Monday, March 21, 2016

Standards for Authentic Achievement and Pedagogy

In their article, Wehlage, Newman, and Secada give what I think is an apt analysis of the potential disparity between the skills students are taught in a traditional school setting and what is actually needed for true intellectual development, or "authentic achievement". True "authentic achievement", as the authors define it, consists of three major factors that can often be neglected in traditional school settings. These factors include the ability to construct new knowledge out of a foundation of knowledge provided by others, the ability to conduct a "disciplined inquiry" (that is the ability to build on a knowledge base in a way that produces a deep and non-superficial understanding of the material), and the ability to build on learning that fosters skills applicable beyond the classroom. What I love about framing authentic achievement under these pre-requisites is that the definition is both simple and, as it seems to me, universally applicable to any specific subject matter. As a history major thinking back on my high school experience, for example, all of these factors have come into mind. In particular the first pre-requisite defined by the authors, the ability to construct new knowledge, struck me as a simple and obvious element that could often be neglected in my secondary education. For the vast majority of my high school experience, I treated history as the practice of memorizing and regurgitating names and dates. While it may have been implied, I was never explicitly told that  history was more about creating new ideas out of the information available than about simply memorizing that information. Simply having that concept of achievement in mind would frame history in a much different light for students, and would both make the subject more  attractive for them and encourage them to approach the material on an intellectual level.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Standards for Authentic Achievement and Pedagogy

In Standards for Authentic Achievement and Pedagogy, Nemann et al.'s goal was to encourage authentic achievement, which depends on construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and value of learning beyond school. I appreciated that they acknowledged that conventional methods have allowed for a lot of meaningless work to be assigned which exposes students to hundreds of "isolated pieces of knowledge" and provides them with superficial understandings of complex topics and doesn't prepare them to use this knowledge in the working world. They advocate for students' construction of knowledge, by encouraging students to produce their own original works rather than simply asking them to regurgitate what others have produced. The disciplined inquiry involves building upon students' funds of knowledge, digging deep into topics, and expressing one's findings through elaborated communication. Lastly, teachers should strive to teach in ways that show the value of their field beyond the classroom. This called to mind the final portfolios that students had to prepare in The Flat World and Education that they presented to real professionals, which gave them the opportunity to see the relevancy of their work. An important qualifier they included was that they don't expect all classroom activities to meet these standards at all times because sometimes repetitive work is necessary; but still, we should keep authentic achievement in mind as the ideal end goal. Some of the examples of authentic learning that I liked were having students write letters to senators about local issues and mailing them and taking students to an amusement park to conduct physics research and brainstorm ideas for creating their own park. These examples showed that teaching that yields authentic achievement can be done. I believe that it's not a question of what students are capable of producing but rather what we ask them to produce.