Reality Bites in the Classroom

My school has strategies to help raise test scores: standards-based instruction, performance assessments and test preparation. Here’s why I don’t think I was successfully able to implement them to make a difference.

Standards-based instruction. A standard is a directive that tells what the students should understand and be able to do following instruction. Such clear standards helped me focus my lesson plans, but the truth is, I rarely got to teach to the standard.

Why? Reality entered: School life kept getting in the way.

That reality includes the mandated clerical activities--the absentees’ notes, permission slips for various activities, grading and scoring of papers and tests, report cards, maintaining daily and monthly attendance records and referral forms for children who need to visit the principal’s office. More reality: addressing student needs such as “I have a nosebleed,” “I have to vomit.” “It’s an emergency.”

Reality is also parents who show up without appointments, problems at home that find their way to school (“My husband hit me”; “My son’s mad because my boyfriend moved in”); classroom fights, thefts, cursing.

Reality includes teachers having to do domestic work as needed--vacuuming the classroom floor when the custodian is absent.

Then there are the intercom interruptions, and the six or seven children from another class who suddenly show up at my door because there is no substitute to cover their teacher’s absence.

Of course, there are also the chronic talkers and out-of-seaters, the class clowns and the chronically angry, on whom I spend many precious instructional minutes, using one behavior modification technique after another to get them back on task.

I did teach despite these distractions, but it was not, in my opinion, the quality teaching that would significantly raise my students’ test scores.

Performance assessments are tests that ask students to perform a task--writing an essay, for example. In fifth grade, one assessment was to write a multi-paragraph composition comparing and contrasting two characters in an assigned story. I hoped that the reading comprehension, spelling and grammar that I taught in preparation for the essay would translate into higher test scores.

But given school-life interruptions, I’m not so sure. It was impossible for me to get in the quantity of writing needed to significantly boost students’ skills. I could not figure out how, in a class of 27 students, to give every child the detailed feedback on each and every piece of writing that would move him or her toward significant improvement.

At least half my students are two to four years behind grade level. Most did little reading outside of my class. Reasons included parents who did not value reading or were nonreaders.

Test preparation is the one area that I feel could be most closely aligned to serve my school’s plans to lift students’ scores. My only sadness is that we did not do enough test preparation activities; we should have made them an integral part of our lesson plans.

I tried my best this year, still I feel a sense of anxiety and wonder: Did I leave any child behind?