Week #6 – February 10, 2022
Chapter 4 – Choose a question from the “Pause and Ponder” section on p. 75 of the text.
What quote or passage encapsulates your biggest takeaway from this chapter?
What immediate action will you take as a result?
This question asks that we discuss our biggest takeaway from this chapter. I don’t know if the section I have selected is my biggest takeaway in learning; however, it is the most deeply resonating section of the chapter. Under the heading of Accuracy and Reliability, the section of “A Focus on Strengths” seemed to strengthen my pedagogical thinking regarding my inclusivity approach with learners.
Not long ago, my nephew came to visit me. He is a former French immersion student whose teacher told him that he would never need to read or write. He is diagnosed with ADHD and is in Gr 9. He told me how much he hates school and getting very down on himself. I told him my theory, and it made him feel much better. I started by telling him about how I knew that he was brilliant. I told him about his fantastic navigation skills in Disneyland and how smart he is with money. I explained that before creating the modern school system, he probably would have been born and rather than going to school, he would have learned things at home from his family. As he grew older, people would have recognized his natural talents, like his attention to detail, and they would have steered him towards careers that matched those abilities, or he would have been trained to follow in a family business, like farming. Similarly, others would be identified for their love of reading and writing, and they would have been sent to fancy schools and then to higher education (a very long time ago, maybe into the clergy etc.) I continued to explain that it has only been in the last one hundred years that we have started asking students to sit in a chair all day, and most classrooms are not designed for brains like his. He needed reassurance that his brain was perfectly normal. At the end of our chat, he thanked me and said he had never thought of it that way. I reassured him that he was a competent learner and listed many different ways to prove that he could learn.
I think that just like my nephew, knowing where your students’ strengths lie allow you to have conversations and that “(d)ata promote possibility and inspire action when a culture encourages a focus on strengths and uses that data to help teachers and learners see themselves as successful” (Essential Assessment pg 80). Without assessment, be it formative or summative, it is tough to gauge where students’ strengths can be found accurately. I fear that it may be true that some educators focus too much on what is wrong and what needs to be fixed.