UNLEASH
ED
Last year’s Bingo was such a success that it seemed only right that a new edition for 2018 comes out. Of course, these are largely generic, and last year’s sheet is still playable. Remember, this is nothing more but to have a bit of fun to make those first days back at work a little more bearable. So here it is, the annual Teacher’s Back to School Bingo.
Have fun as you go back to school!
Thanks Russell for standing up for Teachers everywhere.
This has been an issue that I believe is one of the biggest shifts in society in the last 20 years. As parents get so wrapped up in their own lives, their career, their jobs, the things they love to do, children get left by the wayside. They become an afterthought, a burden, even an inconvenience to some parents continuing their self absorbed lives.
Don’t get me wrong. This is certainly not all parents, and not all children. But increasingly so, there are so many things that schools are picking up the slack on that traditionally have been parents and families roles. This puts additional pressures on schools, teachers, staff, resourcing and funding that are far in a way more than should be expected under the umbrella of ‘education’.
Parents are the first teachers.
Unfortunately, there are an increasing number who leave the basics up to the school to do. We’ve heard reports of children turning up to school in nappies and are not toilet trained, let alone know the alphabet or numbers. We’ve heard in the news lately how parents are expecting teachers to teach about social etiquette, social skills, and other things that have traditionally been the role of society.
Original article: Principal bemoans threats to schools
A Dunedin school principal is increasingly concerned by the social expectations imposed on schools, and says some parents need to take more responsibility for their children’s actions.
During the recent King’s High School senior prizegiving, rector Dan Reddiex praised his present cohort of pupils for their outstanding achievements during the year, but went on to express deep concern about the future of education in New Zealand.
He said the school’s ability to educate boys “in mind and in heart” was under threat.
“Alarmingly, in my view, we are increasingly becoming as much a social institution as we are an educational one.
“The expectations imposed upon us now as a school, to attend to and reverse the ills of our society, are completely unrealistic and they are beyond our resource capability.
“It seems now, the first questions about the inappropriate text message sent by a school-age person in the weekend, or the under-age young person attending a party that goes wrong, are not ‘what were the parents thinking and what will the parents do about it’?
“The first questions now are ‘what school does the young person go to and what is the school going to do about it’? And we’ve seen that in the national media this year…
“I believe it’s not our parent body who thrust these expectations upon us. It’s the media and it’s increasingly a broader societal expectation.”
Mr Reddiex said the lines of demarcation between parental and school responsibility and accountability had been “completely obliterated”.
Following the prizegiving, he told the Otago Daily Times there was an expectation that schools would, in part, fulfil the function that historically had been the role of a parent.
“The vast majority of parents are doing a fantastic job, but there are some who need to take more responsibility for their child’s behaviour.”
Otago Secondary Principals’ Association secretary Gordon Wilson said it was a widespread issue.
“Schools are under increasing pressure to help the community solve some of its issues, and often schools are seen as the last place where some of these issues can be addressed.
“That’s not where schools should be. A lot of these issues that schools are being asked to deal with are not internal issues. They are issues that have arisen from outside the school.”
Source: https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/principal-bemoans-threats-schools
Care provider. Call centre operator. Kitchen hand. Negotiator. Detective. Judge. Medic. Counsellor. Social worker. Psychologist. Personal trainer. Caretaker. Cleaner. Don’t get me started on the numerous things that teachers have to do each and every day. That’s even before they have to teach a class full of students some Maths, English, Science, Technology, Music, Art, Dance, Drama, Social Science, and Languages.
Original article: New Zealand schools need to teach more life skills.
Kiwi parents want more life skills taught in school, a new survey shows.
From cyber safety to sex education and manners, two-thirds of parents believed it was the responsibility of teachers to impart lessons traditionally handled at home, according to a survey of 500 New Zealand families.
Ethnicity played a role in what parents regarded as important in a public education, with Asian parents more likely to want schools to handle the teaching of life skills.
Parents perceived schools’ responsibilities increased in secondary school.
But Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) junior vice president Melanie Webber said that while teachers were role models, it would be difficult to fit more life skills into the curriculum.
The study by the Australian Scholarships Group (ASG) and Melbourne’s Monash University found a “social shift” away from valuing scholastic success towards a more holistic education, ASG chief executive John Velegrinis said.
“There are increasingly blurred lines as to where (teacher responsibility begins and ends as parents’ perceptions of their traditional roles and responsibilities change.”
Asian amilies viewed education more traditionally and set higher standards for their children’s academic success than Pākehā parents.
About 92 per cent believed a degree would help their child achieve their ambitions and 38 per cent did not think their child could be distracted from learning.
