Deconstructing Education – Part 1 – the first of two episodes where Borborygmi: Food for Thought podcast hosts Vamsi Reddy and Akul Munjal and Lead. Learn. Change. podcast host David W. Reynolds discuss the educational system in America and touch on David’s experiences as a teacher and administrator.
How has coronavirus affected education? (3:17)
A shift to virtual learning platforms (4:00)
Teachers are still approaching their work with professionalism and a focus on student learning (6:00)
A potential new understanding of, and appreciation for, what teachers do (6:55)
Will higher ed make adjustments in learning as a result of COVID-19? (8:40)
Immersion in content alongside practitioners (11:05)
Technology is more than digital (12:00)
Communicate to learn (13:00)
Technology based decisions must be made in service of who is being served and what needs to be accomplished (13:30)
I quit teaching after one year in the classroom (15:10)
Connections between education and work in other sectors (16:35)
Learning opportunities exist in virtually every situation (17:30)
Each student’s potential to learn is not determined by what they know now (18:30)
How has the U.S. educational model changed since the 1980s? Many options for one’s education (19:10)
Jamie Vollmer - Schools Cannot Do It Alone (20:30)
The increasing scope of responsibilities connected to public schools (21:20)
The chalkboard. A relic? (21:30)
Notes to students - before texting, email and access to photocopiers (23:10)
Public schools or private schools - which is best? (24:45)
Public school - opportunity, authenticity, and diversity (25:30)
Teachers as the heart of the school (27:00)
Preparing for students for whatever next is the key to gauging school effectiveness (27:45)
Public schools as a foundation of our nation’s government and culture (28:30)
Innovation, creativity, and ingenuity (29:15)
Predictive tests (standardized tests) and their inappropriate place of prominence as evaluative tools (30:00)
The sum total of one’s learning (30:50)
What you know, understand, and are able to do (32:00)
Kindergarten as an example of the need for a more authentic process to gauge student progress (33:00)
Test scores or recommendations about work ethic, understanding, initiative, as components of admission requirements (35:30)
SAT and/or ACT - vital? (37:00)
Indicators of a great school (37:30)
Standardized testing and “the practice of” - finding the balance (38:00)
The inadequacies of a limited bank of test items (41:00)
Engaging with a true practitioner and with emerging mentors (42:45)
Relationships must be a big part of doing one’s work well (45:15)
MCG link: https://www.augusta.edu/mcg/
Borborygmi: Food for Thought podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/borborygmi-food-for-thought/id1507529435
David Reynolds: What matters most in learning? The challenge? The thrill? The benefits? Interacting with other people? Or something else entirely?
What is the connection between leading and learning? Does change drive learning, or does learning drive change? What's more important: teaching or learning? Is everyone a leader, a learner, a teacher?
Want answers? Listen in as we address these intriguing issues through commentary and with guests who share their thinking and tell us their stories. Lead. Learn. Change.
Today's episode of Lead. Learn. Change. is provided by Vamsi Reddy and Akul Munjal, cohosts of the Borborygmi podcast. Akul and Vamsi are entering their fourth and final year of medical school and have launched a podcast that covers a wide range of topics. It was a pleasure responding to the questions they asked me about my career in public education and my thoughts on teaching and learning. Let's jump right in.
Vamsi Reddy: Welcome to Borborygmi food for thought. My name is Vamsi Reddy, and I'm here with my cohost, Akul Munjal. We're excited for you to join us as we take a deep dive into the contemporary topics of medicine, philosophy, psychology, ethics, and so much more.
Akul Munjal: This is Akul Munjal. Before we get started, I just wanted to mention that we are medical students and none of the opinions expressed on this podcast reflect any organization or institution. Thanks for joining us.
Vamsi Reddy: Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. Last week we talked about psychiatry and mental health during a pandemic, and these next couple of weeks we wanted to talk about education and the educational impact of COVID-19, but also just education as a whole.
Today we are joined by Mr. David Reynolds. Could you please introduce yourself for our listeners?
