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Pérsida Himmele, Ph.D.
William Himmele, Ph.D.
Why are we still doing that? The Pedagogy of Panic
to Problematic Teaching Practices, our most recent ASCD book, focuses on problematic classroom practices that persist despite credible evidence that these practices may do more harm than good. In this article, we’d like to address those harmful practices to which we may instinctively revert due to pandemic-related learning gaps. We’ll then make a case for focusing on formative assessment, a tried-and-true approach toward accelerating learning in K-12 classrooms without the negative side effects.
COVID-19’s Discriminatory Impact
It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted K-12 students’ performance in fundamental ways. It has changed our realities, from taking the lives of precious colleagues to inconveniencing our forms of instructional delivery. But the academic impact of the pandemic has not been evenly felt by students across socioeconomic realities. The pandemic has saved its hardest blow for those students whose performance has historically lagged that of their peers. For example, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, students in Illinois experienced an overall drop of 3 and 10 percentiles in reading and mathematics, respectively. In comparison, for those in moderate to high poverty schools, that decrease jumped to an overall drop of 11 and 14 percentiles in reading and mathematics, respectively (NWEA, 2022).
This same reality is true across the nation, with 2021 student performance for historically marginalized groups lagging further behind that of their peers when comparing 2021 to the norms for 2019 pre-pandemic growth. This is especially true for students in the early grades and for overall progress in mathematics (Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2021). Male students of color and students of color attending high poverty schools were least likely to make their typical learning gains (Kuhfled, Ruzek, et. al., 2021). As far as progress toward
educational equity, “the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated longstanding education inequities for BIPOC communities in the United States” (p. 8).
The Pedagogy of Panic
Certainly, in light of these inequities, there is a clear need to support students by filling in essential learning gaps and accelerating growth wherever possible. However, there are ways to accelerate student growth without resorting to, what we call, the pedagogy of panic. The pedagogy of panic includes those hurried instructional practices that we adopt as a result of being faced with the need to accelerate learning. Unfortunately, these panic-driven measures have often resulted in an unhealthy focus on quick measurable results, such as standardized test-based practices, that may actually do more harm than good.
Recently the term “accelerating learning” has caused some educators to groan. Whenever teachers groan, the first reaction of those in leadership shouldn’t be an attempt to stifle the groan, but
Whenever teachers groan, the first reaction of those in leadership shouldn’t be an attempt to stifle the groan, but instead to seek to understand why they are groaning.
instead to seek to understand why they are groaning. What do teachers notice that others (leaders, administrators, professors, policy makers) fail to notice? For too many educators, the groans emerge from a discomfort with what they’re being asked to do. Not because it is challenging, but because they have tasted this form of control before and have realized that it debilitates essential decision-making abilities. Worst of all, in return for this debilitating loss of control, it only provides short-term gains for longterm losses. What we need is a reminder
of what works, but equally important is a warning of how pedagogies of panic can hurt student learning.
The Temptation to Panic
What are some of these pedagogies of panic and why is it that they often provide short term gains in exchange for long
term losses? From our book, Why are we still doing that?, we’ll highlight some of the counter-productive practices that we’re currently seeing emerge as a result of the need for accelerating student learning.
Panic Reaction #1: Rigid Pacing Guides
Though pacing guides are usually meant to provide helpful roadmaps, when they are overly prescribed, they can end up forcing teachers to ignore the needs of their students in favor of a schedule that needs to be maintained. Recall earlier that the greatest lags have been found in the early grades and in mathematics. What good is it to ignore where a student’s current status is in favor of moving on to what “should” be taught? For example, when it comes to developing basic number sense as opposed to developing knowledge of multiplication or division, is it likely to help a student if teachers were to ignore the fact that a student struggles with addition or counting up? While they may certainly get students to memorize abstract multiplication facts, if they expect the learning to stick, they’ll need to backtrack to help students develop
more fundamental understandings of number sense. The same is true in literacy. If a student doesn’t have the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds that can be blended and segmented (phonemic awareness), it does little good to teach a student the C and the G rules (that C and G both usually make their soft sounds when followed by i, e, or y). Unfortunately, forcing teachers to stick to a rigid pacing guide can cause them to ignore these fundamental needs.
