The Big Questions

The clocks have been turned back. Baseball season has ended. All but a few of the trees in my yard have finally let go of their leaves. The Hallmark Channel and Great American Family are playing Christmas movies 24/7 – actually, for 25 straight hours last Sunday.

In short, another year is quickly coming to an end.

How could that possibly be true?

I know that as we get older, the years (the good ones and the bad ones) pass exponentially more quickly – yet another example of the irrelevance of the illusion of equal intervals.  But still, November already?

If you’re like me, it’s probably around this time each year that you start asking yourself, “Where did the year go?”

And after a moment of reflection followed by a commitment to not let the same things happen next year, you will get caught up in dealing with daily challenges and preparing for holidays. Before you know it, Martin Luther King Day and President’s Day are in the rear view mirror, and you’re well into 2024 without taking the time needed to ask and answer the big questions.

What are the big questions?

There are a number of ways that they can be phrased, but to my mind, the four big questions that I keep coming back to are:

• How did I get here?
• Where do I want to go?
• What is the best way to get there?
• What comes next?

Each of these big questions, of course, spurs its own subset of questions. For example, you might have to ask, “Where am I?” before considering “How did I get here?” and questions like “Where did I want to go?” and “What stopped me from getting there?” surely will come up somewhere along the line when you start digging more deeply, but you get the general idea.

Now I’m not suggesting that we can control everything that happens in life or that we live our lives according to detailed plans or exhaustive checklists. Any number of those Hallmark movies will tell you that never works out well. “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” And as they say, life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

On the other hand, we don’t want to be the person who goes in whichever the wind blows or the one who mindlessly meanders down the same road regardless of what is going on around them.

And nobody wants to be the one in continuous panic mode, constantly putting out fires that could have been anticipated and avoided with a little forethought and planning. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

A little reflection, a little self-awareness, a little planning can go a long way. Everything in moderation.

Taking the time to ask and answer the big questions – a good resolution for 2024.

Tests (like corporations) are People, Too

Well, not really, but the same principles, realities, and big questions that we should apply to ourselves are relevant to our field as well. As I spent some of my extra hour this weekend reviewing my blog, I saw one or more of those same four questions reflected in post after post throughout the year.

From Revise or Reimagine the Joint Standards at the beginning of the year to Clearing Our Heads on School Accountability mid-year to my recent post, The Future of Assessment is Assessment, the theme running through my 2023 posts is that we need to reflect on the big questions.

Before setting out to build state tests that are “better than our current tests” in so many different and important ways, we need to ask ourselves:

• How did we get to this point in state testing?
  • Why do we assess reading, mathematics, and sometimes science using computer-based tests administered at the end of the year and report achievement levels and vertical scaled scores for individual students at every grade level?
  • And what about high school?
• Where do we want to go?
  • That is, what purpose do we need state testing to serve?
  • What information do we need it to provide?
  • What questions do stakeholders want the test results to answer?
• What is the best way to get there?
  • Is an on-demand, end-of-year test the best mechanism to gather the information that we need?
  • An interim assessment or other through-year assessment model?
  • A hybrid approach?
  • Something completely different?
• What comes next?
  • If we determine that we need to make a 180° change in state testing, or even just adjust our route a little to get to the same destination (perhaps by avoiding highways and tolls), what is our next step?

Over the next month or so, I plan to dedicate one post to considering each of those questions in turn. Best case, we will have a clear notion of what we need to do to make state testing all that it can be in 2024 and beyond. More likely case, we’ll have spent some time reflecting on why it is we do what we do.

Either way, we should come out of 2023 in a better place than we were when it started, perhaps better prepared to face whatever surprises might come our way in 2024.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay