How do you feel about not being able to help your students during end-of-year testing? I know how I feel. Awful. I know what I think about this rule. It stinks! All year long we play the nurturing, helpful adult that our kids can turn to for advice, guidance, suggestions, and instructions, and suddenly we can't even remind them to write complete sentences, check to make sure they didn't leave anything blank, or tell them that they need to reread the question. That isn't giving them the answer, that is simply doing a teacher's job. That is monitoring. Facilitating. It is what teachers do. It is part of our genetic make-up and someone that has never been in a classroom or interacted over 15 minutes with a room full of energetic kids is telling me how to do my job. I know what the term "enabling" means and I know how to avoid giving my students the sense of entitlement. But, I also know that it breaks my heart when they need me and I have to turn away. I'm a rule follower, so I do it, but it hurts. Makes me feel like I let my kids down. Like I wasn't there when they needed me.Sure, end-of-the-year testing is supposed to be a determination of what they have learned during the school year and how well they can apply these skills. Tell me how many of us can pass a test covering a year's worth of skills without some prodding or gentle reminders? What does this prove? It proves that some kids are better test takers than others, some can retain information longer than others, and some can make sense of questions that don't make sense. This is exactly what I want to know about my kids at the end of the year! Not hardly, I would rather see how well they can apply these skills and solve problems. See how many alternative solutions they can come up with or what their thought process is when they are solving a problem. I don't care if they are good guessers or not.
I want them to believe in themselves. Even if they aren't in "Advanced" or "Adequate". I want them to know that doing their best is good enough. Let's face it, some students will never score above "Average". That doesn't make them dumb and it doesn't make them a failure. It just tells me what skills need to be improved and, in some cases, what their abilities are. It tells me where their opportunities for improvement are, and where I need to focus some practice. It also reminds me that every child is different and they all learn in different ways at different levels. I can't put them all in a neat package labeled "Advanced" and send them off to the next grade. I don't want to label them at all!
And, then we have the growing trend to pay a teacher based on her student's testing performance. Don't threaten to pay me based on what my kids do on the test. Don't threaten to post my student's scores in the paper. Don't pit me against my colleagues. Accept that I'm doing my best and so are my kids. Threats don't work with me. You can't embarrass me into teaching better. You can't break up my team of colleagues by creating a "friendly atmosphere of competition". Some years I have super kids that are whizzes on tests. They can "ace" any tests. Other years, I have kids who struggle to read the questions. We don't waste our school year. I instruct and motivate and they try. They improve, which is what we are all after. It may not be the improvement that you want, but the main thing is they are moving up the scale. That is what counts for any of us.
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