David Reynolds: Sure. First, thanks Vamsi and Akul for having me join you for this conversation. I'm really honored to speak with both of you.
I'm David Reynolds, and I serve as the point person for the Impact project at the Professional Association of George Educators, or PAGE. And before that, for about 30 years, at four schools in three different school systems, I taught middle schoolers, fulfilled various administrative roles, including curriculum work, crafting grant proposals, strategic direction efforts, and professional learning. And today, in my work at PAGE, I continue to interact with educators around the state and even beyond, and I'm involved in some research, some writing, and a podcast project.
Akul Munjal: Before we dive down into a further delve into education, we just wanted to ask how has coronavirus changed education currently?
David Reynolds: I think it's impacted virtually every sector in some way. Public education serves as a central pillar of our nation's culture because it provides opportunities to virtually any child to participate in learning opportunities and have access to myriad options after their official structured school term ends, their schooling is complete.
So any interruption of this system is going to have a cumulative effect or impact over time. That being said, of course the general belief is that this virus situation is not permanent. So we're not looking at a really disruptive, totally debilitating shift in education, but there is an immediate and long-term impact.
So short term, as the guest on your pilot's podcast episode pointed out, interaction between people involved has shifted from face to face to virtual or digital. So whether it's telemedicine or tele-learning, the vital component of personal interaction is different.
So there's pressure on this technology infrastructure with regard to bandwidth availability, connection and processing speeds, and reliability. And if you add to that the percentage of students who may not have access to hardware necessary to really shift to an online meaningful learning experience, it can be problematic.
And it's not just the lessons or the content, because there are new questions, now, about how to appropriately and fairly gauge learning and understanding, assessments, tests, that sort of thing. How do you grade in this new environment?
How do you imbed flexibility or creativity fairly into the traditional aspects of school like graduation and adult learning and ensuring students who are eligible for meal support still have access to meals?
So as we speak, there are literally thousands upon thousands of teachers and paraprofessionals and bus drivers and food service workers and others doing their best to support students in a new way. So it's really just shifted the way that people look at their daily work. That's the short term impact, but there are long-term impacts, as well.
Vamsi Reddy: And just going into those long-term impacts, you've mentioned just the day to day how everybody has changed how they live their lives right now, but what long-term consequences do you see that coronavirus could trigger?
David Reynolds: Sure. As with other sectors, there will be pieces of this new way of doing things that will stick. So I've had some opportunities to speak with some teachers since schools has closed, and what I've heard, and some people might say, "Well, this is anecdotal because the n is so small," I've spoken to a handful of people. But I think it's actually representative of what educators are doing overall, and I think it indicates what their approach and their intent is, and that's this.
They are really seeking out the best ways to maintain quality relationships with and academic support for their students. And in doing so, a whole lot of these people are now immersed in video conference calls. They're doing that to work among themselves, and to stay up to speed with current and emerging technologies, and some of the shifting practices that we talked about a minute ago.
So the other long-term change might be the public's perception of teachers. So people who have suddenly been thrust into the role of supporting their children's learning in a new way, I think they are pausing to consider the unbelievable responsibility that teachers and other educator leaders shoulder day in and day out.
If the listener would just imagine for a minute what's involved in creating a learning experience for anywhere from 20 to over 100 students per day, five days a week, with all the different levels of understanding that the students bring to the table, their areas of interest, their varying degrees of home support, and at the same time they need to navigate all those personalities in an individualized way while they're maintaining a focus on helping every single student learn what they need to learn, know what they need to know, and be able to do what they need to do, and do all of this while the children are staying safe and happy. That happens at school every single day, so there are many other issues that teachers have to consider as well such as life threatening food allergies, managing a classroom or departmental budget, engaging in professional learning, and then assessing students' work, reading it and providing feedback. So all of those things are shifting.
Some of those, now, are not the school's responsibility like managing 20 different personalities in the room at the same time, or dealing with the life threatening food allergies in the midst of other students. So I think on the other side of this current situation, there may be a pendular swing back to a posture of respecting the good work that teachers do.