Rigid pacing guides make several dangerous assumptions. They assume that all students will progress and experience success with content at the same rates and at the same time. They assume that all students are functioning at the same levels. They assume that the calendar is doable, that the need for
scaffolding is all the same, that every year will be the same. Today, more than ever, this could not be further from the truth. These rigid pacing guides also assume that there will be little “getting lost in the learning” and few opportunities to pursue teachable moments that arise throughout the learning cycles. They do not take into account the needs of English language learners, students who are gifted or twice exceptional, or students with special needs. However, in too many schools, what starts off as a skeletal guide can quickly become a mandate that hurts our most vulnerable students more than any other students.
When the teacher voice inside of us says, “this just feels wrong,” we ought to be encouraged to stop and take notice. And therein lies the greatest indictment against rigid pacing guides: they do not encourage formative assessment and any resulting adjustments that need to be made to our instruction. When the pacing guide determines what is taught, it can result in teachers not noticing the very students who are being taught, particularly our most vulnerable students who have been most negatively impacted by the academic effects of the pandemic.
Panic Reaction #2: Ignoring the complexities of literacy instruction
In line with what researchers at NWEA found (Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2021; Kuhfled, Ruzek, et. al., 2021), our personal experiences point to a noticeable lag in primary grade literacy skills for many children in our local areas. Students currently in first, second, and third grades seem to represent a wide array of reading skills and needs that make pre-pandemic primary classrooms seem homogenous in their skill development. The response by some school districts has been to require a strong emphasis on the building up of decoding skills using highly scripted curricula. That all sounds fine until you take into account the variety of needs in a typical classroom.
Additionally, in our home state, legislation is being proposed that could potentially set us back to the days of the type of micromanagement not seen since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Reading First. For those new to the profession, neither ended well. Though the amount of time spent teaching reading increased, only decoding of first graders increased, with no reported increase in third graders’ reading comprehension, even though the whole point of reading is comprehension (NCEE, 2008). One could argue that increasing the amount of time spent learning a topic (reading) with little to no evidence of long-term benefits is actually a step backwards.
We know that building decoding skills is essential for developing readers.
We’re not arguing this fact. Again, we feel that we need to repeat that we are not arguing against building decoding skills. But the science of reading includes a focus on various important dimensions that include cognitive, metacognitive, and affective processes, not simply decoding. For example, there is no reading comprehension without language comprehension. Similarly, if struggling students have been so turned off by reading that they no longer want to read, you may end up with strong first grade decoders who do little reading by the time they end their third-grade year. It will be students living in poverty who have had fewer experiences with the read aloud, limited access to books, and fewer opportunities to practice reading on their own, who will need the greatest exposure to a well-rounded literacy curriculum, but under a pedagogy of panic, they’ll be the least likely to get it.
Panic Reaction #3: Teaching to Test Samplers
One of the biggest problems associated with teaching to the test is that, at face value, it seems to work. Teaching to the test can, unfortunately, produce higher test scores. But while teaching to the test may provide a temporary bump in scores, overall learning seems largely unaffected (Koretz, 2017). For example, during the NCLB years, in several states, district scores seemingly ballooned only to be later debunked by comparing state standardized test scores with more difficult to manipulate NAEP scores.
Because states provide schools with test samplers to help educators know what to expect on their standardized tests, schools have easy access to a type of ready-made test-based curricula. When schools place a heavy emphasis on the test samplers, the content of the overall domain can be ignored or swapped out for easier to cram “test-eligiblecontent.” In turn, schools are rewarded with higher test scores that aren’t necessarily reflected on other tests that are measuring similar content. Unusual test score increases might actually be a measure of how much time was taken away from meaningful learning (Koretz, 2017, Kohn, 2015).
Whether it takes the form of alternative tests, used to measure the same students’ progress, or lessons presented years later that depended on foundational principles that were skipped, the core of the problem with teaching to the test is this: students only gain a shallow understanding of what is asked for in the test samplers. The test samplers are an incomplete slice of what we ought to be aiming for. They are woefully inadequate in reaching the larger goal of deeper understandings in the content that we are striving to
teach. As hard as it is, we have to force ourselves to resist the temptation to teach to the samplers, and instead, to meaningfully teach the domain that the sampler is supposed to be representing. Instead of being sidetracked by those things that are easily measured, let’s focus on developing deeper understandings of the content we teach.
How do we actually accelerate student learning?
There is strong and consistent support for the ability of formative assessment to accelerate student growth. Some of of learning, just imagine what six to nine months of extra learning per year could do for the students who have been most impacted by the pandemic or for those who struggle the most. Wiliam explains that numerous costly attempts at supporting student learning, including curricular changes, charter schools, high school redesign, provide no overall evidence of effectiveness. Meanwhile, five reviews synthesizing more than 4,000 studies provide clear evidence supporting the use of formative assessment. In fact, it’s not just effective, “When implemented well, formative
the most influential research in this field are meta-analyses that review hundreds of studies that adhere to a certain list of criteria. Time and time again, research has supported the effective use of formative assessments as a way of both increasing instructional effectiveness and accelerating student growth (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009).
