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

140 Pages·2015·2.917 MB·English
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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 © The Author(s) 2015 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer Science+Business Media Singapore Pte Ltd. is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) 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, vii 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?” ix 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

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