Just 18 per cent of Pākehā families felt that way about distractions and only 66 per cent said they set “high standards” for their child’s education or agreed a degree was important to their success.
Asian families overwhelmingly supported schools teaching more about social skills and public behaviour (91 and 88 per cent respectively), with about 42 per cent of Pākehā parents on board.
Christchurch mother Michele Fantham said she wanted daughters Bella, 10, and Neve, 6, to be taught social skills and financial literacy at their school, Fernside.
“I think the curriculum is pretty cram-packed full of lots of things the school or Ministry (of Education) think are really important that are just not going to benefit them in the real world.”
She was concerned technology impacted children’s ability to “use manners and communicate properly”. She was among a third of Kiwi parents who believed teaching cyber safety was a school’s responsibility.
Original article: Palmerston North Herald Return of Free Schooling
A cost-free education is being trialled at a Palmerston North school – every child’s stationery, sports fees and class trips will be covered for 2018.
Parents will be able to deliver their child to the front gate on day one and expect a uniform to be their only cost for the year, Ross Intermediate School principal Wayne Jenkins said.
“We’ll literally be taking our till and eftpos out of the school.”
The school is happy to accept donations, but will not ask for them.
“We’re a decile-six school, so we have a real cross-section of society – families that are really struggling through to families that are not.
“It’s about access and removing barriers and kids taking part. We’re not doing this by cutting anything. We’re not reducing any curriculum or other educational services.”
It costs families about $38,000 to put a child through 13 years of school in New Zealand, the Australian Scholarship Group estimates. That’s more than $2900 a year.
For families with more than one child, those costs can be significant.
“It means the kids don’t have to worry about going home and asking for money. Kids shouldn’t be burdened with financial worries, they should just be able to learn,” Jenkins said.
“Parents are saying ‘this is really great’. It’s certainly been appreciated.”
School camp is the only cost the school does not have covered, but it was likely fundraising would for that.
The scheme is planned as a one-year trial and has been paid for by reducing administrative costs.
Jenkins said the school was spending more on staff time, stationery, printing and stamps to invoice parents for costs than they were receiving.
Economies of scale were at work and no jobs were lost, but the approach might not work for smaller schools.
Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/98955099/palmerston-north-herald-return-of-free-schooling
Original article: Survey says teachers’ mental health declining
A long list of anxieties — around school budget cuts, bullying, coarse political discourse and the shaky status of immigrant students — is taking a toll on teachers, a new survey shows, with more educators now saying their mental health is suffering than just two years earlier.
More than half of the educators point out their mental health is an issue: 58% said their mental health was “not good” for seven or more of the previous 30 days. A similar survey in 2015 found just 34% of respondents felt the same.
The findings are being released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers and the Badass Teachers Association, a national grass-roots organization focused on social justice.
Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ federation, said that over the past few years, teachers have actually swapped one kind of stress — an intense national focus on standardized skills tests — for another.
After President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Weingarten said, many observers believed that educator stress would ease. “You would have expected the numbers to go down, not up,” she said.
But stress over the coarseness of our political debate, she said, has become a big dilemma for schools, she said.
“This notion that being coarse and tough and enabling hate is OK is highly, highly, highly disruptive and problematic in schools and goes completely against what parents and teachers know is absolutely important for kids, which is a safe and welcoming environment,” Weingarten said in an interview.
The survey of nearly 5,000 educators, most of them responding online, found that the vast majority — 86% — did not feel respected by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has made expanding private- and charter-school choice a centerpiece of her career.
Over the last few months, I’ve found a way of grouping my student’s writing that makes it quick to moderate my own judgments of each sample.
It started off as a quick few post-it notes, but me being me, decided it needed a bit more setup and design for it to be more meaningful.
Below are photos of the labels having been set up on my floor, and the resulting samples placed within each sub-level. This allows you to read, place, and check that what you have at one level is roughly similar to other pieces of writing that are in that sub-level.
Since the coalition bringing Labour, NZ First and Greens into power, teachers have been rejoicing. Especially primary teachers.
Why?
Well, early on in the election campaign, Labour outlined it’s distaste for National Standards and signalled their intention to remove them from our education system. Something that teachers across the country had been asking for since their inception in 2009.
Today Labour announced through the new Education Minister Chris Hipkins that it would keep it’s promise and scrap National Standards.
Inevitably, Nikki Kaye was quick to reply and outlined a number of reasons why it was a mistake to get rid of the Standards.
And while jubilation is all around, and teachers have a new bounce in their step as they skip around the school playground while on duty, there is a small part of us that is left in wonder, concern, and nervousness as to what we’re now meant to be doing now.
