Teacher Stories
Submitted by Teacher Man on November 29, 2011
My principal recently made it very clear to me that the only written works produced by my 7th and 8th grade students worthy of display, are their constructed responses. In the Philadelphia School District and in my school especially, children are regularly expected to write these limiting and repetitive responses per the direction of our central leadership. According to my principal, it is vitally important that students score the maximum amount of points allowed for the opened-ended responses on the PSSA test. He says that students who do well on the constructed response portion of the PSSA are the ones who obtain the highest overall scores on the test. This reasoning allows administrators like him to believe that putting enormous amounts of educational time and energy into teaching and writing constructed responses will help students achieve the highest scores possible.
I am troubled by my administrator’s line of thinking. Clearly the PSSA is an important factor in my student’s academic lives, but the PSSA is not the only factor that I take into consideration when creating lessons and activities for my students. I want my students to become independent and critical thinkers who are able to freely and clearly express themselves. I value activities that allow for my students to discover their creative side. Yes, I recognize the role of the PSSA in the lives of my students, but I reject the notion of spending the majority of our class time prepping for the test.
Teaching constructed responses is absolutely nothing new for me. I have been helping students through the process of answering open-ended questions for years. What always helped me to get through doing these writing exercises is finding ways to connect the activity to other important thinking and writing skills. I figure if I have to do these drills, why not try to get more out of them? In previous years, I have been encouraged and supported in my efforts to strike the balance between reviewing constructed response skills and using the same activity to discuss what I believe are more important and beneficial skills.
In my classroom, I expect students to make clear and convincing arguments. My students must be able to support their claims with evidence. We work at length on creating strong introductions and conclusions. My students and I use constructed responses as another way to discuss writer’s voice and how to develop one’s own.
According to my supervisor, the skills I want to emphasis are not an appropriate fit with the goals or purposes of a constructed response. He says that these responses are not for developing voice or for doing anything other than showing that a student can read a test question and provide the appropriate number of details when responding to it. My principal stated to me in a recent meeting, “the type of writing you have your students doing during constructed response time isn’t what I want to see.” Instead, the goal for teaching open-ended response writing should simply be to help them to get the most points possible on the test.
I teach in a school where test scores are very important and have a lot of influence on what happens in the classroom. The PSSA is constantly looming on our horizon. Teachers and students alike face daily reminders that low scores on the PSSA will result in our school becoming a Promise Academy next year. This is a clear threat to teachers that if scores do not improve, we will lose our jobs in this school. This is a threat to students as well, even though many do not quite understand what a Promise Academy means. The students in our school have been told enough to understand becoming a Promise Academy is not a positive change.
The more I face messages like the one above, the more frustrated I become at the direction of the educational program in my school. The focus is shifting radically from fostering creative, independent, and critical thinkers to subjecting students to relentless test prep. This shift in educational focus is creating an environment in my school that is no longer one of warmth and support but one of threats and intimidation. The more I am forced to lead these lessons in how to write a constructed response, the more I conclude that we are doing our students a disservice by teaching them only how to get the highest score on a test.