Weekly Reflection #2

This week we watched the film ‘Most Likely to Succeed’. In the film, the High School is called High Tech High, and their education system showed a stark contrast in comparison to the British Columbian curriculum. In this high school, learning is personalized toward each student, where students use projects to express their learning styles and to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. This pushes away from the standardized testing we are used to.

High Tech High believed that schools needed to move away from grades because of some of the negative effects and competitiveness it brings among students. They want schools to transition into a learning environment that brings more ‘positive learning’. However, being competitive could also be healthy.

I believe that school systems cannot completely vanish these standardized tests because of the questions it will arise for higher education requirements. For example, if students do not receive letter grades and percentages, how will universities know which students should be accepted to their school/program? As a future teacher I want to be able to find a balance between personalized, project-learning, and standardized testing; standardized testing is still important in learning and is a good way to test a student’s knowledge, but needs to be used as a tool alongside other forms of assessments.