ELA PARCC Represents an Old Culture of Learning

Two children sharing a draft of their work...

I. Building Possible Literary Worlds 


Years ago I was in a student in an English seminar and one of the texts we read and studied was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. It was equal parts ruse and mystery--alongside a deeply semiotic text.  I grasped the plot as I read, but deeper understanding of the work happened through conversation, writing, rereading with those in the seminar. Writing critically about the text in more formal ways occurred after all of these rehearsals and required many revisions.  It's one thing to understand a text after reading and another to write critically about the text. Alongside all of this, I reread large sections of text for making meaning is most often a cumulative affair.  With literature, one reads more like a seeker of truth that a detective following prescribed clues.

Towards the beginning of Foucault's Pendulum, Diotallevi is having a conversation with Belbo about meaning making while reading the Torah.  He says:

But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.  (Eco, Umberto (2007-03-05). Foucault's Pendulum (p. 33). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. )

Composing possible literary worlds is the work of literary reading--work that often isn't confined to one reader but happens in conjunction with the text, the reader and the context (where, when  how & why the reading is happening). This making of possible worlds is a type of reading that has certainly allowed me to be career-successful, flexible, and able to shift into and out of numerous work scenarios.

In thinking about the work required to compose possible word while reading, Jerome Bruner in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, concludes:

I have tried to make the case that the function of literature as art is to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible worlds that a text can refer to. I have used the term "to subjunctivize," to render the world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation. Literature subjunctivizes, makes strange, renders the obvious less so, the unknowable less so as well, matters of value more open to reason and intuition. Literature, in this spirit, is an instrument of freedom, lightness, imagination, and yes, reason. It is our only hope against the long gray night. (p. 159)

Reading literature opens us.  It allows us to understand, perhaps experience, a world that is less fixed, banal. It allows us to contemplate and respond to complexity and uncertainty in ourselves and in others. Maxine Greene would tell us that reading literature is a way to make ourselves  more (other)wise. We compose possible world as we read literature.  It is not what is found on page 14 that is most essential. Extraction is not a literary end game, regardless of those who would tout reading as detective work.  It is much more complex. We come to understand page 14 in conjunction to the whole of the work. Meaning is accrued not only across the text--but as we read and reread it.

The logic of narrative is different from the logic of an informational or argumentative text. Yet, how we currently measure students' reading of literary texts here in the USA is more about privileging the fixed, the banal and the quick.  It's about extracting discrete bits of information.

Let's take a moment to look at the newly released end-of-the-year (EOY) PARCC tests.

II. A Sample Grade 3 EOY from PARCC

I was thinking about reading literature as I perused the released samples for the third grade end-of-the-year (EOY) English Language Arts (ELA) PARCC.  The test requires third graders to read two texts (literary and informational) and answer 12 questions, the majority of which are paired questions. If students do not answer Part A of the question correctly, they cannot receive credit for correctly answering Part B of the question.  Keep in mind that this is the high stakes test that is supposed to measure the essential ELA learning that has happened across a year. Essential  has been determined by the folks who wrote the Common Core.  So let's take a look at one paired question from the literature test and one paired from the informational text.  Both are said to measure the first reading standard: Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. 

The grade 3 EOY practice test begins with students reading a narrative text about a porcupine and answering 4 paired questions and a fifth question requiring students to manipulate text (drag and drop type question.).

Here's the first question:

Screen Shot from PARCC Grade 3 ELA EOY 

The correct answers for Part A is A (Hitting the ground would harm Pordy).
The correct answers for Part B is D and F.
The standards these questions measure are RL1, RL4, and L4.

After completing the literature test, students next read the informational text, “What is a Spacewalk?” by NASA. They answer 7 questions: 6 paired and one drag and drop type question. Now let's look at a paired question for the informational text.

Here is the section of the passage students would refer to when answering question 9.

from EOY Grade 3 test

Here is Part A and Part B questions.

The correct answers for Part A is C .
The correct answers for Part B is C and D.
The standards these questions measure are RI1, RI8 .

