Technolandy

Day 39 (of SOL 2025) Dear @shanesafir & @sjeducate 7/10 “spoilers” of edutoxins in Pedagogy of Voice

Dear Shane and Sawsan… in Pedagogies of Voice, you bring up “10 Toxins” carried in the form of signature practices and dscourses – here is a thought on:

7. Performing over learning

Looks Like:

• Standardization of curriculum (one-size-fits-all curriculum) 
• Pacing guides 
• Emphasis on “bell-to-bell” instruction 
• Grading on a curve

Sounds Like:

• “We don’t have time for questions; we are behind in the curriculum.” 
• “Your priority is preparing for the test.”

Feels like: 

How you ‘do’ (especially on a standardized test) is more important than the growth you have demonstrated in the classroom… with the statement about ‘you’ll have to take tests for the rest of your life’ makes me happy that (so far) we do not have annual testing periods for adults… It makes me happy that within the BC Curriculum, teachers do have some ‘flex’ under the overall term “Teacher Autonomy” to apply curriculum as they see appropriate ~ not beholden to any pacing guides… and I’ve seen my early mantra used by other presenters (sometimes even citing me… that was embarrassing when a big picture of me was suddenly on the screen with the quote…) of Quality over Quantity of learning being ‘covered’.

It leads to fun debates about how we reward…err grade our students as to whether we need to consider the schema the learners had – is it fair if a student already has mastery of content to still award them an A if they barely learned anything but merely refined it; whereas a student who came in knowing ‘nothing’ about the topic learned a huge amount of content … but maybe not yet at the same level of mastery of the other student… discuss!