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Throwing the Report Cards Out with the Baby
The Ontario government has announced that the province’s schools are to eliminate the fall report card, in favour of an informal progress report. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario explains that the fall report card is not very useful, since three months is not enough time for teachers to get a good handle on their students’ academic progress.
If it is true that teachers are still not in a position to make judgments about their students’ progress by December, then we agree there is a problem, although not what the problem is. Far from being a question of timing, the real problem is teachers’ lack of tools and skills to evaluate their students’ learning. It’s actually quite frightening to contemplate the possibility that children can sit in a classroom for three months or even longer, in serious need of special support, without anyone knowing. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Precision teaching is a teaching approach that, combined with direct instruction, is probably the most effective teaching method ever invented. Precision teaching clearly and sequentially sets out a very detailed curriculum, and the learner’s progress is tested several times an hour. With this approach, the teacher assesses each learner’s status on the very first day of school, and then is able to track his or her daily progress. It would be theoretically possible for a precision teacher to issue report cards every singe day from September 1 onwards.
By eliminating the fall report cards instead of finding ways of making them more meaningful, the Ontario government is throwing the report cards out with the baby.