Extracting information happens more directly when reading informational text as the information is packaged logically and can be stripped out of the passage. I can put my finger on the exact spot to answer many of these types of questions. This is not the case when reading literature as meaning is accrued across the work, not merely across one or two paragraphs. Yet, the questions on PARCC's sample tests, regardless of text type, are largely about extracting information quickly rather than building possible reading worlds.

Now imagine that each day at school for 13 years, a la the Common Core State Standards and the various tests that accompany it,  a single type of reading is privileged.  Your child and mine are reduced to acting like detectives and extracting clues from what they read.  It is overly simple and wrong to reduce all possible reading to clue extraction. This is not only wrong, it is highly problematic.  Let's consider Bruner again. He writes:

There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. 

Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness.

The CCSS with its commitment to a single type of reading (New Criticism) and PARCC that privileges the testing of detail minutia do not allow for a rich diversity of thought.  Is this reliance on a single method going to ready your child or mine for a world that is far more complex?  For situations where others eschew the overly simplified? What exactly is produced via this singular fixation on an overly simplified sense of meaning making?

III. College & Career Ready?

So is being college and career ready about quickly extracting information regardless of the text or context?  Is that the type of learner you see as being able to do the work you currently do?  Is such practice even thoughtful, responsible, logical?  Is it representative of the challenges you face day-to-day? Is it responsive to self and other?  Is it complicated enough?  Is it an apt way to respond to the complexity with which you contend?

Only reading the landscape in order to quickly extract information is not the whole of what I do on a daily basis. Determining the best answer in a very limited field of possibles does not represent the types of thinking I am most often required to do daily. Yet we pay for high-stakes test to be administered to most students that do not resemble reality.  See if you agree with this set of truisms about work:

1. I do not work in a silo. 
2. I am not forced to use technologies I have never used before to complete high stakes work. 
3. I am not limited to working only from a pre-established set of texts given to me by someone else. I can and do use multiple texts, many of which I have seen and read before.
4. I am not separated from powerful tools while I work
5. I am not required to be mute.
6. I am not required to complete the work in a single sitting.
7. I am not required to have cleared my desk of any and all beverages while I work.
8. I am not limited as to where I work and what technologies I use. I can work in chair or on the floor with a laptop. I can work at a table with pen and paper. I can write and dictate responses. I can draw.
9. I am not limited to using only the set of information I currently can access at that moment.
10. I am not limited to faulty spelling because I cannot use outside resources to check how I have spelled specific words.
11. I am not limited to first drafts only as I can leave the work I composed today and reread it later in order to revise and edit. 
12. I am not limited to my first draft as I can send work to an editor, or more knowledgeable other, who gives me feedback that I can use.
13. I follow passions and interests while working and am limited by constraints. These constraints can be liberating.
14. I rely on tacit and explicit knowledge when problem solving.
15. I do not merely answer questions others have formed.  More often I pose questions and frame problems.

Why do we continue to pay for testing that does not resemble actual realities of work? My life, like yours, is far more complicated and complex. And yet, we are paying for schools to be silos where children are considered 'ready' if they can quickly extract information regardless of text from a small field of possible answers. What next generation of standards and testing does this represent?

Should we not want more for our children? Should we not be questioning what this set of standards actually readies a body for? Should we not be questioning what these assessments actually measure?

IV.

A lifetime of reading literature with all of its uncertainties and messy complexities has allowed me to better negotiate the actual world as I am practiced at composing possible worlds.  When reading (listening) and writing, I am imaginative, not limited to following a set of clues to reach a prescribed outcome.  My work requires me to blend logic and intuition--to privilege both tacit and explicit knowledge.  Explicit knowledge is teachable and most often continues to be tested on high stakes tests. Tacit  knowledge is not teachable, although it can be learned. This requires a very different sense of school and a different set of measures than the CCSS currently purports.

In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown explain how measuring tacit knowledge represents a very new challenge for schools:

Measuring one’s level of tacit knowledge, however, is a challenge. Traditionally, every new model of learning has had to specify how much knowledge actually transfers from teacher to student—the more the better being the goal. But the transfer model simply doesn’t work for tacit knowledge. A student cannot ask his teacher to “give me your experience” or “tell me what it feels like to solve a problem” or “show me how to innovate.” We learn those things by watching, doing, experimenting, and simply absorbing knowledge from the things, events, and activities around us. 

