Friday, 2 December 2011

Less is More


Recently we spoke to our school’s Parent Advisory Committee about the shift in assessment from traditional methods to Assessment for Learning. We proposed that a vast majority of our teaching staff are “committed to the transition”, we had a good discussion with the parents of our students about the complexity and difficulty of making this transition, hinging much of the concern on the hard reality of time. We argued that perhaps the greatest challenge when attempting to implement Assessment for Learning (providing descriptive feedback, employing more complex reporting systems like rubrics and matrices, engaging the student in their own learning design) is finding the time to do it. In the realm of curriculum delivery, teachers and administrators are currently recognizing at face value a lesson they have known all along: many course curricula are far too broad in scope of learning outcomes and too shallow in the implementation of each outcome. Teachers constantly feel pressure to “cover the content and move on” – often at the cost of understanding each outcome. This boils down to a conflict of breadth versus depth: learning experiences in high school are often too broad in their scope and too shallow in the coverage of each underlying skill. The result is a paradigm in which teachers feel it is far too difficult to make the time to teach all of the objectives, provide meaningful feedback, and plan learning experiences that are well-suited to these more complex, more meaningful assessments.

We have some excellent examples within our building of teachers and departments breaking out of this paradigm by sacrificing some content and emphasizing quality feedback in the form of written responses, student interviews, and rich peer feedback over social networks. This is the solution according to former deputy superintendent of the Surrey School District, Peter Drescher. He argues that a “less is more, depth over coverage” approach is needed, focusing on “Essential learning outcomes in greater depth”. He argues that:

“Rethinking what we teach must come before we can rethink how we teach. Learning design should move further along the continuum from content knowledge acquisition to an essential understandings/skills development orientation.”  (2008)

 The teachers engaging in this approach are visibly “set free” from the restraints of a long list of curricular outcomes and are able to engage in their passion for teaching students, not courses.  They are able to justify spending the time with students to review their progress, provide quality targeted feedback, and foster personal ownership.

As Drescher states, the goal for administrators should be to allow teachers to challenge any curriculum that presents as a long sequence of shallow objectives. A long sequence of shallow objectives can lead to a long sequence of shallow assessments. We should be encouraging teachers to review this “inch deep and a mile wide” perspective and contemplate the shift to a significantly smaller number of significantly more meaningful learning experiences – an inch wide and a mile deep.

To be continued…


Identify the stakeholders… Trust the process… Trust the people… Edu-Bring

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