If you wanted to be sure to do well on your annual physical, would you practice the physical in advance? Or would you eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep?
Grant Wiggins used this analogy to help his audience think through issues related to teaching and test scores. Wiggins is president of Re: Learning by Design and cocreator of ASCD's Understanding by Design program.
"To practice the physical gets it backwards," he said. "I should practice being healthy, and then the physical will take care of itself." Similarly, he argued, educators should use good teaching practices and let state tests take care of themselves.
Educators who say they must "cover content" to ensure good test scores are misguided, Wiggins asserted. " 'Cover the content' has the connotation of plowing through textbooks, dealing with items that mimic the format of the test—and doing it with great breadth and very little depth," he noted. When educators teach in this fashion because they fear state tests, they are acting in a "pedagogically inappropriate" way.
"I do not believe that one has to choose bad teaching to do well on tests," Wiggins said. "One of the key misunderstandings that gets in the way of teaching and learning is the false dichotomy between [high] test scores and good teaching." To raise test scores, educators do not have to teach worse; they have to teach better, he insisted.
"The teachers who say, 'I'd like to teach for understanding, but I have to cover the content' don't even have research on their side," Wiggins said, because research does not support the notion that covering content maximizes test scores. "There's no research to support the claim by teachers that [doing] that will optimize memory, recall, or retention," he said. "You have to have coherent, conceptual ways of chunking [new information], or you can't recall it when you need it. You've got to work stuff through before you 'get' it—otherwise it's forgotten or mis-understood."
Like the person who mistakenly practices for his physical, educators across the United States are fixating on a proxy (state tests), in the belief that they must do well on the proxy, Wiggins said. These educators "are confusing the means by which results are [achieved] with the measure of those results."
The physical is an indicator of health or its absence, Wiggins said. Similarly, a state test is an indicator of students' intellectual health. "The state comes in and does an intellectual physical once a year, just like your doctor," he noted. "A physical is a quick-and-dirty operation. Does that mean it's wrong or invalid? No."
"We can think the tests are stupid, but that doesn't mean they're invalid proxies," Wiggins said. "We can think that we have to [address] all these standards, but it doesn't follow that we should indiscriminately cover a little of this and a little of that. It doesn't work."