Rather than measuring learning by having students find 'correct' answers,  what if the inverse was privileged?  Thomas and Seely Brown write:

We propose reversing the order of things. What if, for example, questions were more important than answers? What if the key to learning were not the application of techniques but their invention? What if students were asking questions about things that really mattered to them? With that shift in thinking, learning is transformed from a discrete, limited process—ask a question, find an answer—to a continuous one. Every answer serves as a starting point, not an end point. It invites us to ask more and better questions.

Imagine such a world for your child.

Imagine if the work of school was not limited to answering an authority's ready-made questions, but rather occasioned learners' question posing and problem framing? This is the depth of learning I have wanted for my son. I imagine it represents a depth you too would desire.

We cannot get to such higher learning if we continue to fund an old culture of learning. Let's not forget Diotallevi's words to Belbo: "the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is ...discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest." 

Let's not settle for the quick tour when the long quest can be had.

Differentiating ELA Instruction in Grade 1: A 4-Week Plan to Get Started

Books from the Grade 1 Read Aloud Unit

As many of you know, I have the pleasure of working inside classrooms alongside teachers co-teaching and coaching.  This past week I have been working with two first grade teachers, both of whom are early in their careers. They are keenly interested in differentiating instruction based on emerging understandings of their students. These teachers team teach a group of 25 youngsters. This is powerful work that is complicated and complex. To help the teachers, I have developed an initial plan to get them started and will be checking back with them in a few weeks. At that time I'll co-teach with them again and then we will debrief the experience (plan) to see what worked, didn't work, what they changed, maintained, new insights they have, and so on.  They have carte blanche to make alterations along the way as they will need to do.  In this post I will share links to the plan, the read aloud uni,  and the independent reading targets.  First though, some background.

I have worked with the two teachers foe two years and have worked with the staff at this school in Newark, NJ for the last four years. The relationship we have developed allows me great latitude to design and to experiment. I respect these colleagues greatly. I have blogged about the work at this school (two campuses in Newark) in lots of posts and am pleased that the students continue to meet with significant academic success that rivals (if not surpasses) the most affluent districts in NJ. The students in this first grade are without question the most academically gifted children I have ever worked with in my career.  The majority of the children (16 out of 25) have already met all of the exiting grade 1 reading benchmarks. Five students are close to meeting these benchmarks and the four remaining students perform like typical grade 1 children at this time of year.  Our assessment information will alter as this school has made a commitment to using STEP assessment (University of Chicago) this year--which delights me. (No more DRA, yeah!) The use of this assessment system will allow us to deepen our capacity to name how learners comprehend text.

Here are the links as promised.

1. You can access the plan here. (This includes monitoring sheets for guided reading, writing, and phonics.)
2. You can access the 1st read aloud unit here.
3. You can access I Can Statements for independent reading for grade 1 here. 

Let me know what you think.

Expeditionary Learning ELA Modules: A Critique

Grade 3 students answering questions posed by Expeditionary Learning.

I've spent the last year working with teachers in grades 3 through 8 who are using the ELA modules created by Expeditionary Learning. I've appreciated much of the design of the modules, the thinking behind some of the lessons, and the attempt to ensure active learning through the use of collaborative techniques such as jigsaw; Praise, Question, Suggest; interactive word wall and others.

But if asked to recommend these to clients after spending a year with the materials, I would not do so. The modules are flawed in ways that must be corrected, especially as these modules have been situated as being a model curriculum that is CCSS-aligned.  Keep in mind that NYCDOE endorsed these modules for their schools in February 2013 before writing had been completed.

EL states:

EL is at the forefront of creating classroom-ready Common Core curricular materials. New York State chose EL to create Common Core-aligned English language arts and literacy curriculum for grades 3-5 and deliver Common Core professional development to representatives from districts across the state. EL is also working with the authors of the Common Core State Standards to develop model secondary curriculum aligned to the standards. (from here)

Although there are several concerns I have with the EL curriculum, two represent the greatest concerns:

1. The absence of instruction that scaffolds and requires students to generate and frame questions of inquiry to answer.
2. No one present in the classroom authors the work at hand.

