To Whom it May Concern:

            I pride myself on working for an organization that continually revisits and reworks it’s pedagogy in the direction of a more progressive education.  John Dewey once said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”   In my opinion, one of the greatest progressive achievements we have made is to remove the scripted lesson plan and give teachers the autonomy to structure a curriculum based on goals and benchmarks that will better suit the diverse needs of their students.    At my school, our arts program is rich, and in partnering with the Guggenheim over the past few years, has gone in a direction that provides our students with incredibe creative problem solving skills that will directly impact their success in the future.

However, today, I found myself incredibly disheartened over our lack of clarity and progression in one area: ELA.  We are encouraging our students to read between the lines, make connections beyond the text and formulate their own ideas.  As a whole, I believe we are instructing the future innovators of our society.  Yet, when it comes to grading of an ELA IA, it appears that could not be farther from the case. 

In second grade, we are expecting children to be able to make a claim and then provide evidence.  This is brilliant!  This is a necessary skillset in life.  However, we are marginalizing our scholars’ creativity by placing an emphasis on numerical data.  We are not dissecting the children’s work and making attempts to understand their thinking.  We are strictly looking for their ability to copy or paraphrase the author’s idea in support of their own.  This is the type of academic writing that philosophers and researchers do.  Paraphrasing someone else’s claim in support of your own idea is a necessary skill to have in high school and college.  It is a skill that should begin developing as early as second grade, but with that said, it is an incredibly hard skill to assess.  Even harder so, when that skill is being applied to fictitious or creative writing. 

In the art studio, I utilize a method of dissecting art introduced by Abigail Housen and Phillip Yenawine, coined Visual Thinking Strategies.   Here is how Philip Yenawine describes it in his latest book Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines (2013):

“VTS uses art to teach visual literacy, thinking, and communication skills—listening and expressing oneself. Growth is stimulated by several things: looking at art of increasing complexity, answering developmentally based questions, and participating in peer group discussions carefully facilitated by teachers.” (19)

I also engage my scholars in the following mantra: “I see, I think, I wonder… what’s this art about?”  Scholars are very eager to talk about what they see.  It is right there in front of them.  They see colors, shapes and lines and it is impossible to speak the wrong answer based on simple noticing.  However, when it comes time for students to move past what they see, and begin developing conversations on what they think, I witness anxiety and hesitation.  They are afraid of being wrong.  I remind them that in art and any creative field, you cannot be wrong.  So long as you can support your idea with evidence from the picture, you cannot be wrong.  You see, when an individual looks at a work of art, they bring with it a wide range of different life experiences and aesthetic preferences.  Even when a group of individuals come to a consensus on a work of art’s meaning, they still perceive the work in a way that is unique to them.  When scholars internalize the belief that they cannot be wrong as long as they are providing evidence we can all see, the conversations become wildly rich and my scholars continue to surprise me with findings I had never even considered myself.  All artists create with an intention.  The artist has a story behind every single charcoal line, brush stroke or form.  Yet, the artist’s intention may not always come across to the viewer, and that is perfectly acceptable. 

Art is so subjective, much more subjective than writing.  However, fiction is creative writing.  A fiction piece is an author (a creative individual, an artist who expresses his ideas through written word) composing a narrative and a world that exists only in their mind.  The main idea is much more tangible.  However, we need to reconsider that every individual has his or her own range of experiences.  They carry these experiences with them through life and all information received by the brain is filtered through this lens.  Fiction writing is an incredible tool to promote thinking outside of the box and reading between the lines.  We offer scholars a chance to be innovative and make their own inferences so long as there is evidence to back it up.  Does this evidence, however, need to be the limited to the direct quoting of the author?  If a scholar makes an educated claim, and can back it up with inferred evidence from the passage, is that not still demonstrating understanding?

I reviewed two recent ELA IA exams given in second grade.  One scholar scored a 2/8 and the other an 8/8.  I went no further than the first question after I saw that both scholars received the correct answer.  Clearly, both children understood the text.  Then why did one scholar score a 0 and the other a 2?  It seemed that one girl attempted to paraphrase her evidence by listing her own inferences filtered through her unique lens.  She received no credit.  The other scholar dutifully wrote, “The author stated that…” and then copied word for word what was in the text.  She received a 2.  In my opinion, both girls were correct.  One supported her idea with a more empirical approach, citing evidence observed within the text.  The other, supported her idea more organically.  One girl was celebrated for getting the “correct answer”.  One girl was demarcated for having “evidence without enough clarity.”  One girl will grow up to be a phenomenal researcher who dutifully follows strategies given to her by her superiors.  The other might just grow up to be the innovator of the next big trend in her generation.

We absolutely cannot continue to educate children and assess their work with a numerical data system.  We need to take a stand in New York State, and push for ingenuity and push to assess our children’s thinking processes.  We need to encourage higher modes of creative expression and understanding.  The world needs all methods of learning and education.  We need “No Hesitation Math” for those data-oriented careers like engineering.  We need project-based education for scholars working in a field where they need to find solutions to pre-existing problems.  However, we also need to place a much greater emphasis on design based education.   With the way our world is rapidly expanding, we need to educate children who will prioritize innovation as adults.  We need to make sure our children go out there and question and examine the world.  We need to give them the tools to push back in a professional and respectful way.  We need to acknowledge when they find a different pathway towards the same understanding and celebrate their bravery and diversity, not slump them into a “below expectations” group based on benchmarks that are comprised mostly from percentages and averages.  If we are going to be progressive, we need to embrace this process wholly.