Innovative Teaching: Highly Rated Instructors Go Beyond Teaching to the Standardized Test

Not all teachers are willing to go to such lengths.

Even as the annual state testing season bore down on her this spring, fourth-grade teacher Jin Yi barely bothered with test prep materials. The Hobart Boulevard Elementary School teacher used to spend weeks with practice tests but found they bored her students.

Instead, she engages them with innovative teaching, hands-on lessons, such as measuring their arms and comparing that data to solve above-grade-level subtraction problems.

“I used to spend time on test prep because I felt pressured to do it,” said Yi, who attended Hobart in Koreatown herself and returned a decade ago to teach. “But I think it’s kind of a waste of time. The students get bored and don’t take it seriously and it defeats the purpose.”

Yi’s approach seems to work: She is rated “highly effective” in a value-added analysis by The Times based on her students’ standardized test scores in English and math. She also ranks among the Los Angeles Unified School District’s top 100 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in English in that analysis.