The “Rote Map” of Standards, Progressive Education, and Performance Tasks

The recent fashion of defining curriculum in terms of “standards” has created an impression among some that meeting the standards is a teacher's only job. The effect that such an interpretation can have upon classrooms is stultifying, with students in danger of encountering nothing more stimulating than a stream of worksheets keyed to specific standards. Creative, investigatory, collaborative work is relegated to the pedagogical backseat in too many cases.

Many teachers look at the standards movement with skepticism -- after all, they've watched behavioral objectives, mastery learning, minimum-competency testing, and outomes-based learning (just to mention a few) come and go. Some teachers expect standards to come and go in like fashion, and feel inclined to do nothing in the meantime. Others are clearly overwhelmed by the amount of detail contained in some of the lists of standards and despair of ever being able to do justice to each minute item. Many others, though, see that the standards are picayune for the reason of completeness, and these teachers continue to teach in a holistic rather than atomistic fashion.

I believe the promoters of standards endorse this last reaction. I believe they want to see progressive, as much as thorough, teaching and learning in classrooms. It is not their intention to bring the classroom down to the methodological level of the parade ground, and that is certainly not the intention of media education. If you scratch a media educator, you will often reveal a progressive educator who has been attracted to the subject by the likelihood that progressive pedagogy will be a perfect fit to the content. Media classrooms often display the following characteristics, typical of progressive education:

• Group and collaborative work is encouraged and rewarded
• Independent and project work is encouraged and rewarded
• Self- and peer assessment is practiced and acknowledged in final grades
• Abstractions including creativity, originality, and experimentation are encouraged and rewarded
• It is not a problem when a student knows more than a teacher
• The process of work is valued, sometimes as much as or more than the product
• Sometimes work is undertaken without a clear expectation for the outcome
• Risk taking, experimentation, investigation, and discovery are all acknowledged as powerful learning tools

Many jurisdictions are trying to make it clear that their delineation of standards is meant as a clarification of expectations rather than as a strict “rote map” by including performance tasks in their large-scale assessments. (For a link to Canadian standards in media education, go to the Media Education in Canada page of the Media Awareness Network site; standards for U.S. states are listed at Frank Baker's The Media Literacy Clearinghouse.) Performance tasks are not tests; they are activities deliberately designed to give students the chance to show their best performance in an area of learning. They assess not only knowledge of facts and skill (both low-level kinds of learning), but also understanding, conceptual thinking, and the ability to extrapolate into other areas of learning -- the synthesis and evaluation levels in Bloom's taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956).

The link between performance tasks and progressive education is that progressive education (among other things)

• Seeks to provide the best possible conditions for learning in classrooms
• Considers learning to be a lifelong, integrated activity
• Recognizes that classroom relationships revolve around power, and seeks to give power to students to control their own learning
• Believes that learning should be motivating and enjoyable
• Provides for individual differences in learners and teachers
• Tries to make the learning of facts and skills a natural part of the more important learning of concepts, understandings, competencies, and abilities
• Practices active learning and teaching at least as much as passive
• Considers the classroom as an important but not sole site for learning
• Acknowledges that students can be teachers and teachers can be learners without any conflict of role or power
• Values colearning and cooperative and collaborative learning as much as it values direct instruction
• Sees assessment as a learning opportunity as well as an occasion to make judgments

Performance tasks, if they are made important in large-scale testing programs, remind teachers that there is a lot more to good education than just covering a list of skills and facts. Here is a list of the qualities of a good performance task, compiled by my colleague Judith Fine. You will notice more than a passing similarity between it and the description of progressive education above. Good performance tasks

• Present engaging, “real world,” meaningful, substantive issues or problems -- the “big ideas”
• Are directly related to important curriculum expectations
• Focus on what students can do, how they apply and extend their knowledge
• Require students to utilize and integrate a variety of essential skills, knowledge, concepts, procedures
• Emphasize the processes students use to achieve solutions, rather than only the “right” answers
• Present students with complex, loosely structured problems that allow for a wide range of products -- this makes the task accessible to all students
• Require students to justify, defend, explain the conclusions they reach
• Involve the use of complex thinking skills, and the extension of knowledge, skills, abilities -- the task should help students make connections and generalizations that increase their understanding of important concepts and processes
• Often encourage a team effort, collaboration, group discussion, brainstorming
• Require students to demonstrate, create, explain, perform, produce, present something -- i.e., generate solutions, not select answers from a list
• Are often interdisciplinary in nature
• Make available to students assessment criteria (e.g., rubrics), and also models or examples of high-level products -- this encourages students to self-assess and contributes to their becoming independent learners
• Focus on learning that cannot easily (if at all) be assessed with tests
• Are usually longer term, rather than one-shot, efforts
• Are designed to emphasize depth more than breadth
• Give teachers rich data on how well students understand a topic, use the tools of the discipline, and support a point of view