Wiliam (2007) explains that the use of formative assessment can add an extra six to nine months of learning growth per year. Think of the students currently within your classrooms. While a typical school year consists of ten months assessment can effectively double the speed of student learning.” (Wiliam, 2007/2008, p. 36-37).
Despite the fact that these understandings have been around for well over a decade, the term, formative assessment, is still not commonly used in everyday educational conversations. Instead, the meaning is often linked with paper and pencil tests and commercial interim assessments that are marketed as “formative,” but that are far from the type of formative assessment that has been proven to dramatically increase learning. Effective assessment is too often
associated with scheduled tests or semiformal, district-mandated measures of student progress. While well-written tests can be helpful to learning, these tests typically report student learning rather than affect student learning, meaning they don’t typically impact students’ progress today, at this very moment.
With as many books as have been written on the topic of formative assessments, classroom structures are often still dominated by traditional schedules of teaching and assessing, where content is presented, and an assessment is planned as a calendar item. But unlike summative assessments, classroom formative assessments are rarely ever written in the calendar, instead, they happen every day, several times in every lesson. They should be happening so often, that writing them down would be impractical.
Formative assessment provides teachers with constant ongoing feedback on student learning. It is a teacher-powered, stop and check, and then stop and check again, type of intuitiveness that comes from taking the attention off of “getting through curriculum,” and placing that attention on student learning. This backand-forth cycle continually asks these questions: What do they need? How do I teach it? At the risk of being accused of making a sales pitch, our book, Total
Participation Techniques: Making
every student an active learner, has 51 techniques for providing teachers with evidence of student learning (Himmele & Himmele, 2017). It is one of many tools that can help teachers implement formative assessment strategies in their classrooms.
Now, more than ever, we need to set aside our pedagogies of panic and review what has been proven to work. If we are looking to accelerate growth, we already know that one of the best ways to do that is through effective formative assessment. Formative assessment places the focus on teaching effectiveness by continuously gathering evidence of what is being learned. It defines good teaching. There is no better way, in our opinion, to spend professional development dollars than to focus on helping teachers become excellent at formative assessment.
References
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. The Phi Delta
Kappan, 80(2), 139–148.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York:
Routledge.
Himmele, P. & Himmele, W. (2017). Total
Participation Techniques: Making every student an active learner. Alexandria,
VA: ASCD.
Kohn, A. (2015). Schooling beyond measure and other unorthodox essays about education. Heinemann.
Koretz, D. (2017). The testing charade:
Pretending to make schools better. The
University of Chicago Press.
Kuhfeld, M., Ruzek, E., Lewis, K., Soland,
J., Johnson, A., Tarasawa, B., &
Dworkin, L. (2021). Understanding the initial educational impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color. NWEA.
Lewis, K.., & Kuhfeld, M. (2021). Learning during COVID-19: An update on student achievement and growth at the start of the 2021-22 school year. NWEA.
NCEE. (2008). Reading First impact study.
Washington, DC: National Center for
Education Evaluation and Regional
Assistance. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/
pdf/20094038.pdf
NWEA (2022). Exploring the educational impacts of COVID-19, student achievement trends by state.
https://www.nwea.org/researchdata-galleries/exploring-theeducational-impacts-of-covid-19/
Wiliam, D. (2007). Content then process:
Teacher learning communities in the service of formative assessment. In
D. Reeves (Ed.), Ahead of the Curve:
The power of assessment to transform teaching and learning. Bloomington,
IN: Solution Tree.
Wiliam, D. (December 2007/January 2008). Changing classroom practice.
Educational Leadership, 65(4), 36–42.
Dr. Pérsida Himmele is a Professor in the education department at Millersville University. She has been an elementary and middle school teacher in bilingual and multilingual classrooms and a district administrator serving ELL students in a high-incidence district.
Dr. William Himmele is an Associate Professor at Millersville University in southeastern Pennsylvania. He has served as an ESL teacher and a Speech Pathologist, a higher education administrator, an international consultant and a speaker on issues related to increasing student engagement.
They are the authors of several books, articles, and resources, including the ASCD bestselling book, Total Participation Techniques: Making every student an active learner, as well as the accompanying video.