Something else I thought of just yesterday is, at higher ed, and I was thinking about medical school specifically, my wife asked, because y'all know Jackson, our son, in medical school ending third year going into fourth, "Well, what's going to happen with this fourth year, now? When is the official shift to your third year completer, you're a fourth year student, and what will that look like and will that ripple out toward residency programs?"
And I thought, people need to be thinking because of this situation about long-term shifts in how the structure is set up even at medical schools, for example. My thought was, what if fourth year was fast tracked in the following way? If you have already completed a rotation in the specialty that you are going to pursue for your residency, then you do one more, and you really immerse yourself in that, and that's actually more than you might have gotten in the traditional structure, because you really might only hit that once. But if you know where you're going and you know you've got a very strong need to move physicians into the field, then let's immerse these fourth year students into one more rotation, perhaps in a similar setting or another one of the same specialty.
And if you have not yet engaged in that rotation for your area, for your specialty, then do a double dip in that in year four and make that the sum total of your most important rotation experiences. And then defer those other rotations, not to diminish their value, until residency itself. I think it will be perfectly appropriate, even if it's not something that the establishment has done in the past, to have a first or second year resident pop out, so to speak, from the hospital that he or she is serving, and go do an OBGYN residency or go do a PEDS residency or a neurosurgery residency or a thoracic or orthopedics or whatever it is, and just be on leave from that residency for a while you’re still learning so that the crossover between specialties, those connections are still being made and it’s happening in real time alongside physicians.
So if there's a move to fast track medical students into the field, especially from year three to four and out, then there needs to be some creative, flexible ways of ensuring that they're still immersed in content alongside practitioners which you guys know is much more valuable than just the lecture series or UWorld drilling online modules and that sort of thing.
Just shift how residency looks. Even if you added a year to residency and you backed off a full year of some of the shelf test components inside third and fourth year, that could solve a lot of problems. So I bring that up to say that I believe that there will be shifts in multiple sectors of education, not just PK-12 that will have to look at more creative, flexible, authentic ways to ensure that the learners are engaged in work that actually makes a difference when they move into the next level, whether that's practicing medicine or moving into the classroom as a teacher, those sorts of things.
Akul Munjal: So one of the things that you mentioned earlier in your response was the role technology has played and how some of the meetings that you previously had in person have become meetings that you now have over Zoom or other things like that.
So how can we use technology productively to engage in communication and not get overwhelmed or envious of other people on social media or stuff like that?
David Reynolds: Well first, I would say that technology doesn't have to mean digital. We do jump to that statement or to that concept or that thought almost automatically. It doesn't have to be virtual/digital.
Technology is any tool to help you accomplish whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, but it's not solely about being connected to a computer. But at it's core, it's just helping you get something done.
So what was chalk and slate or then quill, pen, and pencil and now texting or video conferencing is still simply about communicating. We should look at communication as not just a way to convey what we're thinking or what we think someone else needs to know to others, but also as a way to learn from others.
So regardless of the technology, the central questions are, what needs to be done to support the people I serve so they're prepared for whatever comes next?
So we can do that via Zoom. We can do that via a phone call. We can do that via face to face should that return to some semblance of normalcy. But once you're clear about what you're doing and who you are serving and why you are doing it, so that's the equivalent, basically, of what problem needs to be solved, then you decide how technology and which technology can be used to accomplish your aims.
We shouldn't use the latest tech tools just because they're available. Every single problem is not a nail with technology as the hammer to solve it. So the right tool yielded the right way matters more when you look at results in progress.
Right now, we could be using an even more advanced technology right now, if we wanted to, perhaps. I'm not wearing headphones and you guys are from our conversation earlier. I know that you're doing that. We could enhance this with some sort of automatic as we go transcription process. We don't have to use every single bell and whistle and always in play the latest technology. It's about who are you serving, what is the change you are trying to impact to make happen and then how are you going to get there?
