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  • A four-day school week?

    Source: A four-day school week?

    This is a notion that I have thought about for many a time, especially as ANOTHER Monday morning looms into view. But this is mostly from an entirely selfish reason, and nothing based on any research or ideas.

    But while we’re at it… would it work? Logistically, after having run with five day working weeks for centuries, can we break the routine?

    With 40 less teaching days a year, would we be able to teach as widely and broadly through the curriculum that we are already jamming into each year?

    What do you think?

  • The Other Side of the PaCT Coin

    Last time I was here

    Last year I wrote an article about the Progress and Consistency Tool. I tried to take a fairly positive approach to it, and tried to advocate as best I could for schools getting involved.

    This time, however, I follow NZEI’s warning against getting involved with it, after recent discussions with other professionals in education.

    My statement still stands when I said

    “I think that if the government wanted to align student achievement with teacher salaries (i.e. performance pay), that they would already be able to do so without using the PaCT tool anyway.”

    However, the PaCT will just make this more streamlined, more direct, and easier to access and/or distribute.

    How it works

    From the workshops that I have attended, ‘The Tool’ works as a bank of illustrations in different areas of Mathematics, Reading, and Writing. Mathematics was developed first, and so most of the examples are based around this. The teacher matches up their student with the illustrations and, after adding all of the different aspects together, the Tool will recommend an Overall Teacher Judgement for the teacher to use. More info on this can be found here.

    The recommended judgement is not set in stone however; but is just a recommendation. If teacher’s are unhappy with this judgement, they can ‘override’ the Tool’s recommendation, and insert a different OTJ, before saving it off to their School Management System (SMS) and the Ministry.

    How it REALLY works…

    I am very much used to working with databases, such as in MySQL. Many website utilise such a database, and I have used both pre-packaged databases such as WordPress, as well as building my own. Building your own is quite an involved process, but very worthwhile when you get all the functionality that can come from using them.

    Putting my IT skills to use, I can see how PaCT will become a threat, and how it will be used beyond what it is heralded to be.

    Firstly, every student will have their NSN as a unique ID in the database. This will ensure that the right student always has their OTJ made against them, and not another student.

    Each of the aspects in Maths for example, will have a dedicated column, for each year of the student’s schooling. For example: lets say there were only 3 aspects, it would be: aspect1-firstyear, aspect2-firstyear, aspect3-firstyear, followed by – aspect1-secondyear, aspect2-secondyear, aspect3-secondyear etcetera.
    When a judgement against an aspect is made, it will be noted in these columns. Then there will be a calculation made from these values, and based on that calculation, the recommendation will be made.

    This is where I’m going to stop for now, because this is when it gets interesting.

    At this point, the data is in the database, and is accessible by two parties – the teacher, and the Ministry. With this data, the Ministry can access both the assessment that the teacher has made, as well as the values, calculation, and the recommendation. Collate all the student’s under this teacher’s care for the year, and you have yourself a picture of that teacher’s class, and their achievement (or non achievement). They also have the recommendation that the Tool has made.

    The more devious of us will then take this to the next step. The Ministry, now that they have this data, will be able to produce a picture of the school from all its students. These will undoubtedly be published in the likes of Public Achievement Information before you can blink. They will then be able to target under-performing schools, and begin their next round of teacher bashing. Because as we all know, poor student results is not a reflection on the student, their environment, their home life, poverty, culture, family priority; instead it is definitely the quality of the teacher that these students are struggling. This will be the case until all the teachers get tired of the treatment, and vote with their feet. These schools are more than likely become charter schools, run by private companies with their own agendas which extend beyond just education.

    To add to the case on the ‘poor teacher’ policy, there is a direct link back to the database that will be quite startling for some.
    You see, whilst there is the opportunity for the teacher to ‘override’ the Tool’s OTJ, the original recommended OTJ will still exist in a column inside the database. The calculations made will automatically do this. The database will then also record a) that the teacher overrode the recommendation, and b) what they changed it to.
    This data is the startling bit. Not only do they have the “original” OTJ, but they have whether the teacher changed it (and let’s face it, it will always be to make it better – because no one in their right mind would disagree with the tool and mark students down – they would go, “Oh okay, maybe I’m being too harsh…”). This will give the Ministry the original OTJ which they would just use anyway, and they have records of teachers that change results; and can pick trends of teachers, or purely select individuals that that regularly change results, and label them as poor teachers. It thus will make it difficult for any teacher wanting to keep their job to change the OTJ recommendations that the tool makes, even if they are inaccurate. Suddenly the professional opinion of teachers means nothing, and instead, a computer programme is making the call on the overall achievement of students in the class, as opposed to the teacher. Yes, the teacher still has to align their student with the illustration, and this is a professional judgement call in itself, but its not the final call on where the student is at.

