Christopher Peak Photo
Eleventh-grade Metro students participate in year-end “roundtable.”
Melanie didn’t need to pass a final exam to prove that her civics class had taught her a ton about effective political organizing.
Through an alternative year-end evaluation, Melanie, a junior at Metropolitan Business Academy, read excerpts from a research paper and talked about the skills she’d picked up in writing it — a self-assessment that her teacher argued gave a better sense of her growth than a single test could ever measure.
In a trend that’s taking hold across Metro, a regional magnet school known for its critical approach to pedagogy, more and more teachers are holding “roundtables,” instead of giving final exams. In those sessions, students share a portfolio or perform a task for an audience, while reflecting on what they’ve learned to get to that point.
During Metro’s last full week of classes, students in 9th Grade English, 9th Grade World History, and 11th Grade Civics all participated in these roundtables, while math and chemistry classes completed similar presentations.
The switch is part of a broader national movement away from standardized tests and more toward grooming students to think for themselves. Metro has been at the forefront of that movement in New Haven. (Click here for a previous story about how teachers there laid the groundwork for the idea.)
Metro’s roundtables are adapted from the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a network of 38 public high schools, primarily in New York City, that created a state-accepted alternative to the high-stakes Regents exam that most other students must pass to graduate.
Rather than bubbling in answers on a test, Melanie talked about strategies utilized by student-led political movements in a presentation for three classmates, a City Hall staffer and a news reporter.
Easper, Melanie, Maya and Devonte.
With everyone seated around her in a loose circle of desks, Melanie linked current events to American history. She compared the March for Our Lives anti-gun-violence campaign with opposition to the Vietnam War. In both, she said, students attended teach-ins, turned out for mass demonstrations and sang along to protest music.
“The strategies people developed back then are still used today,” she said.
Melanie had developed that comparison for a five-page research paper. Inspired by the nationwide school walk-outs against gun violence, she picked the topic to see how students got their message across before, when they too were told to stop rebelling and let the adults handle the problem.
Today, when she feels like legislators “care more about guns than children,” she said it’s so important to “connect to the historical context” to stop mass shootings.
Thinking back on her experience of putting the paper together, Melanie acknowledged that she’d missed several deadlines. She rated her communication skills as “exemplary,” but she scored her research skills as merely “competent.”
“I got flustered toward the end. I didn’t make the paper a priority, and I wish I had,” she explained. “I thought I proved the point of my thesis, but I struggled with deadlines.” She added, “This gives me a feel for how a college paper’s written before I get there. I have that advantage now, more than the next person, because when I’m in college, I can do it without being so flustered.”
After that self-reflection, the other participants at the roundtable gave feedback. Shiela Carmon, the deputy community service administrator, suggested that an outline can help make the first draft less intimidating next time, while Maya, a classmate, told Melanie she was being too hard on herself, pointing out that she stayed focused in class every day.
The teacher, Julia Miller, walked around, occasionally listening in to Melanie’s answers, as other presenters around the room shared their own research about 10 modern civil rights movements with external validators, like a university professor and other Metro teachers.
Metro’s Julia Miller and Stephen Staysniak, early adopters of the roundtable.
Metro’s teachers say the students are demonstrating that they’re ready for life after graduation. Their rubric is similar to the New York consortium’s requirements for its students, which have been vetted for their accuracy in predicting student outcomes.
In a literature class, they might analyze a text, like arguing about Joseph Conrad’s intentions in “Heart of Darkness” or comparing gender roles in “Antigone” and “Othello,” while in a math class, they might prove their understanding of concepts, like showing how statistics can be manipulated or applying parabolic equations to producing solar energy.
The consortium says that their students are more likely to graduate and persist in to college, despite largely mirroring the rest of New York City’s demographics.
But those figures don’t definitively prove that high-stakes testing harms students.
On Connecticut’s other border, all public schools in Massachusetts require an exit exam, too. Officials there claim that the test holds schools accountable to a high standard, helping the state top the rest of the country in elementary-school math and reading scores.
At least one study, however, found that the high-stakes test in Massachusetts disproportionately affected poor students from urban areas. By comparing students who scored similarly, just on other sides of passing and failing, they could detect an effect on graduation rates. Those who barely failed the 10th grade math exam were less 8 points likely to make it to graduation than similar kids who barely passed.
Students and external evaluators rate each other’s presentations.
Miller said the difference is apparent just from sitting in her classroom.
Most schools feel like pressure cookers during finals week, Miller said, including the Brooklyn school where she used to work. She didn’t have time to assign lengthy research papers, she said, because kids were so busy prepping for the Regents exam.
The students at Metro, by contrast, are “so joyous” at the year’s end, she said. One high-achieving student, who’d been disheartened after bombing her SAT, thanked Miller for ending the class with a paper, which she said reminded her that she had the skills to make it in college.
“We’re really celebrating months of hard work,” Miller said. “It’s so much more meaningful.”
Soon after Melanie wrapped up, other students at the table took over, engaging with Women’s Liberation, Black Power and the American Indian Movement.
They talked about why the topics had been so personal to them, struggled to remember what authors they’d cited, and beamed at the number of pages they’d managed to fill up.
Melanie said that she preferred ending the year with a roundtable, which gave students a chance to “show pride in our work and what we know,” she said.