Most people seem to acknowledge that while rote learning for standardised tests will help keep countries and cities at the top of the PISA rankings for reading, science and maths, it's not the best formula for happy, fulfilled, creative and entrepreneurial children. But what would happen if we got children to design the standardised tests in the first place?
At The Education Project, Bahrain, I ran a workshop session with Jeff Utecht, Tinkering School's Gever Tulley and Indian edu-entrepreneur Sudhir Ghodke where participants such as Charles Leadbeater, the Bahraini education quality improvement team and Cisco's senior management designed practical solutions to some of their biggest policy and practice headaches.
I can't remember from which group this suggestion came, but finding it once more makes me think that we might indeed have a compelling, design-thinking and student-centred means of making something constructive out of the standardised test:
"Have the students collaborate on designing a standardised test to assess their collaborative learning program. Then they will learn / assess what can / cannot be assessed via standardised tests and collaborative to design an alternative assessment for collaborative learning, metacognition..."
Agreed! There are such assessments in the US, check out The Met School and The Coalition of Essential Schools.
Posted by: ummali | January 04, 2011 at 09:32 AM