    Trialing

    I have been rather annoyed at the lack of trialing by this government, and have mentioned this in the past as well. First it was National Standards which were rolled out on the country without any trial or input from the teachers who had to be running it. Novopay is another issue all together.

    However, the Government is now trialing PaCT, ironing out the creases, and getting schools involved in using it. As mentioned, it has started with just Maths, with Reading and Writing coming in later on. This will eventually mean that there can be no complaint on the way it was trialed and implemented, and so making it compulsory for schools will become a lot easier for the Government to do. This of course was their intention back in 2013 when the PaCT was announced, but they had to backtrack on that when principals around the country rejected it.

    In Conclusion

    So regardless of what my previous post said in terms of “you may as well get involved”; I’d like to make an amendment. You may as well get involved because they’re going to make it compulsory eventually. You may as well get involved if you’re sick of making your own OTJ’s and would like a computer program to do it for you.

    Just saying!

  • Writers Workshop – Class flowchart

    Recently I began using Writers Workshop in the class to co-exist within the Daily 5 programme that I run. One of the first things I do whenever embarking on a new strategy for teaching is to create a resource that showcases the structure of the programme. Writers Workshop was no different.

    Writers Workshop Flowchart Posters

    Screen Shot 2015-09-13 at 9.33.15 PM

     

    For each of these posters, I cut them out and laminated them. Then I staple/pin them to the wall.

    Each child in the class gets a peg with their name on it, and depending on where they are up to in the writing process, they put their peg. This helps them to be aware of what they are working on, and also assists me as the teacher to work in with where the students are up to.

    What is Writer’s Workshop?

    There are a variety of webpages out there that will tell you all about Writers Workshop. Busy Teachers Cafe has a good outline. The main focus of the workshop approach though, is to get students writing. Allowing them to choose what they write about provides instant motivation. The only issue occurs when student’s don’t know what to write about; but there are a variety of ways to get around this in the teacher’s arsenal. Allowing students to monitor their own writing is another part. And limiting teaching to mini lessons is also a way to get students writing for longer periods of time. Practise makes perfect after all.

  • Mini Lessons – Keep them Small

    There has been an increased awareness of the ‘Mini-Lesson’. We’re using them in Maths – otherwise known as ‘hotspots’; we’re using them in reading, and more commonly in writing. They are great ways of quickly conveying information, getting student buy in, addressing noticeable gaps in knowledge, and moving on.

    What Are Mini Lessons?

    A while back I noticed that students had an issue in writing where their sentences went on and on and on without a full stop or a comma and often including more than one idea and the never ending storytelling that never allowed me to breathe while reading it. Much like that.

    So I addressed it. We discussed sentences over the course of a week, spending 10 minutes at the start of the lesson each day discussing ideas, and including one idea at a time. Students helped me edit examples and decide where full stops should go. We even got into how to combine two ideas together. Student buy-in was high, and there was a noticeable improvement almost immediately.

    An example of what to cover in a mini-lesson
    An example of what to cover in a mini-lesson

    The problem

    The common issue with the Mini Lesson lies in the teacher. As a method, they are great, because student attention isn’t overworked, and they focus on one point.

    However, being the great orators many of us are, and our passion for the act of ‘teaching’, Teachers often make the mini lesson less mini, and more lecture. Student interest wains, and their attention wanders elsewhere. It can go from a snappy, quick, and invigorating lesson, to a morbid affair with boredom, purely because of the length of time focussed on one thing.

    The reality is, a good Mini lesson should have one key point that is the focus, and should be limited to 10 minutes. 15 at a push. But certainly no longer.

    The solution

    There are a number of things that you can do to avoid going overtime.

    1. Make sure you only have one focus for the lesson. Additional points, or sidetracks will only add to the length of time, and can potentially confuse the point of the Mini lesson for the students. If other issues come up that don’t fit into your key focus, but need to be a focus in the future, then put it in the plan for tomorrow. There is always another day.
    2. Set a timer. Let the student’s know what it’s for and they’ll keep you accountable to it. Believe me. As soon as the buzzer sounds, then that’s time up. Eventually however, this can become tedious, and may become a distraction for students. But it’s a viable solution if you’re learning how long you have in 10 minutes, and how much you can cover in the allotted time for the Mini lesson.
    3. Watch other teachers perform mini lessons can not only give you inspiration, but can also allow you to see for yourself how much they get through, and what time they allow for it. You can monitor the clock and see when ten minutes is up.

