Differentiated Coaching for Educators

I recently began reading, then frantically flipping through a major education publication on using multiple measures to assess student achievement. Every measure mentioned was basically a test of knowledge. I'm all for objective standards, but as I understand the real world, knowledge is the least important component of what students need to learn in school. Current estimates are that even the children leaving school with the highest test scores will have only 2 percent of the knowledge they need for careers in the 21st century. To attain the other 98 percent requires curiosity, critical thinking, the ability to ask great questions, and an imagination to consider possibilities beyond current reality. To summarize, what has become a trite phrase, "creating lifelong learners," needs to become central to education.

In fact, I think that the most important "multiple measure" might be student engagement--not whether students are superficially entertained in the classroom but whether they are interested enough to ask questions, dig a little deeper, or push to understand the relevance of a lesson to their lives. Why? Because curiosity creates the patterns of discovery that motivate lifelong learning. For many students, school is something they finish, not a place that sets up lifelong patterns.

Are you seeing evidence of engaged or disengaged students? Roland Barth, in an essay titled "Turning Book Burners into Lifelong Learners," (in On Common Ground from Solution Tree) tells of watching honors and AP students burn all their books and notes on the last day of class because they'd never need them again. An AP honors student told me, "I'll never major in English because they make you hate to read in those classes." The Gates Foundation discovered that over half of all high school dropouts leave school because they are bored, not because they can't do the work. Several researchers have had teachers shadow students to experience their day. Most of the teachers were bored out of their minds by noon. The "Engagement Gap" is epidemic--and could actually be catastrophic.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner lists many of the characteristics of lifelong learners as essential skills for the workplace. An educator himself, he interviewed corporate leaders about essential employee skills. To them, grammar wasn't as important as being able to build a compelling argument. Technical knowledge, almost immediately obsolete, wasn't as important as being able to identify what you don't know and effectively fill the gaps. Succeeding on individual standardized tests is irrelevant in the vast majority of organizations, where success depends on your ability to team across disciplines with people whose diverse skill sets and work styles demand expertise in interpersonal skills and teaming. The list goes on and on.

The disconnect between what we are measuring in schools and what our students really need is, I believe, actually endangering our ability to create lifelong learners. How often do you see a room full of curious students, eager to ask questions and follow paths of curiosity beyond what will be on the test? How often do we see a blip upward in 3rd grade test scores and a dive in 5th grade scores as students lose curiosity while being taught to the test?

Of course, curiosity is harder to measure than knowledge of box-and-whiskers graphs or dates of civil war battles. We can't just ask on standardized tests, "What other questions do you have about this subject?" because "curiosity tutors" would soon offer test prep on such questions. We could, though, stop asking essay questions such as "Who was your hero as a child and why?" and instead probe for what students are learning on their own, how and why they became curious, how they hope to learn more. We could revitalize project-based learning to accommodate student interests and develop curiosity. We could do all kinds of things if we decide that engagement is worth measuring. We might even become engaged in the search for multiple, meaningful, balanced measures of worthwhile student learning.