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  • CoL: Corruption on Learning

    The next phase of the privatisation of the education system is in full swing, with a series of schools being lured by the promise of $365million into Communities of Learning.
    Although there was a slight majority of 93% of NZEI voters voting to exit the negotiation tent when the Corruption of Schools initiative was announced, they continued working with the Ministry to develop a watered down version that is supposedly more palatable version of it.

    Unfortunately, as I have written in the past, a poisoned apple is still poisoned even if you polish it up nice, red and juicy. Or in slightly more crass terms; I’m not going to be eating a turd just because you’ve put chocolate icing on it.

    Groups of schools were then asked to submit expressions of interest into forming or joining a CoL and many did to explore the options. However, an “expression of interest” was taken by the Ministry as a firm “yes” of commitment, and when consulted about whether a CoL was to be formed, the Ministry responded with “well you’ve signed an expression of interest so you’re in one”. Fantastic. This is of course a numbers game, and the Ministry will spin it whichever way it can to show that it is working. Take this map for example. It says where all the communities of learning are around the country and all the schools involved, and all the students from those schools – failing to actually realise that as of March 2017, 61 CoL’s have approved achievement challenges. As of December 2016 there were 180 CoL’s, so only one third have had the go ahead on an achievement challenge. These achievement challenges essentially set a direction for the CoL and until they have been approved, the CoL is somewhat rudderless and ceases to exist. Thus, the Ministry’s numbers are overly inflated as to how many CoL’s there are, and how many schools are actually participating in one.

    At the NZPF Moot last week, Whetu Cormick spoke of the plans the Government is making, with international visits to the UK where Communities of Learning models have been rolled out and the devastating nature of them has become evident. They all centre around privatising education, and will spell the biggest asset sale in recent New Zealand history.

    Of course, as Whetu states, all of this is presented to the public and parents as a way for schools to be equally equipped, for resources to be shared. It’s far too difficult to argue, because all of these things seem very appealing at face value. However, the implications of these lead us to the issues that the UK and US are facing; neither of which has raised any kind of improvement in the achievement results of students. Of course, using National Standards to measure this is completely flawed anyway.

    What I find somewhat amusing is that every opportunity the minister gets at the moment she seems obligated to say “parents should get the choice”. But under this CoL model, schools will have a set of expectations dumped on them and they will all conform to eventually all be the same, with no room for individuality or working with the community. No chance to build a school curriculum or focussing on what is important to that school’s culture.

    I would be very interested to hear from anyone who is in a school involved with a CoL;

    • What are your experiences of it so far? Positive? Indifferent? Negative?
    • What are your “achievement challenges”? How do they relate to your students at your school?
    • Is the CoL having a positive impact on your school, and on student achievement?

    Related Reading

  • Unleashed Members Closed

    Hi all

    Over the last few months, I’ve been taking registrations for my site. It has been quite a good exercise for me to give it a go.
    However, the sign up rate, as well as what I could actually offer members at this stage, is not worth the time, effort, and security issues this has caused. So I have shut down my members area for now.

    Thank you to all those who expressed an interest, but I have had to disable your accounts now.

    You are still more than welcome to follow the website, as well as our social media accounts.

  • Dyslexia in New Zealand Schools

    The current support for dyslexic students in New Zealand schools is a joke. An absolute joke.

    When there is a reportedly 7% of students in New Zealand Schools have Dyslexia, it doesn’t sound like much. However, in a class of 28 students (the funded class size), that’s 2 students who will be struggling with dyslexia. Statistics say that as many as 20% of students will have learning disabilities, and it’s been noted that overall, dyslexia makes up about half of those disabilities. This means it could be even 3 students in your class that will be struggling with dyslexia.

    I also suspect, that the aforementioned 7%-10% is just those that have been diagnosed, and as a teacher, there are many more that are never picked up for a number of reasons.

    That’s not good enough.

    What’s more, is the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and the Government all turn a blind eye about dyslexia support in schools – mainly because if they admit that it is a problem in New Zealand schools that dyslexia affects student’s learning, then they’ll be called upon to do something about it and support schools to address the problem. That comes at a cost to the Government. Essentially, what this has led to is a bunch of private organisations filling this void. However, this of course, comes at a cost.

