Carol Allred's Seven Strategies For Building Positive Classrooms

Teachers shape the minds of students to realize what their purpose is in life. Lately, because of certain educational reforms, it has been hard for teachers to say what they need to say. “In 40-plus states, the math and English guidelines determine the knowledge students have to master by the end of each grade, what they’ll be tested on this year, and in many cases, how teachers and principals will be rated at their jobs once those test scores are released” (Strauss). Most educational reforms are adopting standardized testing and should be reconsidered. Statistics even show that since we have taken part in reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards math and reading are declining. These standards tell teachers what to teach and what the students should know by the end of the school year. The reforms also evaluate teacher performance by how well the students learn the information. Some people believe educational reforms should not be telling teachers how to teach their students, and others believe that the reforms are absolutely fine the way they are. However the truth is educational reforms are yet to be perfected.

Another issue that is standing in the way of students’ success is standardized testing. Standardized testing is unnecessary, it uses up a considerable amount of time and resources are wasted. In many school districts, standardized tests results are becoming the most cucrial point of school performance, that should not be the case, the focus should be that each student is prepared for the future responsibilities that they will have later in life. As a result, teachers feel an immense amount of pressure to make sure that test scores rise consistently, this pressure sometimes leads to teachers tampering with student scores to get more favorable results. Schools also spend large amounts of time and money securing assessments to make sure that there is no cheating, however students are still likely to cheat on tests as more pressure is placed on them to perform well. Schools Change the curriculum to match the test, and teachers tend to cover material that will likely be on the next assessment, standardized testing doesn’t help students

The educational system in the United States has gone through many changes over the last century. These changes are a part of a constant movement toward educational excellence for every child in this nation. One of the most recent acts placed on public school systems by the government is to create more accountability for schools in order to ensure that all children are receiving the proper education. Part of this mandate is that public schools will require students to take tests in order to gather information about their academic achievement. Although educators and administrators claim that the mandatory ability testing programs being initiated in America’s public schools will hold students and teachers accountable for academic

“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.

Reflecting on class readings, class discussions, case study observations and activities, I find that testing and accountability is negatively impacting instruction in early childhood classrooms at three levels. First, I believe that in this era of high-stakes accountability teachers are being both implicitly and explicitly forced to teach to the test. For example, during my three classroom observations that I conducted, I witnessed how the lead teacher was more concerned about coverage of the material versus students actually understanding and being comfortable with the content. Consequently, I believe this teacher practice led to students misbehaving or not understanding additional problems. It appeared that children were not making connections about the information being taught and therefore were not able to see purpose and larger goals of the lesson (Krechevsky, Mardell, Rivard, & Wilson, 2013).

"Educators must stop lamenting the challenges of accountability and start making improvements."(Beyond the Rock and the Hard Place, Craig Jerald)

Even in New jersey a dad had testified that his son was too stressed out from all the tests, as well as New York where the state union president commented that parents should opt children out of taking tests (Taylor, Rich, 2015). Although over testing has been a problem for educators for years, it has become even more of a problem recently with more standardized tests being added to the long list of what children already have to take. Some teachers are taking a stand against the testing and refusing to administer the tests. Three teachers in P.S. 364 Earth School wrote a letter to the administration about why they will not give Common Core tests (Strauss, 2014). They “can no longer implement policies that seek to transform the broad promises of public education into a narrow obsession with the ranking and sorting of children” (Strauss, 2014). They aren’t the only teachers who feel this way, but most don’t want to opt out because without scores, they can't thoroughly review a teacher. Some agree that the expectations are too high, but don’t understand how a teacher can’t be impactful

* Another method is through community discussions. Have a classroom meeting every Friday to discuss issues that students are encountering in the class. Then as a class come up with solutions to how they can solve the problems and prevent them from happening again (Weebly).

In spite of critics, educational reform in Texas continued to rely on testing in an effort to meet accountability required at the state level. Calls for accountability seem to usually rise from the political community. When the political community demands that tests serve high-stakes accountability functions, professional testing standards can be easily compromised. “In accountability contexts, test results decide which students are retained in grade, held back from graduation, and assigned to tracks or special classifications…high-stakes testing produces teaching and testing practices that lead to inflated test scores and further disadvantage already disadvantaged students,” (Smith and Fey, 2000, p. 334).

