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04 Dec 2006 - 14:28
room for growth
I hadn't quite grokked the use of the word "growth" in edu-speak.
What is Expected Growth? (204 KB, PDF)
by Gary L. Williamson, Ph.D., July 2006
We are all familiar with children, either through knowing our own or through acquaintance with those of other people. Perhaps no other thing in life is as obvious as the dramatic way that human beings develop and grow. Our key social and political institutions devote a significant part of their resources to ensuring that children grow and learn to function as productive citizens. Growth and learning are central to the mission of our country’s public schools...
Because there are a number of alternative ways to conceptualize student growth and to measure it, states face a challenge to design and implement accountability systems that address a variety of information needs and still comply with state and federal laws. In this context, there are naturally many viewpoints about how best to conceptualize and measure student growth and to set appropriate goals for growth. This makes it especially important for students, parents and educators to better understand student growth, how it is measured, and how growth expectations may be set in different contexts for different purposes...
source:
White Papers
The Lexile Framework for Reading
I think I first picked up on this last month (late to the party!), reading the middle school newsletter.
Apparently there is room for "growth" at the middle school.
There is room for growth because the middle school is not at this moment "exemplary" as defined by the National Middle School Association.
It's good of course.
It's just not exemplary.
So there's room for growth.
Unfortunately, parents don't seem to be on the same page with the NMSA:
...there is much confusion about what middle level education is and which characteristics make middle schools exemplary. In casual conversations with parents, I have found that there are many misunderstandings about what we do and why we do it....
It is important to know that middle school is not junior high.
source:
Irvington Middle School News
So there you have it again - those endlessly, ongoingly confused parents!
Parents who don't understand!
Parents who need to be educated about the mission of an exemplary middle school!
So parent education will commence!
.... If I were the new principal of a middle school in which numerous well-educated parents seem to be operating under the impression that middle school is or ought to be junior high, I would take that as a sign that my "audience" is people who are actively concerned about knowledge and academic achievement.
Not team-teaching and exploratory programs.
What is growth?
What is growth?
In the simplest terms, growth is change over time.
To study growth, we measure a thing repeatedly on
successive occasions and draw conclusions about
how it has changed. People may speak of growth in
the context of a system (e.g., a population) or in terms
of an organism (i.e., an individual). In the former, we
may be concerned with how many individuals comprise
the population, how they are dispersed and how
rapidly their number increases. In the latter instance,
we are generally concerned with how attributes of the
organism (e.g., height, weight, reading ability) change
over time. Although both notions of growth are interesting,
in this paper we are mainly concerned with
the second idea because it most closely relates to the
concern we have for how individual students develop
physically and cognitively.
Pay attention, class.
Growth is change over time.
e.g., growth in height, weight, and reading ability
Question: when your child's test scores in reading and math decline from one year to the next, is that growth?
-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006
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