Put Your Mind to the Test

"Change is the end result of all true learning."

-Leo Buscaglia

One might think that in a post about our upcoming MAP testing, I would use an analogy about using a map to find our way through a dense, impenetrable landscape, but being a clever man, I used that one last week, so I'll have to come up with something new and fresh this week. 

Listen, I know that having students take standardized tests isn't why any of us became teachers. It just isn't. In my mind, every teacher goes into this profession because of the opportunity to make an impact on students, to change their lives for the better, to see that "AHA!" moment in their eyes when they finally grasp a concept and knowing that because of your efforts, they have new insight into the world around them. None of that will happen this week while your students are taking MAP tests. However, the data produced by these tests is important because we are interested in student learning in the big picture sense, and in order to know how we are doing on that front, we need to occasionally poke our heads out of our metaphorical gopher holes and take a look around at how the students are doing in the other gopher holes (I'm thinking that repeating the navigation analogy wouldn't have been so bad at this point). 

To explain it another way, I will tell you a story. You will find I have lots of stories. This story is about my senior year of high school. I was in a physics class with two other students-- it was a very small high school. Our teacher decided to have us go compete in a physics competition at Eastern Illinois University. For a few weeks, we spent our class time building mouse trap cars, tennis ball catapults, and pasta beams. We worked tirelessly designing, building, and testing our contraptions. Each of us trying to outdo the others in the class, and in the end, we all felt pretty pleased with the results of our work. The teacher was very proud of what we had made... Until we went to the competition. Turns out that comparing us to ourselves didn't give a very good picture of how well we were performing. I mean, it did if all we cared about was the competition between the three of us, but the reality is that we would soon be entering a much larger world, and in order to compete, we needed to at least be on par with our peers in those other gopher holes. We told the teacher that she had to take the next year's physics class back to this competition now that she had seen where the bar was set in terms of design quality. Armed with the data from our attempt, she would be better able to prepare them.

This is how we use MAP data. It gives us a chance to see if what we are doing in our classes is keeping pace with what students across the state/nation are doing because that is the world our students will soon be entering, and we want to make sure their mouse trap cars and pasta beams are going to be competitive.