Back to the Future

Hello again, folks.  Pleasure to see you all again.  I'm sure you all miss blogging as much as I do, and it's good to be back. 

As I viewed the education reform webinar, the musing of Alfie Kohn really resonated well with me as he discussed the topic of quantifying student success and learning.  Societies (Ours, specifically) infatuation with standardized testing, numerical rankings, grades, and others of that ilk have had an overall detrimental impact on all that we do.  What I like about this topic is that it really speaks to our own experiences and background knowledge, since the majority of us MACers attended public school settings that made sweet, sweet love to standardized testing and assessments.  My own personal take compels me to suggest that student motivation is one of the biggest barriers that must be shifted or overcome as we attempt to try and climb back up the ladder of the most educated, industrial societies in the world.  Improving performances on standardized tests is imperative, but addressing the needs and barriers students are presented with almost daily will answer and solve a lot of the issues teachers continue to struggle with as they try to develop significantly positive achievement trends in the classroom.  Once students have answered a lot of their own questions intrinsically, I think you'll see an upwardly mobile trend amongst students and achievement test performances