Reply to What does "teaching to the test" really mean?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I taught in a Title 1 elementary school very focused on test scores. It’s a lot of worksheets in math and only focusing on standards that you know will be assessed.  Everything else is secondary.  It’s very similar in ELA. Lots of worksheets that are skill based - Find the main idea, What is the genre, identify story elements.  No real reading for enjoyment.  Lots of talking about how to take a test, test strategies, process of elimination etc.  This isn’t just for a couple of weeks before testing starts.  This is all year starting in September. [/quote]

We are at a Title 1 school that I suppose "teaches to the test" but it doesn't look like this. There is tons of focus on the enjoyment of reading and the fun that can be had with math. But there is also a lot of attention paid to ensuring kids are acquiring specific building blocks for developing ELA and math fluency. And example of this combination at the Kindergarten level for ELA would look like this:

- 20 minutes a day dedicated exclusively to phonics, focusing on letter sounds, blends, sounding out cvc words, etc.
- 30 minute read along later in the day, reading a fun and engaging book that might connect to a broader focus area for the kids (like they might read a funny book about rain during a focus on weather and climate). The focus of the read along would be the story but the teacher might emphasize a concept from the phonics lesson during the reading along to encourages acquisition of that skill. For instance, they might have focused on the blends -ir, -er, and -ur during the phonics session, and the teacher might have the kids sound out the word "water" in the title or text of the book using what they learned that morning.
- A weekly homework assignment in which a child is assigned a few sight words that incorporate the -ir, -er, -ur blends and asked to practice writing these words on a worksheet. The homework assignment would be accompanied by a brief explanation for caregivers as to what the kids are working on to help them facilitate

None of that has to do with testing strategies. Perhaps they do of that in the testing grades, but my observation at the PK-1st level is that they absolutely focus on love and enjoyment of reading, and are. invested in the kids actually acquiring these skills, not simply learning to parrot them for testing purposes.[/quote]

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