Rahshene Davis Cornerstone Literacy Fellow

Some of you are testing at this moment or just finished standardized testing, and the last word you want to hear is "testing;" but take a moment and think with me about the way we are approaching testing in our schools. Is it a dreaded time when we test students in order to get them ready for the test? Is it a time when practice tests take over curriculum and instruction? Is it a time when we worry about how children will do and count the days until it is over and all the make ups are done?

Well, this article may not take care of all those things but I hope it will cause some of us to think about testing differently in the future and possibly alleviate some of the stress we teachers deal with when we hear that awful four-letter word........................ no, not that one........................the other four-letter word,........................T-E-S-T!

What if we approached testing as a new genre for children, the way we do non-fiction, poetry or biography? What if, instead of gearing children up to practice for the test a few weeks prior to the test, we infused this teaching of the genre into our curriculum starting on the first day of school? What if we unpacked for students on a daily basis all of the features, elements and vocabulary we know are in tests? What if we were honest with children about why performing well on tests was so important to people outside the classroom? What if?

I taught in a school where the morale was low during test time because scores weren't good; and as a teacher in a standardized testing grade, I carried the burden of that test on my shoulders. When scores came back, it was my grade level team only that sat down to review the scores and us who felt guilty about what more could have been done to help the children perform better. Or, we took the other route and blamed the teachers that the children had in earlier grades. Sometimes we were so desperate we began to look at how the parents failed to prepare the children before they entered school. Needless to say, none of this changed the way our children performed on the tests.

It wasn't until we began to approach test taking as a genre, and really began to explain to children the structure, language and implicit elements around testing, that things started to change. When every grade teacher in the building began to share the burden of the students' achievement on standardized test, we began to see change. This was the time when NCLB came into play and our district had been threatened with a state takeover and eventually was taken over because of failing test scores.

" Magic" wasn't what we did to improve scores; in fact, it was the opposite. We gave them "The Code". Instead of keeping the intricacies of testing a secret from the children, we unpacked the mystery beginning in Kindergarten. We began to prepare them for what they would encounter in third grade. I am sorry to say that there wasn't anything out there that we were able to purchase to make it happen. It was just a matter of collaboration among the teachers and leadership. We made a commitment as a staff to investigate the idea and invest the time in learning more about it through professional development. Here are a few of the things we did to approach test taking as a genre in our school:

1. Came together as a staff and put a strategic plan in place to change the way we approached testing in our school.
2. Began to implement what we learned in professional development by giving the children strategies to use when test taking and taught all the elements of the genre while developing a strategic plan to do so in the building.
3. Motivated the children and changed the morale in the school from negative to positive around test taking.
4. Got to know ALL the students - really know the students academically, emotionally and any special circumstances we thought they would have during standardized tests.
5. Met with each child individually in the benchmark grades who were scoring at basic or below basic and explained to them where they were in testing and where they needed to be in order to succeed. Gave those students a road map to get there.
6. Last, but not least, were real with the children about the importance of the test and what it meant to our state, city, district, school and class to succeed on the standardized tests.

At one of our professional development sessions focused on preparing teachers to teach test-taking as a genre, one of my colleagues, who was a superb teacher and who knew best practices, turned to me and said, "I feel so ashamed that I never "armed" my children with these test taking strategies before. It was like sending them to a gun fight "armed" with knives." I laughed at her comment but knew it was the truth. I, too, had just assumed that if I used best practices and taught children well, they would do well on the tests. I can proudly say that our children's scores did go up, but it was due to a combination of best practices we learned through Cornerstone and the way we approached test-taking as a genre with students.

If you want to hear more about what we did in the five areas I mentioned above, well, you'll just have to attend my session at the upcoming Summer Institute entitled, Test Taking as a Genre! Seriously, this module will be available soon in the Cornerstone Literacy Continuum and schools can access it through their Literacy Fellow. It can make the difference!!