I was asked by my principal to vet through DIBELS data for my school’s kindergarten dual immersion learning program. I have to say that I’ve come away from the experience rather intrigued. At the start of this school year we were bombarded relentlessly with the new catch phrase I’ve heard quite often now in education, “data driven education.” We were ‘trained’ on how to sift through FCAT (Florida’s Comprehensive Standardized Testing) data so that we as educators could ‘FIND’ the lowest performing students and key in on them.

My problems with this new trend comes down to two main factors.

1. Why is our educational system not devoting more time towards more QUALITY professional development? During the academic year my district has spent 2 days ‘training’ the staff at every school to use this data. Could we not have devoted more time on ways to incorporate digital content into the curriculum? From my personal experience in the classroom I teach to everyone with the technology that I have at my disposal. My projects task students to use the three basic learning styles: auditory, visual and kinesthetic.
2. I’m still trying to find the rationale of finding the lower performing students and basically catering your lesson plans to helping them achieve higher scores on a test. This can only lead to one thing from our brightest students, APATHY! This educational rationale brings the higher achieving students down to the middle levels rather then working to maintain, or even show a little growth. A major flaw in this type of thinking is this, our schools are judged ’successful’ if our lowest achievers show gains. Don’t get me wrong. I think this is a great way to judge a school on it’s success. But to what degree can we continue to forget our highest achievers?

I think this is part of what Will Richardson was trying to get across to Lamar Alexander in his chat the other night with him. I’ve come across so many teachers over the last few weeks that are looking for quality instruction, with no one hardly to give it.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.