At the root of everything we do in education are two important, fundamental questions:  1) What do we want our students to know? and 2) How do we know when they’ve learned it?  On the one hand, these may seem obvious.  On the other hand, they are often passed over lightly, which can be dangerous, considering the multitude of subtleties and sub-questions lurking there.
Both of these questions can be asked perfectly well (several times a day?) at any of the classroom, school, district, college, university, and national levels, and they permeate ALL we do at any of those levels.  ALL of the individual and collective answers are subjective, of course, and my/our answers might be different from yours/theirs – but if we aren’t at least consciously asking these questions frequently, we are doing our students a disservice.
Over these next two columns, let’s take another look at these two crucial questions separately.  Let’s take them in order, especially since it makes no sense to ask the latter question if we don’t have a good handle on the first!  We’ve touched on some of these areas before, but every perspective helps.
In the broadest of terms, the first question can be phrased (at any level) as follows:  “As we proceed well into the 21^st century, in a highly technological, instant-information, social media society, what is it that we want our students – future citizens – to know?  What should they be able to do well in this society, and how do we prepare them for that?
In my academic discipline, for instance, this might be further translated: Do we want our students to learn skills (times tables and long division with paper/pencil, algebraic manipulation, etc.) or do we want them to have the power to formulate, tackle, and solve real world problems using appropriate technology?  It shouldn’t be an either/or question, of course: we want both! But how much of each, and which comes first?  (Do we learn to build things after we learn to hammer/saw, or do we pick up those skills as we learn to build things?)
In other disciplines and areas, the translations are similar, but the question itself continues to be deviously difficult to answer, even for ‘experts’.  And, as we mentioned last time – the ‘answers’ keep changing with the times!
And, as always, there’s another fly-in-the-ointment here.  As we all help prepare our young students to be educated, well-rounded adults and good citizens, the fundamental question “what do we want them to know and be able to do” extends far beyond the more ‘academic’ (and relatively safer?) areas.  How, for example, do we want our students to form their own opinions on important subjective areas (politics and religion, e.g.?) and how do we want them to discuss (and defend?) them reasonably (and with civility!)  with others?  Or, for that matter, do we even want them to form their own opinions at all, or just believe everything we tell them?
And if, as a society, we are going to extend the question beyond academics (as I think we should), then we must also ask:  to what extent can ‘education’ help in those areas, and to what extent should those questions be ‘hands off’, and left to parents and society in general?  That’s a delicate, controversial question, isn’t it?  But, regardless of your own feelings, note how any our ‘answers’ speak directly to what we think it means to be ‘educated’!
So, after that too-brief beginning, we’ll tackle assessment (how do we know when they know it?) next time.  But for now, it’s worth considering, re-considering, and discussing:  What do we want our students to know?