Testing Burnout Cure

We complain about the time it takes for standardized testing and to prepare students for testing.  The Edutopia article, Handling Teacher and Student Testing Burnout, suggests that our emphasis in the classroom should not be on having students pass minimum standards, but instead, maximum standards. High School principal Ben Johnson, author of Teaching Students to Dig Deeper, says that active learning including collaboration, role playing, projects, and experimentation sometimes doesn’t happen because teachers are too busy preparing students for minimum standards.  According to Johnson, deep learning is the way to send short-term memories into long-term memory. One of his teachers says that technology is the way to avoid testing burnout, for it energizes lessons, which results in “higher interest and engagement.”