Effective teachers know that authentic learning only happens in a safe environment where kids believe they can learn
To create this environment, teachers first work to create an appropriate classroom climate where all students are empathic citizens and then devise engagement strategies that encourage all students to achieve. While this essential work is under the control of teachers, widely divergent circumstances such as poverty, hunger, homelessness, exposure to crime and violence, divorce or a death in the family, relocation, stress, bullying or peer pressure, hormonal changes and other socioeconomic and life factors that influence each individual student in episodic and chronic ways is not. Effective teachers know that these factors do not determine if a student can learn, but they can overwhelm students and make it very difficult for them to properly tune their minds to learning. This can severely impede a student and teacher’s ability to reach learning targets on a timeline in sync with summative assessment schedules. As much time and effort is put into understanding a student’s external factors and providing a stable, safe place for children to learn as is put into lesson planning and teaching, yet, this is rarely evident in teacher evaluations. It’s also little comfort to teachers and students that value-added measures are designed to account for extenuating circumstances, it’s information coming far too late for teachers and students to act on. It also puts students and teachers at a disadvantage as teachers need to find time to re-teach prior lessons, and students find it harder and harder to correct poor summative assessment scores.
Staff at a turn-around school expressed deep concern for the large population of children who were deemed “homeless” by state definition. They cite the daily impacts of scheduling transportation to and from the homeless destination, be it a park or group home, as well as the hurdles in communicating with families over issues of homelessness and hunger.
A middle school math teacher told us how he delivers multiple summative tests throughout the semester to help even out the bumps in a student’s life. He talked about the relationship between divorce or the death of a grandparent on formative and summative assessments stating the impact to the student’s overall grade can be profound when the frequency of assessments are small.