Do I think that we should learn and use technology and keep creating and leveraging better iterations of it? Absolutely, but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of keeping our focus on our work, what we're trying to accomplish, and our relationships, who we're serving as we do that.
Vamsi Reddy: Those are great points. And I think often people do lose themselves in trying to get the newest, greatest thing that they often lose the fundamentals of what education truly entails.
Just quick, because you've talked about technology, just for our listeners, how long have you been teaching in the educational system?
David Reynolds: I started in 1981, and after my first year of teaching, I quit.
Vamsi Reddy: Yeah.
David Reynolds: So I thought, anything is better than this, and I went and built cabinets for a year. And about six weeks into that job, I thought, anything is better than this, and I went back to a different school in the same school district. Then I taught continuously, or I was in the education system continuously until I retired from that part of my career about eight years ago.
I've been working at PAGE since 2008. I retired from public schools in 2011. So it was just under 30 years of realtime in teaching roles and administrative roles and some support roles, but as far as actual teaching was concerned, it was 10 years in the classroom. So I am not a 30, 35, 40 year teaching veteran. There are plenty of people out there who have far more expertise and street cred with regard to decades upon decades of teaching thousands upon thousands of students.
I did have thousands of students, because I taught every single student in the school every year. That's a quick summary of the amount of time.
Vamsi Reddy: So one of the things that you said was how you switched into a carpentry type of job. How do you feel like those other alternative careers that you had influenced your ability to be a teacher?
David Reynolds: Once I shifted, and it was just a year, but it was the area I had trained in. I was teaching industrial arts. So I was teaching woodworking, mechanical drawing, this was before CAD really existed, computer-aided design and drafting, and electricity. Those sorts of things. That's what I was teaching. Obviously not before electricity existed, let me rephrase that.
So I was teaching woodworking and drafting and those sorts of things before CAD really existed. So when I left teaching after year one and went to a cabinet shop, a mom and pop cabinet shop, it was still woodworking and carpentry and some of those sorts of things that I was familiar with. However, I had never done it in that way before.
I was the student immediately. There were actually machines there I had not used during my entire undergraduate experience and there were different ways to spec out jobs and there were customer relationships that I had not conducted before as a small business person.
I think that ripples over, whether you think about it at the time or not. I believe that all of your experiences keep feeding into the next one and you do learn from them and you transfer what you learn to a new or unique situation.
Just realizing how as someone who had a four-year college degree in a specific area, how I was kind of clueless on some of the stuff that Richard was trying to teach me, does make you realize, these students some of them don't really know what that claw is for on the back handle side of the hammerhead. And so there is a lot of unfamiliarity.
You really have to remember that you don't judge anybody based on where they are. You just use that and help them learn to get to the next step. It all goes back to that same thing we mentioned earlier, that your role is ensuring that whoever you're working with is prepared to do whatever's next. I think that's the biggest lesson I picked up from cabinet making and the fact that I actually enjoyed teaching more than I thought when I compared it to some other things that were out there.
Vamsi Reddy: That's fascinating. As someone who has immersed themselves in the educational system since the eighties and now into 2020, has the educational model shifted, and is it better or worse than it's been in the past?
David Reynolds: I want to correct something first. I started teaching in 1982. In response to your question about how the model has changed, there are a whole lot of choices available now that people might not even think about.
So we do have traditional public schools. There are also private secular schools. There are private faith-based schools. Homeschooling is another option. Virtual and online schools are another. And then some traditional schools are using a flipped classroom model.
Then there are residential boarding schools. We have for profit charter schools. There are public charter schools. There's college and career academies. There are alternative schools, and sometimes students are there by choice and sometimes it's via a court decision. There are also hybrid structures where you attend some classes face to face and some classes online, like dual enrollment for example, and move on when ready. Those sorts of things.
So there may be more of those, but those are the ones I can think of. Those are a lot of different options. That's a lot of choices.
