Biggest Challenge in Education Today

¶ … biggest challenge in education today is the daily ability of teachers to strike a balance between teaching to prepare students for rigorous high stakes tests as well as teaching in a way that is creative and engaging to build creativity and intrinsic desire to learn (Longo, 2010). In my own practice site this balance is an obvious and daily struggle as entire blocks of time preceding testing are set aside to make sure that students are fully prepared for the testing process and the material. I believe this happens in most public school classrooms and though it seems a challenge to ethically administer material in such a way that it is not deemed as cheating would be difficult but entirely depends on the material presented and what the high stakes test is testing for. Any preparation for a test that is considered an assessment test would seem to be ethically murky, as traditionally these tests are meant to organically check the existing curriculum to see what the students are learning, yet these test seem to get more and more specialized as the years go on, testing for far more specific materials and it would seem lax and even irresponsible not to prepare children in some way for what they will face in the testing material.

Depending on the material there would seem to be a way to align curriculum to meet testing expectations without stressing out students and in a way that is creative enough to engender engagement, but again this is the balance that must be struck. Teachers often are given little choice as they are often relegated to specific materials, i.e. structured pre-exam material that they are mandated to work on in the classroom in preparation for testing. The biggest problem with much of this added material is that memorizing facts and processes does not engender creativity or thinking skills and as facts and focuses change over time the noted inability to think and innovate in learning becomes a problem in the long-term and could be seen as a huge failing of our education system (Gallagher 2010). In my experience in the classroom the material mandated to prepare students for assessment does not engender independent learning skills or ask the student to think about anything beyond the fear and frustration associated with the unknown and the test itself. This is supported Longo when he discusses the type of questions asked by students when they attend supplemental test preparation sessions held during after school hours (2010, p. 54) the student want to know what they will need to know for the test and this paradigm is frustrating because it support subsistence learning, i.e. learning just what you need to know and no more. Subsistence learning does not support or foster independent though and educators answering the questions the student ask with formal preparation material, especially very specialized material would seem to be ethically murky and frustrate creativity and independent learning. As Gallagher stresses in a work about what she terms readicide, where students and individuals are not out seeking new and novel ideas and are in fact not likely to read independently at all the problem is that the education system, "teaching to the test" is not responding to the need for individuals to develop independent thought (2010, p. 36). Though there are likely hundreds of other contributing factors as to why students today are just simply not reading independently, in part the delivery of instant entertainment and the information explosion of the internet, offering students countless other non-reading materials to focus all their free time on. The problem is still evident as is the lessoning observable qualities of independent thought and development in many people. To some degree the exceptions are now given serious highlights as something advanced and amazing and yet it was not long ago that intelligence was much more closely aligned to innovative thinking. Now it seems we can what we want everyone to know and then they do not seek to know more, i.e. subsistence education. Teaching to the test is an example of how we use our limited time in the classroom to make the whole look better at the expense of the student. What really needs to happen is for our curriculum to align more with materials for testing in a way that makes the presentation creative and engaging and a reassertion of the value of independent though needs to be demanded in the classroom.