     

  • Growth Mindset: What’s it all about

    A lot has been made of this ‘new’ buzzword that is hitting our education shores. Any word with ‘Mind’ in it seems to be linked to being better as an individual. Growth mindset has been around for a while though. But what is it?

    What is Growth Mindset?

    Growth Mindset is the internal thoughts that you can always get better. Whether it is something you are good at, or something that you struggle with, through practise, hard work, training, or just sheer determination, we can all make improvements and progress towards whatever we set our minds to.

    The alternative is a ‘fixed mindset’. This thought pattern suggests to yourself that you are good at some things and excel at them, but are not good in other things. A common area that fixed mindset is applied to is creativity. “I don’t have a single creative bone in my body” is exclaimed by those who are ‘less practised’ in this area. They’ve used this as an excuse not to get better, or not to work hard and try to improve on their lack of natural ability.

    In terms of education, having a growth mindset is incredibly important. It provides students with the challenge to always do their best, and if at first they don’t succeed, then try, and try again.

    Our brains are always making connections, especially growing up; making the growth mindset at school even more important. Having the mindset that these connections can not only be made in varying ways with varying skills and abilities, but that they can be strengthened and developed, enables students to grow as individuals and as learners, and give things a go.

    I found this video incredibly helpful when looking into Growth Mindset.

     

    In Practise

    One way in which I use this mindset in my class every day is through the use of Daily 5. I regularly encourage students by using the key principle of ‘The only way to get better at reading is to practise reading’. The old adage of ‘practise makes perfect’ rings out loud and proud, and provides the students with motivation to strive for excellence. Whilst I haven’t expressly ‘taught’ the growth mindset, it is definitely an ingrained philosophy in my classroom; in the way that learning is encouraged, they way I teach, and the learning activities we do.

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  • No to League Tables

    “Have we introduced league tables? No.” Hekia Parata said this in a meeting at a school as she rattled off a number of things ‘scaremongers’ had said would happen in regards to GERM. This included things like Performance Pay. This statement on league tables is also in addition to this article from 2012.

    League tables: Hekia won’t take on teachers

    Obviously however, John Key wants them; and so he gets the media to do the dirty work, even encouraging them to do so in the aforementioned article.

    And respond they did. Whilst Fairfax’s “School Report” has been out for a while now, it is now being advertised, with words like ‘rate’, and ‘compare’ being bandied about like red paint on a fire engine.

    Why are teachers and schools so against league tables?

    David Shearer (Labour Leader at the time) touched on a few of the concerns in the earlier article. It goes further than just what he addressed though.

    Take a small school. Decile 1 or 2. Even 3. Lots of poverty in its community. Health issues due to poor living conditions, damp houses and cold, harsh nights in the middle of winter. Families split, both parents working full time to break even. The kids love the school.

    The teachers work hard. They’re trained. They undertake PLD. They genuinely care and want the best for the kids; not just the ones in their class, but all tamariki that come through their gates. There are major success stories, but are generally few and far between.

    The teachers are good teachers. Children who have started life on the back foot and who are facing continual struggle in life are making amazing progress each year, but are still “below” the untrialled and untested National Standards that this government hangs its hat on. The children wouldn’t make the same progress if the teachers weren’t any good.

    But along comes Fairfax media and their “School Report”. It shows that this school is ‘failing’ compared with School B down the road (who may or may not be inflating their National Standards results). Their teachers may be good, but also might have a community where students aren’t walking down struggle street, and achieving at school is the number one priority. The amount of progress that they have to make is minimal in comparison, and their teaching staff may be able to relax and not work as hard in order to maintain certain results.

    Parents of the first school compare and begin to buy into the league table problem. They leave school A with its hard working teachers, whose progress and dedication to their students is unrivalled, yet don’t show up in the broad umbrella of “below”, and go to greener pastures.

    School A loses students. The roll decreases. They lose a classroom and a teaching position. Eventually another leaves, and another. The school gets smaller, and the results don’t change, to the point where it is forced to merge or become one of the government’s heralded Charter Schools.

    This is why league tables are dangerous. They compare apples with shackles, oranges with hairties. They force assumption that schools with poor results have bad teachers, when quite often the opposite is true. A lot of teachers would simple cave under pressure, give up, or be eaten alive in School A with the requirements of it’s akonga. They would equally struggle to not only raise the achievement level, but just maintain it.