I did attend traditional public school and served all of my roles as an educator in one, so I really cannot offer an expert opinion on the other configurations or arrangements, but I think that the increased range of choice is a definite change, because all of those didn't exist in the early eighties.
There's a gentleman named Jamie Vollmer who wrote a book called "School's Cannot Do It Alone", and he highlights the increasing breadth and depth of requirements that are placed on schools today and by default that are placed on teachers.
That to me is the biggest shift in what's happened as far as a model change is that the scope of responsibility for what schools are expected to do continues to increase decade after decade after decade. He includes a chart with his book or on his website that shows all of the new areas of focus that schools are now responsible for from the forties, to fifties, to sixties, all the way up through 2010, 2020.
I really think if you look at that, you would be amazed at how far the responsibility expectation for schools has expanded beyond basic content areas and making sure the students are safe while they're at school.
Akul Munjal: So one of the things you also mentioned was the chalkboard. That's kind of something that's traditionally been associated with education and being a teacher, but I never had a teacher that actually had a chalkboard, and I don't know if Vamsi did either, because we used whiteboards and then later in high school we used smart boards.
So did you ever use the chalkboard, or did you go straight to the whiteboard, and which did you prefer?
David Reynolds: I used the chalkboard when I was teaching, absolutely. In fact, when I was teaching junior high in Forest Park Middle School, the chalkboard was my canvas.
So when we were introducing a new machine, the table saw, the regular arm saw, the joint, or the plane, or whatever, at the end of the day, I would draw a big version of the machine on the chalkboard to fill it up and have lines going to the key parts. That would be the basis for the introduction to the machine to kind of look at it, first, in the classroom setting before we moved to the woodworking shop area and then saw those pieces there and talked about some safety rules and that sort of thing.
I used it every day. Any notes to students, there was no texting. There were no emails. There wasn't a portal where you could get on, and students didn't have a Google Classroom account. Teachers didn't push out work to their students over the holidays like you guys enjoy all the time.
It was simply on a piece of paper or on the chalkboard, and there's also some things about the paper that you really don't know about, as well. If you didn't even have a teacher use a chalkboard, then I'm sure you didn't have anybody make their photocopies, which is really in air quotes there, because we didn't have photocopiers to use for student paperwork, either. We had a different kind of machine that was very interesting to create papers for students. The ink was purple, and that's a separate story.
So yes, I did use a chalkboard, and no, I never even had a marker board, a whiteboard, except the last four years of my teaching, I did. But it was not a smart board. That was not introduced until I was an administrator, possibly even after I left the administrative roles at the schools.
So didn't have any experience with that at all. I often had a nice chalk line across the front or back of my pants. If I wore navy blue pants or dark pants, there would be horizontal lines going across my clothing where I might accidentally brush against the chalk tray that set at the bottom of the chalkboard where you guys would see markers, now, at the bottom of a marker board, yeah.
Vamsi Reddy: And as someone who has been at a public school, maybe you're a little bit biased, but we mentioned before about charter schools and public schools versus private schools and schools that are religiously or faith-based. Do the opportunities in which people pay for their education, whether it be a private school or charter school, does that mean that they have a quote, unquote, better education or a higher quality education?
David Reynolds: I don't think you can paint that with a broad brush. I would point to one guest that I had on my podcast, Vlada Galan. I believe it was episode six, and she had experiences in private school and made the switch to public schools for her high school portion of her education, and now she is an international political consultant who oversees presidential level campaigns in multiple countries.
She gave a great testimonial to the value of and preference for the public education choice that she had when she was in high school. She believes that it provided her with far more opportunities, that it was much more authentic, that there was a wider range of people and personalities and experiences that you got to interact with and that you made a lot of decisions on your own that really made a lot of difference for the next semester, the next year. She articulated it very, very well.
I do echo her belief that the public school experience is probably richer because of the diversity that exists in a public school, not just talking about ethnicity, but just the diversity of backgrounds, the diversity of socioeconomic range, the diversity of experiences, and the number of people that you get to interact with from the time that you enter kindergarten until you graduate.
