I was reading a blog post about competition in education and society that my husband forwarded to me, and a question one of the commenters posted echoed one of the principles that drives me most these days:
“What would education look like if we (as in Red Cross Swimming lessons) only competed against ourselves and encouraged co-operation for getting ahead?”
Why is it that to win, someone else must lose? Certainly norm referenced tests mirror that belief as well as a host of other practices like grading on a curve. And I’m not talking about everyone being “winners” if they haven’t earned it; this is no fuzzy, kum-by-ya view of the world where kids can suck air and we say, “Good job!” No. Rather, we recognize that everyone brings their own strengths and weaknesses to the table, set appropriate personal levels of challenge, and celebrate each person’s achievement. Just because someone is further down the path than I am does not devalue my own achievements, and I may well be further along than they are in other areas.
I try to do this in my classroom. As much as I hate grades, I have to assign them, and so my kids earn grades according to individual goals we set and what I observe during the process. After the kids adapt to the can’t hoop-jump style of my classroom, they actually hook in and push a lot farther and deeper in their learning than kids did when I had a more traditional grading system.
So, how would things be different if we focused on individuals rather than competition?
November 1, 2009 at 9:49 am |
The problem with this is that high school, at least, is basically prep school for college. There are only so many seats at the best colleges, and then so many seats at the second level colleges, finally there are junior colleges and tech schools. But there are not enough places for everyone, so it becomes a competition by its very nature.
We can complain about this all we want, but it is a reality that parents and students know. It won’t matter what we do, they will compete for the top spots.
November 1, 2009 at 5:24 pm |
I understand how the rest of the world works, however I don’t see how shifting our focus to helping each kid reach his/her personal best everyday would negatively impact how college works. Yes, our society is competitive, but that’s no reason to make competition the focus in our schools.
I would say that more children would be better prepared (and thus *be* more likely to even be able to enter the race for the “best” seats at the “best” colleges) if we simply focused on growth.
Grades are an illusion. An A in one English class is not equal to an A in any other English class in the nation. Grades give the illusion of achievement and objectivity, when, in fact, it’s more accurate to say they’re more a measure of figuring out how to jump through the hoops of a given teacher to the teacher’s subjective beliefs about mastery, rigor and achievement.
For kids on the lower end of the spectrum, a system based on competition alone gives them an out, a reason NOT to try very hard or learn. In my classroom, there *is* no out. I require 100% of the assignments to be turned in or the grade is an F. I just finished my first grading period, and 100% of my kids turned in 100% of their work, and now they’re working on developing their second quarter goals with me.
Besides, I promised never to compromise my principles about helping every child learning as much as they can to very high expectations just because of what they’re going to encounter in the grades after me. High school assigns an obscene amount of low level, disconnected homework; parents sometimes worry about if their kids will be able to handle the workload because our 8th graders never have more than about 1-hour of homework. Guess what? They go off to high school and have no problems adapting.
November 17, 2009 at 11:41 pm |
My elementry school basically went with this model and graded based on improvement. I hated it because I literally had no where to improve in the class. I always got the second best grade and I was always the smartest one in the class (especcially in math and reading, not so much in spelling). So all the teachers could have done is create my own special class (we had this computer program that tracked your progress, it was teaching me alegebra and geometry when I was in the 4th grade). So you really have to tell me how you see this working.