Another example is homework. This is a touchy subject among educators. Give or not to give homework, that's the question? Students hate it, parents hate spending hours on it, yet teachers insist it's good practice. So, educators debate how to make homework effective.
With so many changes, what is one fundamental change I'd like to see?
Paper and pencil tests are easy to grade but say very little about depth of learning. Multiple-choice, fill in the blank, matching, and true/false only assess the surface recall knowledge. I lived with these kinds of tests my entire high school and college career. I used these kinds of assessments in my years in 4th and 6th grade though I often planned for performance based assessments but never quite got there..
Assessment needs to be tied explicitly to standards and learning targets to determine progress. What do I mean by this?
Educators should be writing learning targets that and correlated 1:1 to either state standards or Common Core. The targets should have a verb and a noun - action and product. Each learning target should have an explicit statement(s) that describe learning. The descriptions are given to students so they know exactly what they have to do to prove their learning. When worked is turned in for evaluation, teacher and student discuss what level of progress is made, feedback is given to students, and they rework parts that have not proven mastery of the learning targets.
This is a long process but much more effective than sporadic feedback given to students using a number, which means nothing is meaningless, or short garbled phrases students don't understand. This process, or something similar, insures two things: the educator individually connects with every student on their work, and students clearly know what they mastered and have yet to master.