Are you one that believes learning is a product of teaching? What about whether schools and education administrators understand the problem they are trying to solve? Are you familiar with the subject of standardized testing in our public schools? It’s not that they can’t find the solution … they can’t find the problem.

All of these questions are certainly an interest of mine, though I have never been in the education profession. I like to follow the subjects of learning and standardized testing and the writings of Marion Brady. I am a big fan of the thinking of Marion Brady. Ever read any of his books or articles?

He is a longtime teacher; school administrator; nationally distributed newspaper columnist; and author of courses of study, textbooks, and professional books. His most recent article published in a blog from the Washing Post is “What do standardized tests actually test?” I will use this excellent work to examine this issue.

Like most people, I believe that learning is a product of teaching. Just not enough learning from the amount of teaching in our schools. The assumption of learning from teaching is the bedrock of traditional schooling.

As Marion states, it shapes nearly all commercially produced teaching materials. It’s how schooling is portrayed in everything media. It’s why traditionally arranged classroom furniture is in rows facing front, why most teachers talk a lot, assign pages in textbooks, ask questions about what’s been said and read. It’s the conventional process and teaching wisdom. Sad, but very true.

Teachers teach, learners learn, and standardized tests monitor how well the process is going. The tests measure a quantity—the amount of information taught, minus the amount not learned or learned and forgotten. A single, precise number is convenient for sorting and labeling the learning results. Something that the education industry feels is the only way to measure progress.

Simple and straightforward. Right?

But hold on for a minute. There’s an ancient Chinese quotation (from Confucius I believe) which, loosely translated, says,

Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I’ll remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.

As Brady points out, there are three very different approaches to teaching—telling, showing, and involving. The first two lend themselves to standardized testing. The third one—the only one that really works—doesn’t. It says that what needs to be evaluated are the outcomes of personal experience, and personal experience is very likely to be too individual, too idiosyncratic, too much a product of a teachable moment, for its outcome to be evaluated by machine-scored standardized test items.

Involved learners don’t just read about geology; they’re outside, identifying, examining, and classifying, the rocks and earth around the school and other interesting places. Involved learners aren’t filling out worksheets about geometric principles; they’re determining the height of the school’s flagpole by measuring angles and lengths of shadows … by active learning.

Here is the key to Brady’s article, in my opinion. What mattered most wasn’t what he said but what kids did. When he drew that radical conclusion, he states he began a search that continues, a search for experience-creating activities:

So interesting

the teacher can leave the room and nobody notices

So useful

the activity’s relevance is self-evident

So complex

the smartest kid in the class is intellectually challenged

So real-world

perceptions of who’s smartest constantly shift

So theoretically sound

the systemically integrated nature of all knowledge is obvious

So wide-ranging

the activities cover the core curriculum (and much more)

So varied

every critical thinking skill is exercised

So scalable

concepts developed on a micro-level adequately model macro phenomena

So effective

when the activities themselves are forgotten, their benefits are fixed permanently in memory

Idealistic? Not in my mind. Perhaps I would call it a great dream. And why not?

As Brady states, if we can stop the standardized testing bandwagon, teachers can pick up where they left off before they were rudely interrupted—trying to figure out how kids learn best. What a novel idea.

In that situation, we will come away from this reform era having learned two useful lessons:

First, one is that no machine can measure the quality of complex, emotion-filtered, experience-based learning.

And second, if you’re testing the wrong thing, there’s no reason to keep score.

Thank you Marion Brady for not giving up and for keeping the dream alive.