Also, I think that the only true comparison that can be made, it has to be focused on the teachers that are actually the heart of the school. Sure, students are the heart of the school. There would be no school if there weren't any students. I get that. But the teachers are the heart of the school and if your teachers are truly getting to know you as a student and ensuring that you are successful and caring about you as an individual, and I believe that happens in great numbers a great percentage of the time in public school. Just based on my own experience and the schools that I get to visit today, I think that's the determining factor in was that a quality learning experience. Are you truly prepared for what's next?
And if you look at the percentages, I don't have a figure in front of me or the website to look to verify the number, so I won't give an exact number, but the overwhelming majority of people in our country do attend or did attend public school. When you look at all the leaders and all the thought leaders and all the decision makers and the accomplishers and the people that get things done, they are graduates of the public school process.
It's not an accident that we have the most thriving economy, the best form of government, I might be biased, but I believe that about our nation, anywhere on earth. The current crisis and its impact on those things notwithstanding, this is a great place and, as I mentioned in one of my earlier comments, public education is central to the way that we do business here in this country.
So I have to say that a public school education is equally valuable, and I believe more valuable than a private school experience. It's just more rich, and it reaches more people, and it's had a far, far greater impact on the entire world if you look at what the graduates of public school have done in their communities or in their leadership roles. Even if it's a parenting leadership role or helping their neighbor, it doesn't really matter. The ingenuity and the creativity and the desire to innovate and just keep helping everybody move up.
I think that's a byproduct of our public school system.
Akul Munjal: So it would be unfair of us not to talk about standardized tests in this conversation. How do you feel about standardized tests and do you think they're a good way to demonstrate how well you have learned information or how good of a learner you are?
David Reynolds: Short answer is I won't dis standardized tests and say they're evil. Standardized tests are bad.
Tests, and I would call them predictive tests instead of standardized tests, and you could look at testsense.com. T-E-S-T-S-E-N-S-E.com and look at John Tanner's work to get a really great summary of why these should be called predictive tests versus standardized tests. He was a guest on the Lead. Learn. Change. Podcast as well, and he explains those things very eloquently.
Not to be dismissive of them, the problem is that they have been moved into a place of prominence that they should not occupy when making evaluations about the quality of an individual student's learning experience or about a school overall.
They do measure something, but they are not the indicator of everything. They are a snapshot at best of how well one student performs on a given day for a few hours about a very finite set of information, a finite subset of content. That content is a subset of everything that that particular subject area that is being tested consists of.
That subject area, or those subject areas, are another subset of everything that's actually absorbed and students are exposed to in schools, and that's even a subset of all of your experience and everything that you actually learn along the way. It's not possible for a predictive or standardized test to capture what you really know, understand, and are able to do.
The only way you really see that is in practice, and that is if you know something, if you can recall something, that's a very low level degree of understanding. It might be necessary. I do know my multiplication tables, for example. I know that. But I can also apply that when I need to, and if I see that the limes are 10 for $1, I can do some math and figure out how much 20 are going to cost me pretty quickly.
I can also transfer that to another situation when it's not an explicit math problem, but I realize we need to multiply here in order to figure out how to create this budget or how to bring this particular project to scale and what might this look like.
You need to understand something well enough to be able to explain it to somebody, so explanation is one way of getting that across, and then the other way is to be able to actually apply it and use it in a situation, and then you have to be able to transfer that. So this might be getting into how do you know that you know something, but when you can actually use it and apply in a new situation that you weren't expecting, that means that you really understand it.
I would add, if you can teach it to somebody else, then you also know that. I don't believe that a standardized test can provide you with that sort of information. I also don't believe that it is as necessary as people believe it is to even administer some of those tests.