    From the figures I have heard, to just get assessed for dyslexia, it will cost schools or families anywhere from $250-$400. This goes some way to explaining why so many more students are not picked up and struggle their way through the system with little or no support for them, their teacher, or their parents.

    Go figure.

    As a teacher, I am passionate about this. Not to find a reason for under-achievement or raise excuses, but to get support for these students who are struggling. It frustrates me to see these kids come in, and feel like I have nowhere to turn to get support for them, and if there is, how it always seems to come to a dead-end.

    In trying to understand dyslexia a bit more, and hopefully be able to support dyslexic students within my classroom myself (seeing as I’m getting no support), I have purchased a couple of books. One is ‘The Gift of Dyslexia’ by Ronald D. Davis (which I have leant to a friend when her child was diagnosed), and the other is ‘The Dyslexia Checklist’ by Sandra F. Rief and Judith M. Stern.  Hopefully they both offer some insight into how I can better support learners with dyslexia in my classroom.

     

  • Teacher Back to School Bingo

    The new year begins tomorrow for most teacher’s, and I felt that what better time to have a bit of fun to make those first days back at work a little more bearable. So here it is, the inaugural Teacher’s Back to School Bingo.

    Have fun as you go back to school!

  • Introducing Daily 5 – Prezi Presentation

    It’s the start of the year, and one of the most important things is to begin how you mean to go on.

    From day one, I begin my classroom routine, especially for Daily 5.

    The last few years I’ve been relying on a Powerpoint found on Pinterest to introduce and explain Daily 5 to my new class.

    This year I decided to make my own, taking aspects from this powerpoint, but also adding my own things, and truncating some of the information to keep up with the declining attention span of my students.

    Feel free to use this as you begin your journey into Daily 5.

    http://prezi.com/vztrhn1kvjsh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy[su_lightbox src=”http://prezi.com/vztrhn1kvjsh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy”][su_button] Welcome to Daily 5 – Prezi.com [/su_button][/su_lightbox]

    [su_qrcode data=”http://prezi.com/vztrhn1kvjsh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy” title=”Welcome to Daily 5″ align=”right” link=”http://prezi.com/vztrhn1kvjsh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy”]

  • Stuck Staples

    Here’s the first (of many?) Top Teacher Tip.
    Heading back into the classroom this week, many teachers will come across this problem in their classroom, especially if they don’t have vertiface on the walls.

  • Ken Robinson – Creative Schools – Chapter 1

    Last year I purchased Ken Robinson’s ‘Creative Schools’ book after viewing his highly popular TED talk video in which he made quite a lot of sense. 

    To be honest, I’m not much of a reader. I tend to stick to picture books. So I’m even less into writing about reading a book, and the idea of writing a book review is far from the forefront of my to do list. However, I was immediately blown away by how much sense Ken makes within his first chapter, that I probably could have highlighted every word as reference material.

    So as a means of collecting the best parts of his book, I’ve decided to write down and paraphrase some of the key quotes Sir Ken makes. While he writes regarding the UK and US education policies, it is quite evident that these models are being dishearteningly enforced and entrenched into New Zealand’s current education direction. At times, you could be mistaken that Robinson was in fact writing a historical account of the reform that Aotearoa is currently undertaking.

