Jacob Kitzmiller Dean Cristol ESQREM 3005 28 October, 2018 Dr. Conrath Interview Melissa Conrath is in the faculty at Ohio State in the staff of Educational Administration. In the years prior to her receiving this position she was a k-12 teacher and slowly moved up to different administrative positions. She later served as a superintendent for a small outskirt district known as Big Walnut. She believes that the implementation of statewide testing has had both positive impacts as well as negatives. She did say that she liked the No Child Left Behind Act because it brought students forward that were once being neglected. She stated that the negatives of it are that teacher’s work is scrutinized more so in a manner that doesn’t look at every component of the teacher’s work. Morale has been lowered for teachers and they have begun to focus more on meeting the standards rather than collaborating to create a positive environment full of diverse learning. She seems to be a big fan of the assessments being used as data that can be analyzed to monitor student progress. She preaches that the data needs to be closely looked at and then put into action any changes that need made. She made a good comparison of student’s progress journey and that of which you would take in a car. If you just take off and assume you are going in the right direction, all conditions perfect, straight steering and you don’t check your surroundings then you might end up in a place you never planned on going. This is a prime comparison to making sure that students need to be monitored on their journey to make sure they get put in the right location at the end of the journey. Suggestions she made as a future teacher is to be able to understand the numbers and data that these tests and assessments give that way you can change your teaching practices if needed. Collaborative environments are important especially in analyzing data and she hopes that we will get our colleagues to look at the data as well and collaborate as to how to answer things that the data shows. She believes that it is very important for us to identify our skills when we get placed in a school and show that we have a drive to grow and learn and that the technical skills and practitional skills will come in time at the job. A question that we should become familiar with and be able to answer, according to Melissa, is about where we would get our data from that would inform our teaching and how would we take the data and implement its results into our teaching. I agree with everything Dr. Conrath said but am a little skeptical about only looking at data with so many outside factors playing a role in education that a single data score point is hard to base instruction on. I think it is very important to know your individual students and adapt your teaching to help them while also using the data to progress them on their journey.