If you think about standardized tests at the kindergarten level, for example, a kindergarten teacher knows his or her students extremely well. They know which students can read, which ones can write, which words they struggle with, if it's an initial consonant issue, whatever is going on. They know who can count over 100. They know who can identify their colors and their shapes, who plays well together, who is helpful. They know all of that stuff about them. I don't believe that you need a test to know if that child is ready for what's next in first grade or whatever the next grade level, or the next set of content is.
A good teacher knows that. There's an absence of trust built into many systems, and so we place an over reliance on an easily measured metric on something that we can then say, "This is easy. We don't want you to have judgment because there may be some people at some point somewhere who abuse the flexibility they have with subjectivity and do something that they shouldn't do."
I have not seen that to be the case. Again, I believe that teachers by and large, overwhelming super majority, actually like their students, care about their students, and want them to succeed. I have never met an educator who wakes up in the morning and says, "I would like to see how miserable I can make somebody today."
That's not the case. I think that we place too much emphasis on the tests and I think that's another byproduct that might grow out of this current situation that we talked about earlier that we're dealing with right now, this pandemic.
Perhaps the LSAT, and the PCAT, and the MCAT and some of these other professional tests that students take in order to enter, be admitted to medical school or law school, pharmacology programs, those sorts of things, maybe those will be viewed less significantly than recommendations from practicing respected practitioners who can vouch for someone's work ethic and their likelihood of success and their current level of understanding and their desire to be an actually good fill in the blank teacher, educator, physician, pharmacist, attorney, whatever.
So I hope that that shifts that way, that we fall away from over reliance on standardized testing. There are some medical schools, for example, I think Johns Hopkins might be one of them, that now says you don't have to have the MCAT if you graduated from one of these other undergraduate programs with a degree in a certain area. We know that you know the content that's going to be tested on this particular test or that you've been prepared enough with the foundational knowledge that you're going to be successful as a year one medical student and then during year one, we can help you be successful in year two and so on.
There are schools doing that. I just read this week, there's also at the undergraduate level, there are colleges saying we are not going to be concerned about an ACT or SAT score going forward.
I think that if we can do that now, that says we could've done that then, and we should probably consider doing it in the future. So they're not bad or evil. They're misused, and you can't take a standardized test set of scores and say, "This is a better school than that school because these test scores are higher."
Because test scores can be short term manipulated, not in an unethical way, but if you teach solely content that's related to a test and you work on test prep skill and those sorts of things to the exclusion of some other types of area of focus, you can bump some numbers. It's the great schools that do that, and graduate students, and have students in community programs where business leaders want them to come work with them as interns and apprentices and those sorts of things. And there's a lot of community involvement and a lot of student choice.
And really, a great school, one of the indicators is how many students are involved in something outside of their traditional academic coursework. Schools that really focus on making sure every student has a place, that's a great measure that you may not see ever reflected in a standardized test score.
Vamsi Reddy: That's very true, and I think Akul and I can both attest to the fact that we've taken numerous standardized tests throughout our lives. It almost feels like our lives are a series of standardized tests back to back just based on medical education.
You brought up a lot of really, really good points and you've been consistently doing that. So one of the things you did bring up was the difference between standardized testing and the practice of something. For example in medicine, the difference between step one versus the practice in your third year of clinical rotations.
In order to do well on standardized tests, it takes a lot of time to study for, but it also takes a lot of time to be a good clinician.
And there's only 24 hours in a day, so how would you think that learners should balance their demands of a standardized test, and the anxiety, and the time it takes, and the emphasis of those standardized tests, as well as whatever material it's trying to get at?
David Reynolds: So that almost renders inconsequential my previous response, because I spent all this time saying, "Wow, here's why we shouldn't use standardized tests."
And the reality is, they are still used. And they are extremely high leverage tools that impact lives like yours Vamsi, and yours Akul, and Jackson's, because if you don't hit the score, then you're not getting in.
So hopefully that will shift over time as we just mentioned. And then you all have shelf tests and things like that as you go through these year three and year four rotations and the scores matter on those, especially with the specialty that you're going to pursue as a physician. That's a reality.