    Chapter 1

    The Standards Movement
    • “Reform isn’t new in education. There have always been debates about what education is for and what should be taught and how. But now it’s different. The modern standards movement is global… National education policies used to be mainly domestic affairs. These days, governments scrutinize each others’ education systems as earnestly as their defense policies.” – p6
    • “Since 2000, the standards movement has been turbocharged by the league tables of the… (PISA). These tables are based on student performance in standardized tests… The political impact of PISA has grown… Ministers of education now compare their respective rankings like bodybuilders flexing their biceps.” – p7
    • “Governments everywhere are now yanking firmly on the reins of public education, telling schools what to teach, imposing systems of testing to hold them accountable, and levying penalties if they don’t make the grade.” – p9
    National Curriculums
    • “Most national curricula are based on the idea of discrete subjects. In most systems there is a hierarchy to these subjects. At the top are literacy, mathematics, and now the STEM disciplines. Next come the humanities, including history, geography, and social studies. Be cause the standards movement emphasizes academic study, it places less value on practical disciplines like art, drama, dance, music, design, and physical education and on ‘soft subjects’ like communications and media studies, which are all thought to be nonacademic. Within the arts, visual arts and music are usually given higher priority than drama and dance. Often these last two are not taught at all.” – p12
    • “When it comes to assessment, the standards movement emphasizes formal, written examinations and extensive use of multiple choice tests so that students’ answers can be easily codified and processed. It is skeptical too of course work, portfolios, open book tests, teacher evaluation, peer assessment and other approaches that are not so easily quantifiable.” – p12
    • “One of the aims of testing is to increase competition between students, teachers, and schools…Students compete with each other, teachers are judged mainly on their students’ test results, and schools and districts go head-to-head to win resources. Standards-based tests influence funding allocations, staff promotions, an whether or not schools stay open or are placed under different leadership.” – p13.
    Charter Schools
    • “Some governments are now encouraging investment in education by private corporations and entrepreneurs. Their involvement ranges from selling products and services to schools to running their own schools for commercial profit. Governments are promoting different categories of public school – such as academies, charters, and free schools – in which some strictures of the standards movement are deliberately relaxed. There are several motives here. One is to intensify competition; a second is to promote diversity of provision; a third is to ease the burden on the public purse; and a fourth is profit. As I said, education is one of the world’s biggest businesses” – p13
    • “If the standards movement were working as intended, there would be nothing more to say. But it isn’t. Take the three R’s. In spite of the billions of dollars spent, the standards movement has been at best a partial success. Countries like the United States and England have sacrificed much in a desperate drive to raise standards in literacy and numeracy. Yet test scores in the targeted disciplines have hardly improved.” p13-14.

    • “The standards movement is not meeting the economic challenges we face. One of the declared priorities is to prepare young people for work. And yet, youth unemployment around the world is at record levels…
      The blight of unemployment is even affecting young people who’ve done everything that was expected of them and graduated from college. Between 1950 and 1980, a college degree was pretty much a guarantee of a good job… They don’t now. The essential problem is not the quality of degrees, but the quantity… A college degree used to be so valuable because relatively few people had one. In a world bristling with graduates, a college degree is no longer the distinction it once was.” p14-15
    Education & the Economy
    • “Yong Zhao… calculates that in the twenty-eight years from 1977 and 2005 more than a million jobs annually disappeared from existing firms in the United States. During that same time, new firms created more than three million jobs a year. Many of these new jobs needed significantly different skill sets from the old, lost jobs – and there was very little advance warning over what those skill sets might be. The work went to employees who had refined those talents already and to people with the creative and entrepreneurial ability to make career and training adjustments.” p16-17
    • “In 2008, IBM published a survey of what characteristics organization leaders need most in their staff. They spoke with fifteen hundred leaders in eighty countries. The two priorities were adaptability to change and creativity in generating new ideas.  They found these qualities lacking in many otherwise highly qualified graduates… On the contrary, standardized education can crush creativity and innovation, the very qualities on which today’s economies depend.” p18-19.
    • “The standards movement is not achieving the objectives it has set for itself. Meanwhile, it is having catastrophic consequences on student engagement and teacher morale…the teacher attrition rate is alarmingly high. In the United States, more than a quarter of a million teachers leave the profession every year, and it is estimated that more than 40 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years. Thi scenario is especially bleak in high-poverty schools, where turnover is approximately 20 percent every year.” p20-21
    Achievement
    • “The standards movement came about because of legitimate concerns  about standards in schools. There are many factors that affect students’ achievement in schools. They may include student motivation, poverty, social disadvantage, home and family circumstances, poor facilities and funding in schools, the pressures of testing and assessment, and myriad others. These factors cannot be ignored, and any attempt to raise achievement in schools has to take them fully into account.” p24
    • “The best ways to raise (achievement) are to improve the quality of teaching, have a rich and balanced curriculum, and have supportive, informative systems of assessment. The political response has been the opposite: to narrow the curriculum and wherever possible to standardize content, teaching, and assessment. It has proved to be the wrong response.” p24-25
    • “The evidence is everywhere that the standards movement is largely failing by its own terms and creating more problems than it is solving.” p24
    • “The fact is that our children and our communities need a different sort of education, based on different principles from those that are driving the standards movement.” – p24.

