Learning to Teach with Assessment: A Student Teaching Experience in China

140 Pages·2015·2.917 MB·English

by  Heng Jiang

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUCATION
Heng Jiang
Learning to Teach
with Assessment
A Student Teaching
Experience in
China
SpringerBriefs in Education
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8914
Heng Jiang
Learning to Teach
with Assessment
A Student Teaching Experience in China
1 3
Heng Jiang
National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
Singapore
ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Education
ISBN 978-981-287-271-5 ISBN 978-981-287-272-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-272-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954599
Springer Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
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This book is dedicated to my mother,
Jifeng Chen, and the memory of my father,
Zongjie Jiang
Foreword by Lynn Paine
“How can I know if my students are learning? And how can I help different
students, with different backgrounds, learn?” These questions, posed in a range
of ways, drive much of the experience of new teachers anywhere. They are
central to much of the education research scholarship worldwide. For the pre-
service teachers in Heng Jiang’s meticulously drawn ethnography, these questions
motivate their conversations with their mentors and their efforts in planning and
teaching.
Today assessment has a growing importance in the discourses of teach-
ing. For good or ill, new teachers have to learn how to use assessment to inform
their teaching. The pressure for assessment has not been uniform in all teaching
contexts. Certainly, in an era of globally circulating ideas about accountability
in teaching, attention to assessment is on the rise in many countries. In Chinese
schools, the role of the test has long been emphasized. If anything, recent reforms
would appear to challenge this tradition; major education reforms in China have
called on schools to teach more in ways that support all students’ learning, what
is considered “quality education” (suzhi jiaoyu), and less on exam- and test result-
oriented approaches, referred to as shengxue jiaoyu (“education for the purpose
of passing on to the next level” or yingshi jiaoyu (“education for the purpose of
passing exams”) (Kipnis 2006, p. 298). Yet even with this reform push, Chinese
teachers still feel enormous pressures from examinations, and assessment is a vital
part of what new teachers have to learn.
This book illustrates the ways in which learning about assessment is a crucial
dimension of learning teaching. In the body of research on novice teacher learning,
there has been far more attention on issues on developing teachers’ subject-m atter
knowledge or their understanding of students. As assessment brings together
issues of subject and of students and their learning, it stands as a central object for
new teachers to engage.
What sets Heng Jiang’s study apart is her ability to show us how the process of
learning to teach becomes, for these beginning teachers working in a rural setting,
a process of learning to make distinctions, to construct boundaries. Interestingly,
despite the surface attention to teaching all learners, in China, as elsewhere,
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viii Foreword by Lynn Paine
teachers get drawn into practices that in fact contradict the rhetoric of quality for
all. In this sensitive portrayal of a small number of student teachers from an urban
teacher preparation program, assigned to a practicum in a rural school, we see
how novices are powerfully affected by the norms of the teaching community they
enter. Even with an explicit goal of preparing teachers to support learners in rural
communities, this teaching experience tends, for most, to reinforce their notions of
how different rural learners are from urban ones.
This book enters the field of research on teacher learning at an important
moment. Discourses of research on teaching and policy reform aimed at teaching
internationally certainly has brought more visibility to diversity among students in
terms of student ability and achievement level, disadvantaged background and/or
marginalized status, and developmental issues and special needs. In many coun-
tries, for example, the results of OECD’s PISA studies have clearly revealed the
strong correlation between socio-economic status and student achievement. Using
theoretical framing of boundary work, Jiang explores how the micro-processes
of teaching, developed through the community of new and experienced teachers
working together and enacted through test construction, teacher talk, and class-
room practice, contribute to this.
While Jiang’s study follows student teachers in one small rural school, the
portraits she paints raise powerful questions for us. If teachers must learn how to
assess their students’ learning, how can that process be one that ultimately sup-
ports all students’ learning, rather than reify categories and reinforce processes of
marginalization and failure? Jiang argues that, even in this small rural school, we
can see the problems, as well as possibilities, in learning teaching with assessment.
Lynn Paine
Professor of Education
Michigan State University
East Lansing, USA
Reference
Kipnis, A. (2006). Suzhi: A keyword approach. The China Quarterly, 186, 295–313.
doi:10.1017/S0305741006000166
Foreword by A. Lin Goodwin
I recently worked with several teacher inquiry groups focused on assessment as
part of a year-long initiative of the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project.
