Re-Educating Our Parents

In public education, the pressure to keep doing what we’ve always done is rooted in societal expectation and filtered through the lens parents remember their own education.  If there is going to be a change in how we deliver public education, it is going to take a re-education of our communities. Our parents need to see the value and recognize the need for the change.  As Dr. Demming would say… We need to drive the fear out!  Just asking our parents to take a leap of faith and embrace change is not good enough.  Our children are too precious to take that kind of risk.

In our last post, we made reference to assessment being one of the biggest levers to effect change in public education.  The use of assessment FOR and AS learning is where the change needs to take root.  We need to move past the summative evaluation that concludes, “You got an A or a B”.  This is the re-education of our parents that needs to happen.  We must move our parents away from the need to receive marks and percentages as a definition of learning.  Assessment should be part of the learning process, a step towards a better understanding, a way to engage and spark a child’s interest not a conclusion to the learning.

In Elementary school, parents enjoy in-depth, comment-based feedback on their child’s learning. Why do we move away from this model in secondary school? Once in secondary school, the system leads families down a path of letter grades and percentages. For us at the secondary level, moving to a more descriptive formative feedback style will free our students and make them more accountable for their own learning.

 

How do we phase out this dependency on numbers, percentages and or letter grades?  The key is to instill a change process that shifts the emphasis off the numeric value and more onto descriptive feedback that speaks to the growth of the child. This is the core emphasis of the work that needs to be done. The factory model of bringing in students as “raw materials” and grinding them out within a statistical spread of a normal distribution doesn’t apply anymore. Society has changed and our students’ needs have changed.  And on top of this, we as educators now know more than we ever did about individual learning styles and needs. The educational community is realizing that we must change. It should therefore be our responsibility as public educators to lead the way by educating our communities and helping them navigate the change. It’s about time we started to question why we demand letter grades and percentages from our schools when society clearly doesn't demand it for itself.

Formative assessment with descriptive authentic feedback will improve learning and make students more engaged and promote independent learners.  If it’s all about creating life long learners, then we have no choice! Are our parents ready and willing to move past a letter grade on a report card?  If you knew that your child would be more engaged and spend more time working to improve themself, would you make the shift?

Are you ready for your child to engage you in their learning?  What a novel concept it is to have your child sit down with you and discuss their learning. Parent Teacher Conferences will become Student Centered Conferences where we all gather to hear what the child has to say about their own learning.  A conversations where they eagerly articulate, explain, support and endorse their own learning.