Real Talk Intervention

“Test prep” is a bit of a dirty word in public education. Time spent in a classroom doing explicit test preparation work is implied to be time wasted – time spent, not on educational goals, but on hazy “good test-taker” skills. Skills like eliminating the distractor answer choices, using the answers from the previous questions to inform your guesses, getting good sleep the night before – to be honest I’m not sure exactly what behaviors our “good” test takers engage in. I only know that we feel we need to spend time actively teaching our students how to be one. And, the truth is, we do. Your intervention students are not good test takers. You DO need to spend time actively teaching them how to become good test takers. But not by spending class periods doing intensive, specific “test prep” – whatever that might be. A good test-taker is a good test-taker because he or she is able to connect together a wide range of information and apply it to the context of a question. A bad test-ta...

As public school teachers who are apparently on the “wrong side” of the accountability movement at this time, we are challenged quite a bit. Standardized tests are unfair and biased. Standardized tests only test a student’s ability to guess. Standardized tests are inauthentic experience that aren’t a judge of anything other than themselves. And after all - “Don’t you think that every student is an individual, and every kid has strengths, and every kid can learn…Don’t you want to teach them and not teach a test?” Yes, of course. No one wants to spend their lives wasting their time teaching students things that don’t matter. Hence the impact of politically charged legislation like The Teaching OverTesting Act – which aims to reduce the accountability piece of the STAAR performance system. But standardized testing and standardized measures of accountability are not incompatible with teaching, individuality, or strengths finding in students. The trouble with the reinforcing t...

By: Stefanie Garcia In the world of Texas English assessment at large, and here at the smaller world of Real Talk Intervention, there has been a debate on whether or not a test can actually assess an author’s intent. As an English teacher would like to weigh in on this – no, it cannot. Yes, it is impossible to know exactly what an author was thinking. As an author myself of many terrible high school emo poems, I understand that sometimes, an author uses a word, or a structure, or a simile, instinctively and without guile or intent. Sometimes, the author’s intent is just to get the feelings out. However, we are educators and we are not here to have esoteric conversations about individual authors and what they wanted me to think about their poem. They already got to write it, and now it is my turn to have a go at this text, whose rights were knowingly sold to the STAAR test creators. I am first and foremost a teacher and the educational reality is that discussing and, ye...