Just wondering …?
Posted by: greg.carroll in Learning and Teaching, Pedagogy, opinion, politicalCan anyone point me to ANYTHING an education professional not employed by the central MoE has written or said that is positive about the National Standards and their implications for our system?
Not HERE:
The thing we might agree on is that New Zealand has a long tail of underachievers. Will national standards shorten this tail? I don’t think so. The factors that contribute to under achievement are complex and varied. If it was just good teaching that produced high achievement then good teachers and good schools wouldn’t have a range of achievement – everyone would be high achievers[my emphasis]. I know this is not true. Good teachers and good schools still have a range of achievement, even when other factors that influence achievement are weeded out (poverty, parents’ education level, etc).
good point though ay!
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Greg
Been following (and enjoying) your thoughts for a wee while… and I agree with your general comment here. One of the issues for us nationally though is that the teaching workforce is NOT as homogeneous as some would have us believe. All teachers are NOT equal .. too many schools are carrying mediocre operators in classrooms. There are some VERY god teachers out there, but there are also…….. Teacher unions need to accept the fact that all teachers are not equal!! This would take us along way to reducing the tail in our NZ kids’ achievement.
Hi Robin
not sure I agree. If it was simply quality teaching that caused achievement then good teachers and schools with good teachers would have ALL their children achieving highly. This is NOT the case.
cheers
Greg
Understood.,.. but my point is that no school has uniformly good teachers… there is always variation. Hence there is variation in achievement. If we can imporve the overall quality of teachers we will reduce the gap.
Nice to hear from you.
Cheers
Robin
Robin – I agree that no school has uniformly good teachers, and certainly not across all curriculum areas. Kids I have taught did not get the music programme they would have received in the classrooms of some of my colleagues for instance. I am not sure however that there is a causal relationship between high quality teaching and achievement. There certainly is the converse where underachievement can be the result of poor teaching, but while all children can be the best they can be with quality teaching I am not sure that this is the same for each child. Or that a cognitive hurdle for them to jump over to be meeting National Standards etc is appropriate (but you will know my thoughts on that ….hehehe)
You can bet that the things that we are being judged on in the league tables (yes league tables equate with National Standards as night follows day) will be the things we put our energy into- good teaching or bad. There are so many other things that are important for children to be learning that are not on a test. They are not easily quantifiable. Less emphasis will be put on those by the fact alone that there are only so many hours in a day.
Parents are already buying into it that success on an e-AsTTle test equates with absolute success in maths. If a child succeeds with that then they are better mathematicians than those whose success is measured with progress through NUMPA. The two things are not necessarily correlated with each other. Do I gear my class teaching to give children more success with e-AsTTle at the expense of NUMPA so their test results look more authoritative?????
We are only just getting our heads around creativity. I would hate for children to be made to feel like failures because their talents don’t lie with reading, writing and maths.
this is a valuable point from allanahks blog retold in a twitter conversation
@Allanahk Very good point – if a kid is identified as falling behind what will be done to help the kid that isn’t being done now?
in this thread tho the conversation has crossed over a very good point. there are some (quite a few) crap schools with poor teachers and leaders. so philosophically you can take the moral high ground and say it will be bad for education bla bla (which is my point of view) BUT you could say those hopeless buggers need to be identified and forced to shape up or ship out.
for me it just doesnt sit right but i dont think we have a choice.
i wrote to anne tolley, got no reply, so moaned about getting no reply, the reply came swiftly after the second email. i will post her reply on podgorani