Give me unpredictable alchemy over a class of widgets

As the new academic year begins, professors like Deborah Williams face the challenge of teaching students how to pass exams or to think freely and creatively.

If you want students to do well on standardised tests, you will need to use standardised modes of teaching. Sarah Dea / The National

I always start the beginning of the academic year with great excitement because it means I get a fresh batch of student-widgets to work with, each ready to be counted and tagged, measured and assessed.

In my teaching satchel, I carry precisely calibrated information modules that I will parcel out to the students during the course of the term, and at the end of term, each widget will be examined to ensure that all the information has been properly installed into the necessary hard drives. Then each widget will move to the next widget-filling station to receive another batch of info-modules.

Oh. Wait. Sorry. For a moment I got lost in visions of what teaching would be like if the battalions of educational testers had their way. These tests, with their infinite array of multiple-choice computer-generated questions, imply a battalion of test-takers who regurgitate details on demand, as if, in fact, test-takers really were information-digesting widgets. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to be able to download an app directly into my brain that would enable me overnight to become a fluent Arabic speaker but alas, the folks at Apple haven’t got that far yet.

Standardised testing has come to determine the success (or failure) of students, teachers, even entire schools, all over the world. The educational testing industry – from curriculum-based tests such as those affiliated with the Common Core in the United States to exams like the GMAT (for applicants to MBA programmes) – generates hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. The company that oversees the GMAT, for example, recently posted a gross profit margin that was 11 per cent higher than that of Apple’s. Running parallel to the testing industry is the booming field of test-prep: the companies and individuals who sell coaching, instruction, and fancy tech tools that will help students achieve the “right” score.

As a professor, I understand that standardised tests may be a necessary evil, one that enables us to see at a glance a general picture of a group of students. Increasingly, however, these tests have become a blunt instrument that reveals who could afford test prep and who could not. A professor of mine once asked me if I knew what these standardised tests measure, and when I hesitated, she said “the tests measure how well the students take tests”.

If you want students to do well on standardised tests, you will need to use standardised modes of teaching. Rote memorisation will help with that, as will a steady menu of facts and figures that require no debate or discussion. Make sure you ask only yes-or-no questions and never let your students challenge what’s being said. Never let your students ask questions, don’t let them come up with their own solutions to problems and by all means avoid having them work on anything that requires sustained analysis or detailed interpretation.

If, however, you’d like students to emerge from their schooling with the qualities that a recent Forbes article listed as most sought after by prospective employers, then widget-learning (and widget-testing) aren’t going to work. Employers want employees with strong skills in critical thinking, complex problem-solving, decision-making, and active listening. When is the last time you saw a widget solve a complex problem?

One of the pleasures of teaching – for me, anyway – has to do with the fact that students are not widgets: students don’t learn in tidy chunks and smooth upwards trajectories. Groups of students interact with one another, and the material of the course, in different ways.

There may be similarities from one group to the next or from one term to the next, but no class is ever the same. The old chestnut about teachers learning from their students doesn’t always apply (do people say that to doctors and lawyers about their clients?) but if I’m lucky, during the course of a semester, a student will offer an insight or comment that I’ve never considered. I’m not sure that anyone has ever learnt anything from a widget.

I think of what happens in class as a kind of alchemy, which I can plan for but not entirely predict. Sometimes there might be explosions, and sometimes things get messy, but unlike ancient alchemists, our messy explorations and experiments frequently result in gold.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon