Can an education for the whole child coexist with the current high-stakes testing requirements?
Marshall: They coexist as strange, uncomfortable partners. What we need are assessment tools, processes, and mechanisms that get at deep conceptual understanding and integrative ways of knowing, that move kids along a continuum from a novice’s ways of understanding to greater levels of expertise. We need assessment tools that can discern, track, and show growth over time and that show how students solve particular kinds of problems. We have the technology to do it. The current structure is an input model grounded in memory, transmission, acquisition, one-size-fits-all, compliance, and punishment. It’s grounded in competition and, fundamentally, in fear. An education for the whole child is different. It’s not simply about learning information and content; it’s about what you do with that information. Every way of knowing is essentially a language. In my institution, I want kids to be multilingual, to speak mathematics and science and poetry and dance and music and art and history. If we