Additional Concerns:

• The absence of comprehensive writing instruction that moves beyond writing in response to text.
• The absence of  systematic vocabulary instruction that doesn't rely on directing students to "use context clues" (which aren't always present) or guess.  
• The amount of time allotted for students to respond to tasks is woefully underestimated.
• Situating literary texts as something to be used is problematic. There is an absence of an aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Rather literature is situated as efferent (Rosenblatt, 1978).
• Wait, where's the expedition? The translation of these modules, sans expedition, is simply wrong.  The experiential opportunities are missing.

In this post I want to focus on the first two concerns as these speak to issues of servitude and colonialism.

1. What Career Is EL Getting Your Children Ready To Do?

3rd grader answering a question.

A main challenge I see with  EL's 'model' curriculum is that it undervalues students being active problem framers and instead locates them as responders to already determined questions. Throughout thousands and thousands of pages of curriculum, students are situated in the role of responders to already determined questions and their teachers are located as mimers whose main task is to parrot those already determined questions. Learners are not asked to generate and then frame their own questions to solve. Rather, they are asked repeatedly to merely pen responses to questions that the EL curriculum writers have written, including essay questions.  

Now slide under that instruction for a minute and ask yourself what that set of practices might be developing.  Remember the CCSS is all about making sure our children are college and career ready.

As a former college professor I can assure you that not developing children's capacity to generate and then frame questions of worth is a method to ensure that students are not college ready. College ready at least ought to include students who have done the challenging work of framing problems, not merely answering an authority's questions. Questioning involves speculating about possibilities.

K Mart Greeter.  Image from here. 

But what about career ready?  What is the career trajectory for people who have been trained to answer questions, rather than generate and frame questions?

Yes, it isn't a pretty outcome for millions of children.

Recently when I asked a group of teachers this question we came up with the following jobs: phone operator, K-Mart greeter, customer service representative.  The absence of question generation and framing leaves the EL curriculum to be more a model of servitude than a model curriculum.

2. Authoring.

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."  (Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”  ― Edward W. Said

The EL curriculum is scripted. No one in the actual classroom gets to author--neither teacher nor student.  The curriculum is written to direct teachers to the specific materials to gather (including independent books for student reading), what to say, what to write, what to show, and allocates the number of minutes that each task needs to be completed.  It also includes anecdotes teachers can say (I guess in case teachers have none of their own?) when teaching vocabulary for example.  The curriculum is so bloated with commentary and directions that it is not unusual for each module to be comprised of 500+ pages.

With all of those pages there is little room for anyone actually present in the classroom to create curriculum: authentic and complicated conversations between students and teachers. The construct is epic, not novel.

Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) described epic as “ a poem about the past” (p.13), “an utterly finished thing” (p. 17) and novel as being unfinalizable and speculative about the unknown.  A similar difference can be said to exist between the institutionally controlled structures such as curriculum, and teachers' more idiosyncratic pedagogical and content practices. The epic world of Expeditionary Learning curriculum is unified, completed, “beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete, and therefore re-thinking and revaluating present” (p.17).  One can think of this epic world as being unalterable. The EL curriculum is an epic construct. It is untouchable. Dead. Beyond the influence of now.

Further, EL situates teaching as being complicated, not complex. Brent Davies' and Dennis Sumara's observe that “teaching has been cast as a complicated rather than a complex phenomenon—one that can be understood by analyzing its component parts and one that, for all intents and purposes, does not vary across time, setting, and persons” (“Cognition, Complexity, and Teacher Education,” 1997, p. 121, emphasis in original).   It doesn't matter who you are and are not. Who the children are and are not. Teaching and learning does not vary across time, setting, and persons. At 10:05 on Tuesday, all 3rd grade teachers should...

Such a belief sucks the energy and creativity from people: teachers and children alike.