    And that’s pretty much the highlights from Chapter 1; and only Chapter 1! So many more to go, so I will continue making posts when I come across more in the pages that follow.

  • NZCER – National Standards in their seventh year

    National Standards in their seventh year – NZCER

    At the mid point of 2016, we were presented with a survey which was sent off to NZCER for the current views of teaching proffesionals views on National Standards. 6 months later, and NZCER have done the collation and inquiry around the survey results, and have presented the following report.

    National Standards in their seventh year (PDF 2.9Mb)

    As one of these teaching professionals who completed the survey (selected at random by the school principal) I was quite interested in the results and findings. Below are some of the key quotes from the report, and hopefully it provides a good summary and synopsis of the entire article for you.

    Key Quotes

    • While (the National Standards) are part and parcel of teaching and school decision making, questions continue around their impact for students, differences in their interpretation and their impact on the rest of the curriculum.
    • Over half of teachers and principals still feel they have not had the support they need to work with National Standards.
    • Over two-thirds of teachers reported a narrowing of the curriculum they teach, associated with National Standards
    • Many teachers indicated that their school has a shared understanding of National Standards that means that overall teacher judgements (OTJs) at the school are consistent…
    • Only 41% of the principals and 49% of teachers thought they had had enough support and guidance to feel confident about their work with National Standards.
    • Only 16% of teachers agreed the impact of National Standards on students’ achievement overall has been positive.
    • Most parents and whānau reported receiving clear information in their child’s mid-year report about their achievement of National Standards… Fifty-one percent of parents thought National Standards provide a valuable record of their child’s learning.
    • Nine percent of the teachers who responded to the survey had used PaCT to support their OTJs in 2016. PaCT is a Ministry-funded online tool that was developed to support teachers to make consistent judgements of students’ performance in relation to the National Standards.
    • Teachers’ support for National Standards remained around the same as 2013, when it was 35%. The proportion who agreed National Standards provide a valuable record of student learning was stable at 23%

    Principal Comments

    • In the comments made by 43% of the principals about National Standards, the unreliable nature of National Standards data was the most frequently mentioned theme (18% of all principals).

      NS are a joke. Data coming to us from schools when students enrol here is highly unreliable. Our view is that without a National Test (WE DO NOT WANT NATIONAL HIGH STAKES TESTING!!!!) there is no accurate way of assessing whatever the data schools are submitting is truthful/correct. We are hard in our marking, we do not overstate student achievement, most probably we understate it. It is obvious that schools are not being truthful in their reporting of data because of the high levels of inaccuracy. OTJs cannot be accurately moderated within a school, let alone between local schools and definitely not between suburbs/cities etc. NS data being published by the MOE on Education Counts cannot be trusted.

    • Nine percent commented that the focus should be on students’ achievement, rather than their achievement of given standards.

      (National Standards) Do not acknowledge the progress of students who are not achieving at the Standard but are making progress, but it is not enough to move out of the ‘below’ categories.

    • Seven percent of principals voiced concern about the negative effects of National Standards on students and their learning.

      Good idea but each child will have different abilities. What about the child who is ‘below’ from 5 years–12 years old. How do they feel?

      It is soul destroying for students who are well below—we used to celebrate their small achievements—now they are just well below! 🙁 Overall, National Standards have led to a deterioration in the educational deal our children are receiving.

    Teacher Comments

    • Forty-four percent of teachers wrote comments about National Standards, and concern about negative effects on students and their learning was a main theme (13% of all teachers).