One “group” consisted of a high-school teacher who was particularly concerned
about students’ poor performance in state-wide school-leaving exams, even
though these same students had done well on all the practice tests that he and his
fellow teachers had put together for them. He focused his inquiry on analyzing
the practice versus consequential tests to figure out the reason for the dramatic
(and curious) difference. His close examination and his question led him to see
that the practice tests teachers had created were comprised mostly of content or
factual items; in contrast, the consequential tests emphasized application. In
essence, teachers were bypassing the substance of the exam entirely in their efforts
to “prepare” students for the assessment. Once the teachers began to teach from
the test as opposed to teaching to the test—i.e., they began to use (analyze) the
test (data) to inform their goals and revise curriculum and instruction, students’
performance on the high school gatekeeping exam improved significantly. As
a consequence of thinking differently about test prep, teachers’ pedagogical
repertoires necessarily expanded to include more interactive, hands-on and
participatory practices, resulting in an increase in students’ level of engagement
and motivation. In the end, the high stakes outcomes were more about learning
than test scores.
The fine yet significant difference between teaching from versus to tests forms
the central concept at the core of Heng Jiang’s research. In this volume, teaching
from the test means focusing on meaning, using assessments to peer into students’
thinking and adjusting instruction according to what students have revealed
through their test responses. In contrast, teaching to the test emphasizes strategy
and best guesses, using time efficiently, and anticipating test items solely to boost
test scores, understanding is secondary. Heng’s book tells the story of assessment
as “an authentic teaching task” for teacher learning, how experienced teachers in
a rural school in China help student intern teachers teach from tests in order to
answer the central question: “when has learning happened?”
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x Foreword by A. Lin Goodwin
Heng’s work comes on the heels of the latest (2012) Programme for
International Assessment (PISA) results that once again have Shanghai, China
achieving the number one position among participating countries in assessments
of reading, mathematics, and science. This is a repeat of Shanghai, China’s leap
into the top spot three years prior, demonstrating that Shanghainese 15-year olds’
first performance in PISA 2006 was not a fluke but apparently a consistent stand-
ard. This phenomenon has further fueled an international appetite among many
countries—including the U.S.—for learning China’s secret to stellar test scores,
to emulate what China does so as to improve their competitive edge among inter-
national peers. But what does China do, according to this ethnographic case study,
set in the Chinese countryside, far away from urbane, sophisticated, and well-
resourced Shanghai? What can Heng’s book teach us about better test scores?
Apparently, not much.
Heng is very clear that her work is “not another attempt to find out why
Chinese learners score high on tests or to examine Chinese teacher’s effectiveness
in preparing students for the tests.” Instead her book is about by “using assess-
ment as a focal task for teacher learning.” Heng acknowledges that high test
marks, learning, and teaching in China are “intertwined,” and that teachers in
China operate within a test-driven and academically tracked system. Her purpose,
however, is to take an intimate look at how seasoned teachers transform what is
typically a static and close-ended exercise—a test—into a dynamic opportunity for
teachers, in this case teachers-in-preparation, to come to know learners, evaluate
curriculum, modify instruction, and achieve deep understanding. By analyzing test
responses (versus results), teachers are able to identify patterns of misconception
as well as comprehension—where learning has, or has not, happened—across the
group or class, as well as pinpoint any specific conceptual gaps an individual stu-
dent might evidence. This method of “teaching with assessment” ensures that “test
items [are] not taught as discrete fragments,” but rather become clues and keys to
conceptual understanding. This practice allows teachers to see students’ learning
quite clearly, to use careful analysis to map out where to take students next: what
alternative solutions to try; how much practice to require; how to parcel out lim-
ited resources; which student to push harder, whom to slow down, etc.
It is important at this juncture to interrupt what might be construed as an
entirely rosy picture about tests and testing. The educational context in China can
be described as hierarchical, competitive, stratified, and restrictive; opportunities
are not always equitably distributed or uniformly available, and destinies can be
decided by where one lives, how one’s parents earn a living, which school one
attends, and yes, what test score one earns. Heng writes quite candidly about a
national mindset that spends more resources on those who are already ahead, on
the best schools, on those students who have already demonstrated their ability
to achieve. The lives of students classified as putongban (ordinary, mediocre) are
palpably different from those identified as shiyanban (high status, high achieving),
and a test score can dramatically change a student’s life either positively or
negatively. Heng’s research gives voice to implicit social messages about which