Food Trucks

So to give some context to the photo above, Betsy DeVos was talking about school of choice and charter schools being related to the food truck market. Besides the general lack of thought in the analogy, it did get me thinking about a good analogy for schools and what they could be related to. The president likes to compare schools to grocery stores and talk about how the competition between different stores is good for all and that people can choose which store they want to go to.

I think of this very differently. I think schools compared to grocery stores is a terrible analogy because of the end goal. The point of a grocery store is to deliver food (in schools information) in a much quicker process than before. Fifty years ago you had to walk down the street, visit a ton of stores, and wait at super long lines.

If we think of this in terms of school we have already lost to the internet, we cannot deliver information faster than the internet in the typical school manner. We can implement more technology and access more information much quicker but at the end of the day, the internet is still delivering the content faster than we can. So just looking at a school as a grocery store to me is a poor analogy because what we do here is different than just solely providing our consumers with goods.

When thinking of what schools do I think a much better analogy would be a Kitchen. Anyone can functionally go to the grocery store and buy things, just like any kid can show up at school and pick something up. We may all pick up different things, but nevertheless, we are picking things up.

I am an expert A+ student at the grocery store, I am in and out of there quickly, I have my list, I get the same things, I know where those things are, I know the self-checkout lane by the fruit section is much faster than the main ones by the medicine, and I know their tricks for pricing items on discounts, and how to avoid the cart that has the squeaky wheel (hint there is normally some debris stuck in the wheel that won't move)However, when I get home, I cannot cook. I have all these great ingredients, I followed my list, and I have most of the tools, but I have not learned along the way how to combine it all, how to put the final pieces together. Truth be told I haven’t practiced it enough to become good at it, not a natural talent of mine.

A school to me should be more kitchen than a store, it should be a place where we can experiment, try new things, and actually USE what we picked up at the store. The goal of a school isn’t to answer a pre-determined question correctly, rather the goal is to transfer the knowledge learned here into the world in new and different settings.

I link this back to instructional practices, assessments, and generally how we ask kids to use this knowledge and one area that stands out to me a bit is spelling.

If I were to say that all growth data for the 5D tool had to be focused on spelling (I’m not doing this but can be fun to pretend!) and that we could only use spelling tests as the growth data, I guarantee we would see mass hysteria, because we all have those students who struggle every week with the spelling test. Yes I know that spelling tests do not make up the entire spelling grade, but then I ask myself what is the formative feedback that we give with spelling test if we are using it as an instructional tool? Do we go back and make kids redo all the spelling words they miss or do we move onto the next list? Is there dialogue after each test that goes back and tries to find the patterns of spelling errors to address the errors? I struggled with spelling test feedback as a teacher because the kids didn't really care what I had to say about spelling if they got a 2/20 on the test. The other part I hear is, “Well that is the curriculum” or “We have to get them ready for middle school.” I asked the middle school, no one is giving spelling tests and nowhere in the curriculum do I see anything about required weekly tests, in fact, this is directly from the book:

“Consider the needs of your students and use the Sourcebook to select the instruction that best suits their abilities. You decide how long it takes to move through a unit, which skills and concepts to address in certain units, and which follow up-activities are appropriate for your students. Remember, that the focus now is not on a grade from a Friday spelling test, but on how well students apply spelling in their writing and on their long-term learning of spelling words, skills and concepts.”

I also think back to the fact that I need a list to go to the store in order to shop, I still need to know my priority words, my sight words, and have some sound systems in place to help with spelling. We have a plethora of kids who can pass spelling tests but cannot spell and a plethora of kids who cannot spell but can pass a spelling test. The answer is somewhere in the middle, there is a place for the spelling tests, a place for word study, and a place for embedded spelling assessments.

I wonder what our students would say would be the best way to assess their spelling skills, would they pick a test, would they pick their writing, would their choice on which style impact their level of focus on those areas? Could we mix it up for kids depending on their self-assessments and needs?

The answer will come in time for sure as we play around with what works best for our students, but I do know one thing. Schools aren’t like food trucks, if the goal is just to get information quicker than we’ve missed the point, schools are more like kitchens where we explore, use, and create.