Standardized testing receives a bad rap, from school board members to teachers and seemingly everyone in between. The boogeyman is sometimes generalized to all testing; teaching practices vary widely, from one end frequently using quizzes and tests to the other rare to none. B. F. Skinner operationalized learning as “change in behavior.” For teachers to know this change, one shift can greatly improve learning: teach to the test, or T³. T³ revolves around the notion there is an end result desired of key knowledge, skills, and attitudes, with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly markers. Transforming T³ beyond the previous boilerplate requires 5 shifts:

          - There should be alignment with a final test, semester test, quarterly test, and weekly/biweekly test. Two key ideas drive this shift: distributive and repetitive learning. Distributive means planning on reteaching, practicing, and testing key concepts within a month and throughout the year. Repetitive involves regularly spaced practice when introducing an objective.

           - Daily, 3-4 times minimum, there should be a check for understanding. Such quizzes mean a student demonstrates what he or she knows individually.

           - Flipping the use of T³ means any student activity which makes learning visible is an assessment. Instead of waiting for students to ask for help because they do not know what to do, students should ask for help because they know what to do and want to discuss their work. When assigning work, the teacher should also check students’ work after 3-4 problems or questions. If there are problems, three actions can help: A.) Simplefix could be I-We-You and the student is off. I-We-You should be recursive and contextualized, such as I-We-I-We-We-You-We-You; B.) Minor problems might be fixed by giving a bridging assignment or peer teaching. C.) Some problems are too large and will require reteaching. Unlike textbook-guided reteaching, the teacher will assess the situation and design a plan based on the problem (which could be prerequisite skills are missing, conceptual issue, etc.).

            - Summative assessments weekly, biweekly, monthly, or end of semester paint a picture of retention of skills and inform future instruction.

If students cannot demonstrate knowledge or skills at the end of the year, then B. F. Skinner’s maxim on learning means learning did not occur. Some teachers might scoff T³ is too onerous. A test is anything where a student independently creates a product to make learning visible. Whether a question, three problems, or an entry/exit ticket, T³ provides actionable information on a daily basis. Many teachers write lesson plans for a week, yet when a teacher becomes Chief Intelligence Officer, mistakes and issues become visible in real-time versus figuring out problems when students hand in work or reveal gaps weeks, months, or even a year later. What if a student is not making a mistake? Feedback can still grow and refine student's work.

Curriculum mapping should be tied to instructional practices; not everything can, will, or should be retained. T³ requires the teacher to don an investigator’s stance and be on the search for continuous intelligence to evaluate everyone’s course. Waiting two weeks or months is educational malpractice. Everything can be distilled down to three questions: What is your yearly testing plan? What can students do differently at the end of the year? How do you know?

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