So should you say, "Well, standardized tests don't really say who I am as a future educator, or as an attorney, or as a physician, or as a steel worker, or an accountant, or whatever?" No, of course not. You still have to prepare for those.
It's not a cop out, but I really believe that it depends has to be the answer, because it has to be individualized. I believe each student, each learner, will figure out where that point of diminishing returns hits for them.
If you spend four hours a day studying content, will eight hours a day actually be beneficial to you? It may take a couple of years of medical school to really figure that out, or read the particular section well enough to know what might be tested. But it's really almost impossible to prepare for those types of situations because the vast quantity of detail that's embedded in a single medical specialty, for example, is so great that the intersection of systems, the intersection of specialties can create literally tens of thousands of legitimate questions that you should probably know when it's time to take a test.
And you're going to be tested on 196 or 203 of those, and then that's your score, so to speak. Each person has to decide where the law of diminishing returns occurs, and then I think that you have to just balance that with how much practice, how much study on your own on things outside of the predictive standardized test score you have to spend.
My hope is that medical schools and other colleges, whether that's colleges of education or any school, will look at test scores as a snapshot inside a photo album or inside a movie about the particular student and say, "Here's one picture. There are a whole lot of others that we can also look at and weight them appropriately."
I think that may be where the problem comes in. It goes back to the previous response, weighting them inappropriately seems to be the problem.
Because you should not fail a test about mechanical drawing when I took my TCT, the teacher certification test, I shouldn't fail that. I had years of engineering draft, mechanical drawing, advanced engineering drafting, that sort of thing. I should be able to pass a standardized test.
But should an opportunity to pursue a career in education where I can continue to learn over time and I'll probably still know more than my ninth grade students who are entering drafting for the first time, should that opportunity for me to do that be completely eliminated because I'm not in the top 5 or 10% on a particular metric? I don't think so.
I really think it has to be balanced with other input from people who matter and people who know. So back to how do you balance this in the practice of? I just think that every opportunity that anybody has to engage with a true practitioner, an official needs to be taken advantage of.
A teacher doesn't have to only learn from the officially assigned mentor that is paired with him or her for the year. Your peers and those who think like you or think differently and therefore can help you, just emerge over time as your immersed in your work. And I'm sure that in your rotations that you've moved through in year three, you have met multiple kinds of physicians and nurses and other medical support staff. Their knowledge level may have been the same, but their desire to teach you may have been quite different.
I think we really need to lean toward people who can help us learn, even if we're not officially connected with them. Find that point where this is too much studying, I'm actually going to forget stuff, now, because I'm trying to cram in so much and it's not going to help me, and just move ahead and have some confidence and not be overly concerned.
That's very difficult to do in practicality, because it's very stressful to think I have to pass this test. The problem is, that's actually a little more important if you're training to be an emergency room physician, or someone who is going to deliver babies, or fix broken bones, or do brain surgery. Those types of things really matter and you need to have people who are so intellectually gifted and skilled that they can operate in that stressful situation and take care of it and help their patients.
It may not be as important in some other fields. Not that the work is not as important, but sometimes the test is not capturing what happens. You have to work on balancing how much time you spend studying, how much time you spend in the clinical setting or as a student teacher, or who you hang around with after work if you're a teacher, who you talk to.
I think it comes down to the relationships every single time. Who are you trying to serve? Who can you learn from? What are you trying to accomplish? You just have to balance them.
I really do hope that people will back off, the decision makers will make shifts, rather, on how to weigh the standardized tests versus practitioner recommendations, whether that's from a teacher for a student teacher, whether that's a physician for a medical student.
Akul Munjal: That'll be the end of the first part of a multi-part series with Mr. Reynolds. Before we go, would you just like to give a brief shout out to your own podcast?
David Reynolds: The podcast is Lead. Learn. Change. and it's available on any podcast platform.
Vamsi Reddy: Thank you for joining us for part one, Mr. Reynolds.
David Reynolds: Thanks very much. I look forward to finishing this conversation.
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