The Educational Testing Service (they produce the SAT) has a new Personal Potential Index, a one-to-five scale for analyzing letters of recommendation to accompany a candidate’s GRE scores to graduate school. Its criteria?
- Knowledge and creativity
- Communication skills
- Team work
- Resilience, planning, and organization
- Ethics and integrity
There is more, but already the themes are pretty obvious, and the idea that an educated person reveals all of these skills and aptitudes is not new. Educators have known for generations that education entails all of this. Centuries, actually—when was it that Mark Twain said: “I never let schooling interfere with my education?” What is perhaps new is that, just as America is finally overcoming its general ignorance and acknowledging the reality of global warming, it also seems to be waking up to the fact that schools need to do more than just grind kids toward limited “academic standards.” (See Is No Child Left Behind Working?)
If one walks into a school that is pursuing literacy rather than just “teaching kids to read,” you will see students doing many of the following:
- Researching topics of interest in books of interest
- Writing in journals
- Sharing stories and creating puppet shows
- Expressing themselves in artistic creations
- Writing descriptions
- Writing directions
- Describing art
- Collecting data and composing hypotheses
- Designing letter writing campaigns
- Reading books to other students—older and younger
- Documenting each other’s experiences
- Labeling everything in the room
- Finding the stories behind words and tracking their journey through time
- Writing their personal stories into plays and performing these plays
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