A recent study reveals that the movement started by the federal government and policymakers aims at rewarding good performance and punishing failure in schools. The initiative has been implemented to ensure that the taxpayer’s money is efficiently and effectively used. Even critics of the accountability movement agree that answerability has become a paramount issue in

I critically analyzed one of Diane’s Ravitch’s chapter Teacher’s Accountability for the course EDUC 680. As I described earlier that according to DeMarrais and LeCompte (1998), schools and teachers are responsible for reproducing the stratification of social classes and so we should consider having a curriculum to meet the needs of the disadvantages students and fill in the gaps of the differential knowledge between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Similarly, the neoliberalist (Apple, 2004) claims that teachers and schools should be held accountable based on standardized tests scores of the students. In both the situations, the teachers and schools should be responsible to mitigate the differences in their knowledge formation and reduce the test scores differences between the advantages and disadvantages groups based on the premises that

For instance when inspiring a shared vision it is important to invite everyone to be a part of creating that vision. It is also important for the vision to be simplistic so everyone understand clearly what it is trying to be accomplished. Model the way is just as it states, through modeling what it as a leader you expect. This as a teacher could look like how you walk down a hallway verse how you want your students to walk down the hallway. If the expectation is to slightingly walk through the halls, having a teacher talk to another staff member in the hall is not modeling the way. I have personally seen this happen and usually it results in the students to begin to hold conversations, verses a teacher who is walking quietly down the hall way with their class showing the students what is expected. It comes down to showing what you expect and not just saying what you expect. Encourage the heart is giving that child a purpose for praise, by being specific in what the child is being praised for not only that child but other children as well will began to see and understand what they can do to earn a praise. Enable others to act in a classroom makes me think of cooperative learning, this gives each student personal responsibility, along with having to work in a group. Lastly, challenge the process which reminds me of story from Rita Peirson. This practice is focusing on small wins and how they can make a difference, in a Peirson’s TED talk she tells a story about how she put plus two on a student’s paper with a smiley face. The student came up to her and asked why she had put a smiley face when they had missed eighteen other questions. She responded by telling the student at least he knew two and didn’t get them all wrong which means they could learn and next time know even more. This, from her explanation, made the student feel

Teachers are responsible for the learning environment they create. Classroom management has been conducted in many ways over the years, and not always for the benefit of the students. It is not simply a format for rewarding or punishing student behavior while hoping students understand the classroom material. An effective classroom environment is something that can be achieved through the help of clear management strategies, discipline that serves students well, class collaboration, and a reevaluation of the classic reward and punishments system. If a teacher can implement these critical elements into a classroom, then the learning process will be a positive experience for the teacher, and all students. A quote that accurately illustrates this would be, “Classroom management is not about having the right rules…it’s about having the right relationships” (Danny Steele).

system─ is on results. And while this focus on results is understandable (see, e.g., Schmoker, 1999, 2001), it is also important to consider the means by which the ends are achieved. The questions emerged: What was the effect of a political decision─ to demand public school accountability─ on pedagogical decision making? How might the demands of a new testing program affect how teacher teach and how children are expected to learn?

Through my time in Education 100, my field observations, and the readings, I have come to the conclusion that I have strong opinions on certain issues in the field of education. One of my strongest beliefs is that student performance targets, school ratings, and support from the government for schools should not be based on student’s performance on standardized tests and state-mandated exams. Often times, especially in public schools, schools are given a ranking or a report card based off of how well their students did on that year’s exam. That score that the school receives then becomes the target for students to reach the following year. However, the government fails to realize that the scores students receive do not include the amount of growth the students had from the previous year. I saw this issue while doing an observation at Noble Elementary School. The students had learned so much throughout the year and had academically grown, but they still performed poorly on the state-mandated exam. Because of their poor performance, the school received an F from the government. This is alarming because the principal at Noble explained that the reason students did poorly was because their core was not at the standards of the exam. This lead me to the idea that the reason students perform poorly on these exams is because of the way the government set up and handles our education system. The flaws in our education system prove to be detrimental to our students, therefore, reforms