Sticky Issues
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Sticky Issues Archive >
In this section, principals tell how they handled a challenging situation, how some policy that was in place actually worked, and the lessons learned from dealing with these Sticky Issues. Send your stories to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Can Students Really Pass the Test If We Don’t Teach to It?
by Theresa Kucsma
We have certainly run the gamut of “accountability” attempts. The state of Ohio started 25 years ago with proficiency tests that were based on uncertain outcomes. Essentially we did not change how or what we taught and our results were pretty good. Now we know exactly what the students are to be taught; we even have access to sample and previous tests so that we can teach the students how to respond to each kind of item. Usually this kind of attention does yield some gain in performance, but does it yield a gain in real learning?
Can we really teach so that the students learn without focusing so much on the test? In the last school where I was principal in the early 2000s, the students were performing much lower than they should have been on “the tests.” Teachers were following district protocol diligently but were quite frustrated that they were not helping the students learn—only helping them take a test. I was in an enviable position with a contract well through retirement eligibility, so I felt that we could take a risk since I would be the first on the firing line.
I asked the teachers what they wanted to do and they had a plan to make the learning much more integrated and applied and not just at the “test” grades. Giving teachers time to work together, within and across grade levels, annihilated my staff meeting plans and resulted in a lot of team teaching and teacher discussion. Needless to say, we were quite anxious when the test results came in, but our lowest growth percentage was over 20 points and that was in math. We had gone from low 40% passage rate to over 60%. That gave us all a needed shot in the arm.
Over the next few years, we continued to increase our performance until we reached Excellence status by 2005. The district didn’t argue with success.
There are a few basic strategies that paid off big time for us:
- Make sure that ALL teachers are teaching from CURRENT courses of study.
- Give teachers common planning time to talk about what is working in their classrooms. Make sure this is structured (agenda, note taking, plans for follow-up, etc.) so that it is productive.
- KISS: Keep It Simple Sweetie! Writing was a huge challenge in grades 3 and 4, so we looked at what worked for teachers/students outside our building/district. Big tip—in third grade, make sure that the students can write a really good sentence with beginning, middle, and end. In fourth grade, extend that first to a really good paragraph with beginning, middle, and end; finally have the students expand that to a strong extended response of three paragraphs, each with a good beginning, middle, and end, and fitting together into a response with strong beginning, middle, and ending paragraphs. Throw in some connectors like “first,” “then,” “finally,” a few good adjectives and adverbs, and we were over 90% passage rate. Sounds like a recipe, but it works!
- If you have a reading program that works, do whatever you can to keep it. We were having success with Literacy Collaborative but our “numbers” dictated that we lose a part-time K teacher, which would eliminate our coordinator. The teachers proposed that they take more than the maximum number of students so that we could rework the coordinator’s schedule and keep the position. Since the teachers proposed it, the association was agreeable, and eventually the district agreed too. That was some commitment! On the other hand, if your reading program is weak, make it a priority to find strategies that work.
In summary, it seems to me that not only can we be less test focused, we have to be less test focused if we are to produce students who can actually function and learn how to learn.
Theresa Kucsma, a member of the Principal’s Office Editorial Board, served as an elementary principal for 24 years in various settings, most recently in South-Western City Schools.
