My Turn
'Teaching and Learning Are Personal'

The death of his son took this professor back to his students--and away from traditional assessments.

By Matthew Miltich

During the spring quarter of 1996, immediately after the death of my son Andrew, I found that when I was alone in my office on campus or at home, I could not read student papers from my learners at Itasca Community College, where I teach English.

I couldn't focus, couldn't concentrate my thoughts upon my learners' words on paper, or even make myself believe in the importance of grades or other prescriptive measures of their learning.

Sometimes, my vision blurred by grief, I couldn't even see the words my students had written. I could, however, see the students. Each one of them seemed to me as dear as my own child, so I had no trouble being with them, or reading their work and talking with them about their reading and other school work when they were with me.

In my composition classes, I worked with one person at a time offering individual help with writing.

I abandoned written examinations and instead questioned each learner individually. Each examination became a private conversation and each conscientious learner told me more about her or his learning than I'd ever discovered in written exams.

My experiences that quarter taught me more deeply the lesson I'd been learning one class day at a time for more than 20 years: Teaching and learning are personal, individual, and unique--and also inseparable from who we are and from our lives away from the classroom.

Years have passed since the death of my boy, and I can read student writing again and grade exams, both of which I consider honorable activities. But my conviction has deepened that every experience of learning, like each learner, is singular. I've concluded that for me and my learners, standard measurements of learning are inadequate.

Now, I find myself in direct conflict with the "assessment" movement in education. I disagree with the assumptions of this movement, and I'm suspicious of its advocates.

I disagree that assessment should assume a priority role in education. The evangelists in the movement offer it as a kind of panacea. I see it as a distraction that diverts our attention from more critical, more primary issues.

We must provide for our learners. Measurement is no substitute for nourishment. Advocates for assessment like to talk about nurturing students and about learning communities, but they end by focusing on measurement, data gathering, and quantification. Moreover, assessment programs absorb resources that otherwise might provide students with truly enriched and enriching learning experiences.

Students need good instruction and good instructors. The assessment movement promises to improve instruction; but assessment has failed to capture the imagination of most teachers because the promise of improved instruction can't come true if assessment is the means for making it happen. Instruction will improve when administrators make careers in education more attractive and provide better support and greater access to professional development.

The assessment movement has promised to make us more accountable by providing tools for reporting measurable outcomes--a way to prove our worth and to hold us responsible for the learning of our students. Standardized tests, charts, scoring grids, rubrics, and assessment tools are promoted as the means by which we can quantify and report this learning.

What this promise fails to account for is that, for good or ill, no matter how well we teach, learning rests finally with the learner--and this is as it should be.

No more important moment comes for a learner than that in which she is struck, forcefully and clearly, by the notion that she and only she is responsible for her learning. No quantification can account for this revelation, but learners know when it occurs, and afterward they value worthy instructors as guides and allies in their learning experiences. Such an immeasurable outcome is worth more than any portfolio of objective data.

While objective evaluation of learning is important, learning can go on without it. No "assessment program" can take the place of energized, passionate faculty who love their disciplines and their learners and learning itself.

Matthew Miltich teaches English at Itasca Community College, near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and is a member of the Minnesota State College Faculty. A more extensive version of this article, titled "All the Fish in the River: An Essay on Assessment," appears in the winter 2001-02 issue of Thought and Action, the NEA higher education journal, online at www.nea.org/he/tanda.html.

Editor's Note

Our debate column has always been one of the best read of all NEA Today features. It's also one of the longest running, dating back to the very first NEA Today published nearly 20 years ago. The first question debated was this: Must every student become computer literate? Taking the "yes" side was, naturally enough, a computer curriculum specialist from Illinois. On the opposing side was a San Francisco teacher who supervises student teachers.

We find many of our debaters at the NEA Represetative Assembly, held each summer in a different city. Debaters must be able to write and willing to take a stand on controversial issues.

And they can't have thin skins, because their positions may set off a wave of negative reactions from readers.

I don't have any definite numbers about which debates out of the 150 or so that we've printed have drawn the most mail, but those that deal with real-life, day-to-day issues rather than policy-type questions always draw the most reader comments.

Twice in our history we've run pro and con on whether schools should teach values, and both times, we've received a flood of reader comments.

Our most recent debate on whether teachers should be able to expel disruptive students seems to have struck a nerve. What teacher hasn't been confronted with this situation? As a result, readers responded in large numbers to this debate question, as you'll see by the representative sampling of letters.

In education, yesterday's issues can come back anew today. Years ago, we didn't have a mechanism for you to register your opinion. Now we do so, be sure to vote. Just go to www.nea.org/neatoday and see the debate topic. Register your opinon and find out instantly how the running tally stacks up.