In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene writes about the difficulty teachers face with burgeoning demands and bureaucratic prescriptions that the public at large demands from educators. She writes:

“We do not know how many educators see present demands and prescriptions as obstacles to their own development, or how many find it difficult to breathe. There may be thousands who, in the absence of support systems, have elected to be silent. Thousands of others (sometimes without explanation) are leaving the schools” (p. 14). 

I've witnessed this leaving--the exiting of excellent teachers who simply can no longer allow themselves to be puppets of corporate enactments of learning. The struggle to continue to teach in light of model curriculum like EL is a formidable task as the mandated use of such curriculum restricts what is allowed to be taught and whose voice, value, and ideas are honored, ignored, and discouraged. 

Citing Evidence When Talking - High School ELA Class

In this video we get a glimpse of a high school ELA classroom where the students are citing evidence in order to deepen their conversation. Further, the students are using multiple texts to do so.

Grade 10 ELA.

Students Cite Evidence from Informational and Literary Text - Common Core Literacy from Expeditionary Learning on Vimeo.

Close Reading via Expeditionary Learning

Interesting look at close reading and the protocols that support active learning in a fifth grade.

Grappling with Complex Informational Text through Close Reading - Common Core Literacy from Expeditionary Learning on Vimeo.

Reading State Exemplars With A Critical Eye

I was reviewing a model ELA unit of study for a client that is aligned to the ELA CCSS.  The unit was produced by a state Department of Education and is intended to be used with fifth grade students. I expected that a state DOE would produce apt models--given that the K-12 series is intended to (in)form teachers' work.

So, it was particularly shocking when I read these directions for students:

Read the summary of A Wrinkle in Time, Chapter 1, from SparkNotes, then read the description of Mrs. Whatsit from the text.

Students would repeat this process for chapters 2 and 3, beginning with the SparkNotes and then reading a only small portion of the actual literary text.

Yep, SparkNotes is the main text.

It seems incredible that SparkNotes are an equivalent to any literary text.  I mean it's SparkNotes.  Read all of the SparkNotes and just a small portion of Madeleine L'Engle's actual words? How can this make sense and why would a DOE put this out for educators to emulate?

In the SparkNotes version of A Wrinkle in Time, the 21-page first chapter is reduced to three paragraphs of information. Gone is the press of weather. Gone are the tensions among daughter, mother and brother.  Nothing but the bare facts remain and it couldn't be sadder.

Surely this isn't a vision of literary learning we want to encourage.

                                      

A Primer for Creating Units of Study

This is a webinar that Kathy Glass gave earlier this year.  Although it is lengthy, the information is interesting, especially if planning units of study aligned to ELA CCSS is relatively new to you.

What Was the Question To Which PARCC Is the Answer?

Waiting on Icarus (2009, M.A. Reilly)

I. The Absence of Complexity

I took a look at the new release of PARCC assessment items the other day and specifically spent some time thinking about the demands these prototypes represent and the contexts in which these demands will occur.  PARCC situates the assessments as "next generation, technology-based assessments"  and makes these claims (here):

Better standards require better tests – and the shifts in the standards call for critical advances in assessment quality. PARCC will develop custom items and tasks aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
In regards to the ELA/Literacy assessments, this means PARCC will include:

• Texts worth reading: The assessments will use authentic texts worthy of study instead of artificially produced or commissioned passages.
• Questions worth answering: Sequences of questions that draw students into deeper encounters with texts will be the norm (as in an excellent classroom), rather than sets of random questions of varying quality.

This made me a bit uneasy, not because I don't want my son to read or engage, but rather because the language here reminded me of the discourse that typified the high school I attended several decades ago--years before the Internet.  At that time information was thought to be scarce and a private school education was supposed to afford its students access to the coveted information (preferably ahead of others) and in doing so gain its clients entry into select colleges (where even scarcer info could be had). Yet even then a belief that there existed an agreed upon collection of 'texts worth reading' was being challenged.  So too was the idea that a deeper encounter could be had devoid of person and context.

Reading the claims from PARCC reminded me of that important Neil Postman question: What was the question to which this was the answer? 

 Hmm.  So take a moment and see what you think.

What was the question to which these next generation prototypes are the answer?
What world is posited?
What beliefs are held sacred?
Whose power is secured by maintaining such a system?
Who wins? Loses? Profits?

