If you have a child at LEADPrep or you’ve landed here in your research for a good fit, you’re probably fed up with standardized testing.
Too many educational systems determine the success or failure of students based on just a few assessments. Assessments that don’t have a clear goal or purpose, aside from measuring what children can memorize and regurgitate back.
That’s not how the world operates. We need to teach our kids to be well-rounded and critical thinkers. It’s not about being able to recite facts. It’s about using knowledge and skills at home, work, and to simply function in society. And we do our kids such a disservice when one test determines what they’re going to learn in the coming months and years.
Of course, we do need to assess our students. But when most of the public hears the word “assessment,” they think “multiple choice test.” And they’re not wrong. That’s the way the education system has worked for as long as most of us can remember.
But a test is not the only way to find out if students learned the information the teacher taught. In fact, a student assessment also doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of the curriculum, instruction, or teacher training.
It’s time to go beyond the traditional assessment and start looking more holistically at what’s happening in classrooms.
That’s what we do at LEADPrep, and we’d love to see this model find its way beyond our school. It has, to some degree, but not enough!
What’s more, many schools use student test scores to assess the effectiveness of teaching too. Our teachers absolutely need to be held accountable for student learning, but testing our kids is not a good measure of teaching ability.
In a conversation I had with Kristine Hadeed of Perigean Technologies, we talked about going beyond the test and finding new ways to teach and learn. She helped develop Beyond Multiple Choice, a free virtual series that explores this concept.