      Labels children from an early age. National Standards has helped label our Pasifika and Māori students as ‘below’ achievers, it doesn’t take into account the added value of the child’s own learning.

      I find the whole push for acceleration very dangerous as many children are getting insufficient consolidation and fall down later because they do not have a solid grounding.

    • The other most frequently mentioned theme in teachers’ comments was that the focus should be on identifying and reporting a student’s individual progress, rather than their achievement—or not—of a set standard (10% of teachers).

      National Standards do not accurately recognise the progress of some students, in particular ‘well below’ and ‘below’ students. A student can arrive at ‘below’, work as hard as they can all year and still be ‘below’. National Standards do not acknowledge or show this progress. This can be very demotivating for these students.

      National Standards are a terrible way to measure student achievement as it does not include specific progress within a level. Students may make huge individual progress within their own ability, however parents/caregivers are only concerned if their child is ‘AT’ National Standards.

    In Conclusion

    • Overall, the picture from the 2016 NZCER national survey responses indicates that, while the National Standards have been incorporated into teaching and learning and used by school leaders as indicators of student need, experiences of using them continue to raise questions about their role in student learning and performance, more than 6 years later. To make the National Standards more productive for teaching and learning, it would seem that the recommendations from NZCER’s 2013 analysis of its national survey data (summarised on p. 6 of this report) are still applicable.

    Your thoughts?

    What are your thoughts on National Standards and their role in today’s education? Are they relevant or are they a distraction from your teaching?

    What did you think of the report above? Anything stand out for you? Please Comment below.

  • Lend me your pencils

    As the new year begins, I have begun to prepare for the first day back at school, and the remainder of the term, and year.

    One thing that has always plagued my classroom has been the lack of pencils. Not colouring pencils, but your standard HB. Yes, you got it. The one you use all the time at school. For one or whatever reason, there are always a number of students who do not have one – and lots of the time it is difficult to lay blame at them for this. Their learning suffers if they don’t have one, and thus, this year, I have purchased (and will continue to purchase) stack loads of pencils for them to borrow.

    Some will argue (and this would have been me) that they should be able to provide their own else they miss out, tough love, etc. But something didn’t sit right with me doing this any more.

    I began to look for what other teachers do, and found this comprehensive look at the very problem, and helped me re-forumlate my own perception (and solution) of this problem.

    Read Full Article

    “I recently taught a university course in Seattle for graduate students seeking master’s degrees in teaching. In one lesson, our focus was on creating a psychologically safe learning environment for students. It was an issue of managing students and supplies. I posed a question:

    If a student shows up to class without a pencil, how should the teacher respond?

    Small groups collaborated for a few minutes. Ultimately, they came up with plans involving taking something (a shoe?) from the student as collateral to remind the student about the importance of having supplies, notifying parents and even assigning classroom cleanup duty or lunch detention.

    “What about you, Prof?” they asked.

    “I would give the kid a pencil,” I said.

    “You mean the first time?” someone asked.

    “Every time,” I said.

    This evidently had not occurred to them. There must be some punishment, subtle humiliation or a response that makes the kid pay for the error, right? They were concerned that my action would reinforce and reward poor behavior, possibly even help develop bad habits.

    What they failed to see is that the teacher is not the cause of the problem. Likely, the student has been doing this for years. The teacher can respond by criticizing the child in front of the class, reminding him that pencils are required at school, making her give up something as collateral or inflicting some punishment as a power move…

    …I resolve to remain a patient advocate for the child even if he is testing me. When I hand him the 50th pencil and remind him there is always one here, what will be his likely impression? Has humiliation worked so far in his educational experience? Has the status quo resolved the issue? Imagine the impact of endless advocacy. We should all be extended such grace.”

    Read Full Article

     

  • Mannequin Challenge – Daily 5

    As a bit of End of Year fun, I got my students to make a quick video of our favourite part of each day – the Daily 5. In the video you’ll get a glimpse of what the Daily 5 are, what happens during Daily 5, and why the kids love it so much.

    Enjoy!