See, there is now a generation of teachers who have only ever taught with National Standards standing behind them with a whip and directing every decision they ever made in their planning, their teaching, their practise, and their career. Put simply, many of us know no different. We simply weren’t teachers before National Standards hijacked our education system.
So many of us are left wondering, what can we do now? What are we meant to do? Obviously we still have our assessments, but how often do we need to actually do these now? How much do I need to change in my reports that go out at the end of this term? Some are even asking ‘What do we replace them with?’
But here’s the thing.
It’s all false. A complete fabrication. It’s a fallacy and has been from the start.
Here’s what I mean.
National Standards were pushed out on schools. No beta testing. No ironing out the kinks. Schools had to re-build their charters, teaching programmes and assessment schedules to fit them in. Up until then, schools had been surviving quite well on the assessments they had beforehand. Reporting to parents may not have been as regular as twice a year, but no doubt would have commented on student ability, academic or otherwise, and would have made mention of progress rather than achievement.
The reality is we didn’t need them. We don’t need them. And now we don’t have them.
We do not need to replace them with anything.
When you take a worm out of an apple, you don’t go putting a caterpillar in it’s place.
While they are gone in the blink of an eye, as signalled by Chris Hipkins today, this doesn’t mean it won’t take a significant amount of time and energy to adjust, to rebuild, and to get used to life without the standards. Lots of policies need to be re-written, new systems designed in each school (as best they see fit for their community) and training and support provided for teachers who know no other way (or can’t remember a time without), such is the entrenchment of National Standards on their career to date. This is a huge undertaking, and should not be taken lightly. For my own school, a big job that will need to be done is to return to a mid and end of year report schedule for our Year 1 to 3 students, and of course, a re-design of the school reporting template. These are just two of the jobs that are going to require time and energy to roll out for our school. Multiply this by the total number of schools across the country, and suddenly there’s a better understanding of the task ahead for us.
The bonus of course is that it is hard and difficult work that teachers will be only too happy to do. Some are chomping at the bit to get their hands dirty stripping out any mention of National Standards in their schools. Some are a bit more relaxed. But I’ve yet to see a teacher since this announcement who hasn’t felt like a large and heavy burden taken off their shoulders and who haven’t breathed a big sigh of relief.
Original article: Now what? Recovering from the Standards Era
When the coalition government was confirmed last week, I joined with many of my teacher colleagues in a frenzy of jubilation and relief as we comprehended the significance of this outcome on the future of NZ education. One campaign promise, in particular – the abolishment of National Standards policy that has plagued schools since its introduction in 2009.
But after the initial elation and resultant hope that those in education experienced upon hearing the appointment of the new Minister, the reality of what this might mean for many teachers is beginning to creep in. There is little debate among educators that the Standards were having a significant and detrimental impact on our students. Furthermore, teachers were faced with the enormous workloads, over-testing and pressures to ‘get kids’ to the standard which, in turn, were sucking the joy out of teaching at all levels. However, at the signing of the coalition, and the confirmation from Minister Hipkins that the standards were to be abolished, so began the rhetoric about what these might be ‘replaced with’.
For those who have taught before the Standards era, there will be the vague recollection of the introduction of the New Zealand School Curriculum Document in 2007. This document signaled an approach to education that reflected international evidence of the need for integrated and holistic opportunities learning opportunities for our students. At its inception, it was lauded as a world-leader, innovative and reflective of the type of ‘21st Century learning’ that our future students were facing.
From this document came tools for teachers to specifically measure the progress of their students in the key areas of literacy and numeracy. The Literacy Learning Progressions, a document that describes specific literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students draw on in order to meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum; and the Number Framework enabling teachers to clearly establish their students’ current knowledge and mathematical skills, and determine the next point for them in progressing this knowledge and skill base.
With the arrival of the National Standards, so too was the well-orchestrated public perception that up until their arrival, teachers were not actively involved in the assessment and documentation of their students’ learning progress. That they were almost ‘winging it’ when it came to knowing what current skills and knowledge their students had, and were not actively planning for and responding to these in order to progress this knowledge and skill base. These Standards were clearly needed.
The vision, values and other learning areas of the New Zealand School Curriculum subsequently took a back seat. Literacy and numeracy were elevated to being the key focus of learning that teachers needed to focus on in order to demonstrate that they were doing their job, and that they could progress students to a stated benchmark.
The predicted side effects of the arrival of the National Standards also came to pass. Reduction in time spent on learning areas such as the Arts, Health & PE, Sciences and Social Sciences. Reduction in opportunities for students to be creative, innovative and develop problem-solving skills and independent thought. Reduction in time available for those ‘teachable moments’. And teacher well-being impacted negatively, with excellent practitioners leaving the classroom.