    So when I see an advertisement to compare schools while I’m reading the latest news, I get annoyed. Frustrated. Because I am a good teacher. I work hard for my students and my students work hard for me. They are a challenge, but the hard work brings reward. They make phenomenal progress each year while they are in the shadows of elephants in the room that no one wants to acknowledge; but these improvements, no matter how amazing, fail to show up in a simple pie graph showing banded results. Some of these students will go from a reading age of 5 and a half, to a reading age of 7; yet because they are 8, are still below.

    The public compares schools. School A must be rubbish, with dead-beat teachers. I don’t want my child going there.

    Thanks Fairfax. I’m sure John Key appreciates the dirty work you’ve gone and done for him.

     

  • Ministry website ‘gold-plated’?

    The Ministry of Education has spent a whopping $1.2million on a new website.

    Source: Ministry website ‘gold-plated’?

    I am dumbfounded. Absolutely speechless.

    For once, two of my main passions collide for the first time since designing and building our school website. I worked on this in the school holidays, in my own time, and built it with content from the school’s previous website’s content.

    $1.2 million. It’s $1,200,000. That is a lot of dollars being spent for a website, which in technology terms will be requiring a re-design in 4 years time, is a ridiculous amount.

    That’s $300,000 for each year of it’s life.

    Being a web developer of a variety of small websites, I know the approximate costs of doing this. To get some idea around website costings for large websites, I went and looked up approximate costs for large website designs, for which Education.govt.nz would fit into.

    Executionists suggests that large websites with all the costs can range in the area of $14,700 – $29,900. Being from a US based website, we can assume that this translates to $23,000 – $46,000 per year.

    While this is based on approximate costs, it certainly isn’t anywhere in the region of $1.2 million, or even $300,000.

    Silverstripe is the CMS (Content Management System) that is being used as the backend of the website. This is a Wellington based company, who I have had some minor dealings with (friends of friends helped develop it). Its incredibly flexible, but a lot of the management is done for the user. Silverstripe do partner with developers to help build web solutions. However, it is also Open Source, meaning the Government doesn’t NEED to pay a cent for it.  In 2013, the Government teamed up with Silverstripe as a ‘common web platform’, because it would save money by encouraging the use of Silverstripe for all Government websites, which suggested that 10-15 government  websites were built or redesigned each year.

    The Government has even set up a demo of Silverstripe so that Government agencies can have a play around. Actually, anyone can have a play around. I quite easily signed in and could begin building a demo site. It was easy to see how the Ministry of Education website was developed on from here.

    So, if this is the case, if the back end is already sorted out into default templates; then how did this website end up costing $1.2million?

    Refresh

    There is no doubt the old Ministry of Education website was due for a rebuild. The old site was developed in 2008, and I’m surprised it has taken this long for it to be re-built. Though, if it has a $1.2 million price tag, maybe it is understandable.

    It frustrates me that all that is said in defense of this spending is that the previous website was old and tired and required a rebuild, with new functionality and innovations that is required for our learners, whanau, and teachers in today’s online environment.

    But, at the end of the day, the money spent is exorbitant amount in any terms. It makes me wonder if the Government even “shopped” around for its development. Surely there are a variety of design companies out there that would do as good a job, including all the “functionality”, for a much more reasonable price tag. No one is saying it didn’t require a rebuild. What is being said is that it doesn’t need a whopping $1.2 million spent on a rebuild.

    Historic Trend

    Wait a minute. Haven’t we already seen this? Extreme expenditure on seemingly mundane things?

    Of course we have. This Government has built a reputation for burning holes in it’s pockets.

    Take the case of the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment. In June, it emerged that $70,000 (not previously stated $24,000) was spent on a stone sign out the front of the building. In either case, $24,000 is a ridiculous amount.

    Fast forward to June 17, and it emerges that MBIE spends a whopping $140,000 on a curvy screen that is now in their reception area in the head office in Wellington. This is to go along with a $75,000 reception desk.

    It doesn’t just stop there though. Let’s take a look at the $26,000,000 spent on the new flag that ‘no one’ wants. I say no-one, but I may be exaggerating – much like the expenditure of this Government.

    Meanwhile, children starve, nurses go without a pay-rise, and miners face an improper burial. No amount of money should hold these things back from happening, yet picking and choosing seems to be all that happens.

    As Chris Hipkins and others have put it; this money could be better spent on other things. That’s not to say that the website shouldn’t have been rebuilt; but that this could have been carried out without spending such an unreasonable amount of money.

     

  • Whoopshhhhh!

    In relation to:

    • Hon. Hekia Parata – Minister of Education: Pictured Article.

  • The Teaching Conundrum

    Part 1

    Part 2

    In relation to:

  • KFC Charter School

    In relation to: