Wynne Ferdinand's LaGuardia Workshop

Part II: Conflict Between Transformative Learning and Standardized Testing [Wynne Ferdinand's LaGuardia Workshop]

On April 14, 2014, I attended Wynne Ferdinand’s HSE/TASC workshop at LaGuardia. Overall, the workshop was very enlightening. I had very little exposure to the old GED. My previous experience has been limited to Ms. Ferdinand’s classroom visit the week before, and the discussions we’ve had in class about high school equivalency test and the role in adult education. There was some overlapping content between the LaGuardia presentation and the City College classroom visit, but I did get a hands-on experience with mock TASC tests.

Ferdinand stressed the new focus of the TASC exam: depth over breadth. What this comes down to is interdisciplinary skills being more obviously tested: reading comprehension, deductive and inductive reasoning, basic mathematics functions are critical to the all five sections of the exam. In the workshop, we analyzed sections of the exam and evaluated them on the skills needed to successfully answer question. In my previous post, I questioned the place of transformative education in standardized testing. While I still believe test preparatory courses are limited because of their very nature, this approach (utilizing many skills to engage in many different subjects) is slightly more transformative than strict memorization because the student learns to exercise fundamental skills in a way that will hopefully lead them to the understanding that those skills are applicable in other situations.

Another important factor in this experience that was invaluable to me was the opportunity it gave me to interact with more closely with my fellow colleagues and administrators. We were able to come together discuss real concerns we had about the TASC such as curriculum changes, no set cut scores, and the ambiguous norming process. It helped introduce me to the wider field of my job and put my efforts as a tutor and my future career as an educator into context.