I always pay attention to those that stand up for educators, education, schools, and teachers.
The likes of Bryan Bruce, Welby Ings, Nigel Latta , Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg and Kelvin Smythe all comment on education in support of teachers, and against GERM, even though they don’t have to. I’m not here saying that these are the only ones that do, or that I mention them because their views happen to agree with mine, or mine with theirs, or that their views lie heavily in my favour as a teacher.
It’s more because what they say is down to earth, common sense, and full of truth. The weight of experience cannot be ignored either.
Another advocate is Martin Thrupp, who has long expressed his disdain for National Standards.
His latest article in reaction to the axing of National Standards raises so many good points that I have no other choice but bring them to your attention.
Thanks Martin.
Original Article: End of National Standards
I have been asked to reflect on the end of National Standards and, this being the blog of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE), I thought I would focus particularly on how researchers and academics contributed to the debates over the Standards and to how they are now being thrown out.
I will be referring in places to my recently-published book, with Bob Lingard, Meg Maguire, and David Hursh, entitled The Search for Better Educational Standards: A Cautionary Tale. This book provides a rich account of the rise and enactment of the National Standards policy from multiple perspectives. The book also looks at Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori, the Māori-medium assessment system that accompanied the National Standards.
To me, one of the most interesting things about the 2017 general election and National Standards was the National party’s pre-election announcement that it would be further reinforcing the Standards. With the new ‘National Standards Plus’, the reporting of a child’s National Standards data would go online so that parents could track their child’s achievement as they were assessed.
It is tempting to say that National were already in a hole with this policy and should have stopped digging. There had been numerous signs in recent years that that the policy was in trouble (see A Cautionary Tale, chapter 9). Indeed, just the week before ‘National Standards Plus’ was announced, a feature-length article in the New Zealand Herald had pointed out numerous difficulties with the existing form of National Standards.
But the National-led Government had become fully invested in the National Standards policy. When it was first announced in 2007, it was National’s big idea for education – the ‘cornerstone’ of its education policy. Over the 10 years that followed, the Government had dismissed all criticisms. Any late turning back would be a sign of weakness, and instead the National party wanted to plough on with this truly awful project that had already became a world-class example of how not to make education policy.
As shown repeatedly throughout A Cautionary Tale, the National Standards were too driven by political rather than educational considerations. As Bob Lingard says in his reflection (A Cautionary Tale, chapter 10):
“The analysis seems to demonstrate that instead of evidence-informed policy what we have here is more a case of policy-based evidence, with the political in the National Standards very much overriding research evidence and professional knowledges, to the detriment of the reform”.
Despite the National-led Government’s adherence to the National Standards, researchers and academics certainly pushed back against the policy. I emphasise this because a recent posting on Diane Ravitch’s popular blog quotes Australian Phil Cullen handing out bouquets and brickbats around the National Standards being thrown out. While I agree with much of what Cullen has to say, the only mention academics get are as “schooliolist academic know-alls”. It is as if we contributed nothing to the campaign against National Standards.
In fact, researchers and academics did a great deal in this space! A particular highlight for me was the 2012 open letter signed by over 100 education academics against the public release of the National Standards data. But there were countless other instances of academics and researchers opposing the National Standards, either publicly or more behind the scenes. Opinion pieces, articles, TV debates, radio, public meetings, meetings behind closed doors – and all the rest of it. Chapter 8 of A Cautionary Tale, about the politics of research, gives numerous examples.
A number of us also did empirical research that helped to explain how the National Standards were a problem (see A Cautionary Tale, especially chapters 3, 5 and 7). And, of course, New Zealand researchers are part of international networks that are working on the same concerns about high-stakes assessment in other countries (see A Cautionary Tale, especially chapters 2 and 10). Note to Cullen: without doubt, some of the best work in this area is coming from Australian academics.
It is true that some researchers and academics chose to support the National-led Government’s National Standards policies (A Cautionary Tale, chapter 8). This happened for various reasons that may have included the researchers’ educational views, their political beliefs, the political pressures that were upon them or their organisations, and the advantages that came with supporting the policy. It may have also involved a judgement that it was better to be ‘inside the tent’ and have influence than be on the outside.
But this range of viewpoints among researchers and academics is no different than was seen within the teaching profession and amongst principals, where National Standards also had supporters. Indeed, a central problem that the new Labour-led Government will have to grapple with, having removed the National Standards policy, is doing away with the data-driven disposition amongst teachers and principals that grew along with the policy under the previous Government.
Source: https://nzareblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/end-of-national-standards/