II. Take This Test

Go ahead and access and then read the two texts (Ovid's "Daedalus and Icarus" and Anne Sexton's "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph") and the four prototype questions here.  I am not asking you to answer the two essay questions, but do take a look, along with the two multiple choice questions.  Keep in mind that the sample ELA test items have been designed for high school sophomores.

So what did you think?  How did you work?

As I reread the poems on my laptop, I started searching terms in an effort to read against each poem, clarify questions, and pose new questions based on the meanings I made.  I am curious as to what you did when you read the texts. Did you seek external sources as well?  Did you talk to others?  Did you search for works you had written that connected?  There were many references that came up as I queried Daedalus, Icarus, Minos, and Perdix.  Just reading the links allowed me to call forth understandings I have had of the many Icarus texts I've taught/read/view/heard and composed (an example at the top of the post). 

As I worked it was painful to think that my child and yours too will not have access to their connected lives when they take this assessment. They will not be asked to make sense of texts through the dominant tools many use daily.  In fact,  my child will be disadvantaged as he lives in a highly connected world. When he has a question or is trying to frame a question, he often skypes with friends, clients, and colleagues across the world.  Just yesterday he shared a program he wrote and when I asked him how he learned to write script he said that he studied examples online, talked with a few people from one of his development teams who are more advanced programmers, and then gave it a try and revised as needed. None of these options will be afforded to him when he takes the 'next generation' test and this should give us pause.

As I read the prototypes I did not see a web 2.0 world, but rather a continuation of the last century, albeit somewhat slicker (the absence of #2 pencils, dragging, highlighting text, etc.).  But what is fundamentally unchanged is that the student is situated in front of a stand alone computer screen.  While the software maybe networked, the student is not. The isolated test taker is unable to interact at will with anything or anyone else and this is contrary to the very career and college world that CCSS purports to be readying your child and mine.

III. What Does It Mean to Be Ready?

I own a consulting business and I cannot recall a time when I was limited to working without any access to resources and not required to frame the question(s), determine resources, and collaborate within a given and nonetheless emerging context.  Most of my work requires me to interact with others and to make and negotiate meaning collaboratively.  This is not to say that I don't produce texts on my own, but rather that the texts I do produce are (in)formed by the client and the context which is always evolving.  As such, the work is complex.  And so in considering how I actually work,  I do not understand how the results from PARCC measures are going to help me and my child know if he is career and college ready.  At best, PARCC offers complicated tasks, but clearly not complex ones as there is no difficulty in tracing the journey each and every child will take well before anyone begins.

I want to say that PARCC and Smarter Balance assessments are little different, at a philosophical level, than the high stakes tests that we have subjected children to since we were first told that we were a nation at risk (mid 1980s).  Instead of valuing learning that children actually do in the myriad of contexts they work and learn in, we continue to create a separate testing reality that costs taxpayers billions, reduces learning time within schools, and is disconnected from important learning dispositions, strategies, and skills we want to cultivate with (not in) children.  Oddly, understanding and being able to perform a range of performance strategies that include collaboration, creation, critique, analysis, evaluation, and representation--while being responsive to emerging situations--cannot be included in measures where learners are isolated beings. Even though it is 2012, we continue to measure excellence with the belief that information is scarce and knowing is akin to that which you can prove on your own. Sadly, it's an every (hu)man for him/her self world.

IV. When Information as Scarce

Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) define this type of thinking as mechanistic. They write:

Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. (Kindle Locations 336-338)

In contrast to this mechanistic view of learning Thomas and Brown offer a view to a new culture of learning, one that is absent from the PARCC prototypes:

learning should be viewed in terms of an environment—combined with the rich resources provided by the digital information network—where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing way.  (Kindle Locations 329-332).

Instead of examining actual work that learners do for real purposes, we continue to subscribe to the belief that simulated assessment tasks are apt measures of knowing and doing.


It's the 20th  

     century
                  all over,

   all
            over

         (again).


Work Cited:

Thomas, Douglas; Seely Brown, John (2011-03-12). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.