Chad M. Barrett

I have slowly continued to read Seth Godin's education manifesto called Stop Stealing Dreams. A couple of weeks ago I read article #50, called The Problem with Competence. Seth defines competent people as those that "have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems." He also says that competent people "resist change." Seth's conclusion is that competent people are not good for our future. He wants to find an "incompetent worker," someone that will "break the rules and find me something no one else can."

I understand Seth's point, but I don't think the answer is to hire an "incompetent worker." I would rather hire a competent worker with a skill set that allows him/her to overcome resistance to change. My inspiration for this alternative comes from Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. In the book, Peter defines a learning organization as one "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to learn together." An organization or individual that adopts these ideas will move to higher levels of achievement and respond to change with greater speed and success.

I propose that lifelong learners, those of us that never settle and consistently seek personal mastery, are competent people with the skills necessary to break the rules and find something that no one else can. However, I didn't study to be a lifelong learner in school (well, at least not K-12). I learned some of this in college, but I learned most of what I know about personal mastery after making the decision to be a lifelong learner.  

Is Seth proposing that we find a way to expose students to notions of lifelong learning and personal mastery during their K-12 years? Is he proposing that we force students to adopt these principles? Let me know what you think.

Earlier this week Seth Godin released a manifesto on education called Stop Stealing Dreams. You can download a printable version or view an online version. I follow his blog and I've written about a couple other of Seth's works (Tribes and What Matters Now). I enjoy reading his ideas and am often challenged by his perspective.

Seth's education manifesto is arranged as a series of short, numbered sections that resemble blog posts. In one section (10. Frederick J. Kelly and your nightmares) he tells the story of  Frederick J. Kelly. Seth credits Kelly with developing the multiple-choice test item. He then goes on to say that Kelly "disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned." According to Seth, we continue to use multiple-choice tests because its "the easy and efficient way."

I agree with part of what Kelly said. Yes, multiple-choice items assess only a portion of the curriculum; in particular recall of facts and skills. However, this important item type should not be abandoned. In my opinion multiple-choice test items share a place with a number of other item types: constructed-response items, performance tasks, and technology-enhanced items. Every item type has its strengths and weaknesses, so why throw one out? I think that we should be looking for ways to have many item types and student experiences work in concert to provide valid and reliable information about what each student knows and can do.

Thankfully, I've been working for better than a year on projects that help achieve this vision. I'm grateful for these opportunities because I feel like I'm "doing something" about bad testing practices. However, this is change on a scale I've never seen before. This means that this transition won't be perfect, or pretty, or fast. However, if we can sustain the change, I am confident that educational assessment will become a powerful tool to improve student learning.

Do you think that educational assessment can be transformed into a positive change agent in the field of education?

I am waiting, like many of us, for the release of the final Mathematics Content Specifications from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. If you haven't reviewed the draft specifications, click here. In the meantime, I thought I would point out some of the other materials available at the Consortium's Web site (http://www.k12.wa.us/smarter/).

The Consortium recently began development of the Mathematics Item Specifications. This document, alongside the content specifications, will provide valuable information about the future SBAC tests. The Consortium released draft portions of the specifications from the first two "Showcases," including sample items. I think these documents will give you an early look into how items for the SBAC assessments will be designed.

Photo Credit: Image: Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net