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Accountability
Begins at the Beginning
by
Kathie F. Nunley
The cry for accountability
is louder than ever. Across this country communities, districts, and
states are asking for more accountability in schools. States want
districts to prove their validity in quantitative ways. Year-end state
mandated exams are becoming the rule rather than the exception.
Administrators and teachers are feeling increased pressure to bring
test scores up and failure rates down. The classroom teacher is faced
with the dilemma of teaching the curriculum without teaching the test
per se. (Although teaching the test is not a problem, as long as the
test is valid and reliable - but that's a separate article.) One of the
biggest problems with the accountability cry is that it tends to focus
down to the teacher, and then stops there.
Accountability for learning
needs to go one step further - to the student. Amazingly, students have
never been held accountable for day to day learning. End of unit tests
or chapter tests have implied accountability, but as most classroom
teachers can attest, that is a wild assumption. Students do not see the
relationship between learning activities and accountable learning.
Ask a student to defend a
homework assignment and then sit back and watch their shock! Why, it
has never occurred to them that they were supposed to have learned from
the assignment. They thought they were just supposed to "do" it.
Here's a typical first time
oral defense of homework:
Teacher: So tell me Sarah,
what were some of the experiments which lead to the discovery of the
double helix structure?
Sarah: "huh?"
Teacher: The homework from
last night...I see here you did answer that question. I believe it was
the first question in the section - what research helped lead Watson
and Crick to their model of DNA?
Sarah: I don't know...I
just wrote it down.
Teacher: Do you remember
anything about what you wrote?
Sarah: No, I was just trying
to get it done.
Teacher: Well tell me
something, anything, that you learned from your homework?
Sarah: Well, I don't
know...but I did it, doesn't that count?
Unfortunately, no one
should be surprised by a conversation such as above. Somehow, in public
education, the relationship between class and home activities and
learning has not be clarified to students. Amazingly, as silly as it
sounds, students do not know that are supposed to learn from daily
schoolwork. They have become accustomed to getting credit for "doing"
assignments with no accountability, so that is what they do.
All assignments in my
classes require an oral defense. As people who have followed my work
know, I consider oral defense the cornerstone to my teaching
methodology. Accountability must begin at this level. When students
realize credit is not given if learning does not occur, a paradigm
shift begins. Their simple and innocent response of "You mean I did all
that for nothing?" opens up the lines of communication about school,
assignments and learning. Because, let's be honest - if they learn
nothing from the activity, then it truly was done for nothing.
Kathie F. Nunley is an educational
psychologist, author, researcher and speaker living in southern
New Hampshire. Developer of the Layered Curriculum® method
of instruction, Dr. Nunley has authored several books and
articles on teaching in mixed-ability classrooms and other
problems facing today's teachers. Full
references and additional teaching and parental tips are available
at: http://Brains.org
(originally written in 2004, this article may be used
in any non-profit print publication so long as it is used
in its entirety including the bottom author credit paragraph).
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