of a great designer, unencumbered by committees, processes, or analyses. To proponents of this philosophy, the creative instinct - the unanalyzed flash of insight - is venerated as the source of true innovation. At the heart of this school is intuitive thinking is the art of knowing without reasoning.

Martin doesn't suggest that one is necessarily more important than the other, but that both serve important purposes, depending on your objectives, and that a balance must be found between the two. He explains:

Neither analysis nor intuition alone is enough. Rather than forcing a binary choice to drive out either analysis or intuition, the burdon of this book is to reconcile the two modes of thought.

Today's educational accountability policies are woefully imbalanced - we have an obsessive focus on analytical thinking. Phrases like 'data driven decisions' and measuring learning through very limited kinds of testing have contributed to a gross ignorance toward intuitive thinking.

The costs of this ignorance is becoming more and more evident. Roger Martin goes on to say that:

Organizations dominated by analytical thinking are built to operate as they always have; they are structurally resistant to the idea of designing and redesigning themselves and their business dynamically over time. They are built to maintain the status quo.

Analytical thinking, which harnesses two familiar forms of logic - deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning - to declare truths and certainties about the world. The goal of this model is mastery through rigorous, continously repeated analytical process. Judgement, bias, and variation are the enemies. If they are vanquished, the theory goes, great decisions will be made and great value will be created.

When school gets stuck in the status quo, we run the risk of preparing our childrens' future for only our own past - we end up teaching 21st century children inside a 20th century model.

So how do we subscribe to more intuitive thinking?

We have to trust teachers.

Our current demands for more and more standardized curriculum, standardized assessment and standardized instruction are an attempt to 'teacher-proof' education.

A doctor would never take a patient's temperature over and over again - hoping that the act of measuring would bring the patient's temperature down. At some point, the doctor has to stop measuring and take care of the patient. Now put a gun to that doctor's head and demand he do something about the patient's temperature; he might resort to placing the patient in a tub of ice.

Because today's teachers are so inundated with the 'need' to measure students, they don't have the necessary time or resources to properly take care of their students. And because high-stakes testing has placed so much pressure on teachers to show achievement, some have resorted to short-term solutions that simply cure the symptoms (low scores) and ignore the real problem (learning or lack of).

A doctor wouldn't send home an obviously sick patient simply because all of the tests came back saying there was nothing wrong with the patient. The doctor can intuitively see that his analytical tests have not properly served their purpose. Instead, the doctor refuses to be a slave to his analytical reasoning and pursues what he intuitively know to be true.

The excessive dependence on analytical thinking has deprofessionalized teachers. They have been stripped of their confidence to resist becoming slaves to the tests. Teachers no longer feel like they can pursue what they intuitively know to be true - that is, there is something wrong with our current day narrow measures of learning.

And our children are suffering because of it.