great site The Njask is the Sat of the Younger Generation
The Njask is the Sat of the younger generation. I state this to peak your interest even if it is a bit controversial. It may also guide you towards an comprehension of the place this estimation task, the New Jersey estimation of Skills and Knowledge has in the life of a student, parent, and teacher.
The Njask is the Sat of the Younger Generation
Thinking back thirty years or thirteen years, depending upon your current age, reflect upon your Sat or Act experience. Did your teachers share tips and strategies as a way of helping to prepare you for this test? Did you walk into the testing location 'cold' without any expand preparation? Did you use #2 sharpened pencils? Did you get a good night's sleep and eat breakfast before the big event?
Now come back to the gift moment. Visualize your classroom filled with your students. It is the school day prior to the Njask testing week. Do you have a provide of #2 sharpened pencils with erasers? Do you have calculators? Did you share tips and strategies as part of their expand preparation? Did you get a good night's sleep and eat breakfast? Did you share that restful nutritional tip with your students? But, if not, why not?
What is it about facing the test 'cold' that makes you believe that is a good way to approach the Njask or Sat? With sample scored tests ready for teachers to use as instructional tools, what is it that you don't want the kids to know? Why not prepare your pupils unless it is a response to your own fear of testing, your own test anxiety?
Conquer your test anxiety while simultaneously attractive your students to do the same. Why? So that you and your class have this shared sense and from that you can understand and even embrace the relevance of and advantage of test preparation, a making ready that is as much for emotional and affective reasons as it is to lower your blood pressure and calm students and parents, or whether it leads to an growth in operation scores which in some classes is all that it is about.
Testing Miss Malarkey is a story that I have read out loud with students and with adults. It can be borrowed from a library or purchased whether in man or online. When habitancy laugh at it, I often hear comments such as "That is exactly what it's like in my school." It touches us and makes us look at what is happening in conjunction with high stakes testing. Yet, while it reaches us affectively, it also may cause us to reflect upon the actions of colleagues or those of our own children's teachers.
Let's go back to the Njask-Sat connection. habitancy take and retake the Sat. habitancy spend money on prep books, tutors, and courses. The score, now 2400 is the greatest goal, impacts where the pupil applies to college and in many cases, which admission's officer will accept you to college. The scores impact scholarship money. The scores impact the district's school narrative card, and sometimes sales of homes in the district. The scores are used as bragging ownership by students, teachers, counselors and local news reporters. All of that for a test that takes place for a few hours on one day in the life of a teenager.
Let's look at the Njask. It is longer than the Sat and it is administered over the procedure of a week to students beginning in grade 3. Those students do not take it again to get a best score; they take it the following year when they are in 4th grade, then 5th grade and so forth up to the Hspa. Scores are not impacting scholarships or college admissions, at least not yet, but scores are reported on school and district narrative cards. Scores are used as tools by realtors and scores are part of news reports. So, rather than scoff at helping kids, let's take the time to share the inside scoop, to share the scored samples, to provide our students with skills and strategies for success. Why? We do this because we can.
Open your mind and adapt your educational philosophy just a bit. We are not giving in or cowering to the powers that be, rather we are recognizing the powers that be, and we have found ways to join them and show them how best practices coincides with curriculum standards and how when that becomes part of direct and indirect instruction, we can save jobs, growth home values, and more importantly growth district, and pupil pride in a job well done. There are expert improvement sessions, there are district reading coaches, math coaches, and literacy coaches who are ready with tools of the trade to guide and provide assistance. It's not if you can't beat them, join them, in a negative sense, it's if you can't beat them, show them how it's done and do it well.
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