Tag: teaching

  • The Foundation: An Introduction

    A man began building a multi-storey high rise in the centre of the city. He worked furiously away at his dream building. He wanted a glorious penthouse at the top, with panoramic views overlooking the city. Luxurious furnishings and fittings, the gold standard in design and comfort. He began at the top, laying tiles over the top of each other and then raising them up on a slope so the rain could run off. He built the penthouse ceiling under it, before constructing the walls, windows and doors. Before long he was carpeting the floor and installing the plumbing for the grand en-suite. The patio decking stretched out from the large living area. He furnished the penthouse with expansive sofas and designer tables. The kitchenette had the latest in appliances and the reflection off the white marble was near blinding. It was a perfect example of a presidential penthouse.

    Then came the moment to build the floor below. He hired cranes to get the penthouse lifted, and began building the walls down. Each additional floor was the same, lifting the top higher and building the floor below. Eventually he had the desired number of floors and was able to start laying down the foundation.

    Something tells me that this is a slightly more difficult way of building. Needless to say that by the time he had finished, repairs and damages to the existing penthouse were extensive. The marble slabs each had a large winding crack through the middle of them, and many of the windows had long become shards. Several roof tiles fell to the ground with each subsequent level of the build.

    A teacher walked into the classroom on the first day of the year and stood at the front. He began teaching his dream lesson that was designed to fill his students with knowledge, awe, and excitement. It was engaging, collaborative and included everything a perfect lesson for learning needs…

    Next Part:

    The Foundation: Relationships Matter

     

  • It’s Time to Teach Back Home

    Great to see the NZ Government finally getting on board with the latest NZEI slogan “It’s time”.

    Of course, they tried to be cool with it, and put in a New Zullund accent in the spelling – “It’s Toym to Come Home and Teach in New Zealand”.

    In the latest effort from the Government to try and lure teachers back home, the first website has been launched.

    https://teachbackhome.co.nz

    The fancy graphics and videos can’t have been cheap.

    The site goes to outline the incentives to come back to New Zealand and teach.

    • Up to $7000 relocation grant (limited number)
    • Three agencies to assist you finding a job “…in Auckland” (and in other parts of the country!).
    • A child willing to give you their lunch (Seriously!?)
    • Videos of teaching happening in New Zealand.
    • The lack of security checks for weapons in New Zealand schools (Seriously!?).
    • A list of a few latest job listings from the Education Gazette and a link to take you there to see more.
    • A list of registration requirements before you can teach in New Zealand.

    Yes there is a degree of humour in the recruitment drive – but it treats it like a bit of a joke, which isn’t entirely ideal.
    But at what cost? Just looking through the site, there are several areas where the $10 million dollars for recruitment is being spent

    • Website design – probably exorbitant given the visual media costs and prior history of prices paid for websites by the Government.
    • $5K and $7K relocation grants
    • Ministry of Education “contracted recruitment agents”.
    • Several student story videos and other video media.

    However; the grants were already in place PRIOR to the $10million dollar scheme, as per this article: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11981974

    Of course, there are other costs involved as well, and it speaks volumes when those that have returned to teach here are then let down by the system and have since quit! Not exactly the best advertisement.

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11924965

    I certainly hope that this isn’t the only plan to address the teacher shortage. Hopefully it’s low down on the initiatives.

    It’s time to start valuing the Teaching profession – make it a viable career, with appealing pay and career prospects. Reduce the workload and motivate the current teachers enough to tell the world about what an awesome job they have, rather than how tough it is at the moment. Don’t offer us a child’s lunch or suggest that not having to walk through a metal detector is what makes our education system the best in the world.

  • Primary school Science results poor

    Teachers lack the confidence and resources to deliver meaningful science lessons, an expert says.

    A leading science educator is shocked by a study that shows just 20 percent of children in their final year of primary and intermediate schooling are reaching the expected level of the curriculum in science.

    The National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement said the figure for children in Year 8 was the worst of any subject in the curriculum.

    The founder and chief executive of science education trust, the House of Science, Chris Duggan said the result had huge implications for society.

    “It’s shocking and I’m sure that there’ll be a lot of people very disappointed,” she said.

    “The Year 4s have improved slightly but the Year 8s it’s still really, really bad. To look at that and see that 80 percent of our Year 8s are going into secondary school with insufficient science to allow secondary teachers to start teaching where they should, that’s a real worry.”

    Ms Duggan said many years ago science teaching was well-supported with government-funded science advisors who worked with primary school teachers and specialist resources for use in science lessons.

    But that support had not been available for a long time and in addition the introduction of the national standards in reading, writing and maths had sidelined other areas of the curriculum, including science, she said.

    Read full article here.

     

  • Understanding the Teacher Crisis

    The Side Eye: Everything to Everyone – understanding the teacher crisis:

    A unique take on the Teacher Crisis put into a visual narrative succinctly and accurately by Toby Morris.

    Be sure to check it out over at The Spinoff – The Side Eye.

    For the rest of the story, please head over to the original article here.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/the-side-eye/03-12-2018/the-side-eye-everything-to-everyone-understanding-the-teacher-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR04F0_Wj102NUYIFSY1Th7SJhbX99I83ZLJJwidKkSEwdKfAnvlkLkycqY

  • Trainee teachers share aspirations, apprehensions | Stuff.co.nz

    Alexia Cochrane has wanted to be a teacher since she was five years old.

    Dedication, numerous part-time jobs and a $65,000 student loan helped get her through years of study and within reach of teaching her own class of young minds.

    But like many aspiring teachers, the 22-year-old Waikato University master’s student says recent teacher strikes and talk of a crisis in education have her questioning her career path.

    “I’ve met people with such a passion and drive for teaching who, once they go teaching, say they may only last three or four years,” Cochrane said.

    “That’s devastating, because kids deserve people who are fully invested in them.”

    “Teaching as a profession seems to be undervalued and I keep asking myself how long can I keep defending my passion?”

    Source: Trainee teachers share aspirations, apprehensions | Stuff.co.nz

  • Over the Bridges and around the Roundabouts

    Hekia did a U-Turn on class sizes back in 2012 when she announced National would be increasing class sizes.

    John Key himself stated that he sent his children to private schools because of the smaller class sizes.

    Yesterday Simon Bridges sent National back down the road, but this time after heading around the round-about and back in the complete opposite direction to his former leaders. In fact, it appears that he’s even driving on the wrong side of the road.

    “In a fiery speech to the National Party annual conference on Sunday, Bridges promised National would increase the number of primary teachers to reduce class sizes and give kids “more teacher time”.

    “With the right education we can overcome the challenges that some children face purely because of the circumstances they were born into,” he said.”

    Stuff.co.nz – https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/105832210/smaller-class-sizes-under-nats-says-simon-bridges-in-major-speech

    It has left many of us scratching our heads, dazed and confused. Isn’t this what Teacher’s all around the country were asking for back when National was in power?

    It would seem easy to make such promises when you’re not held to account, or when you’re not in driving seat or in charge of the books.

    Of course, this gives Labour the mandate to lower class sizes and not have any opposition to such a proposal – least of all from the teachers around the country, backed (I’m assuming) by Simon Bridges himself.

    It won’t happen though. And here’s why.

    To lower the class sizes there are several things that need to change.

    Either there needs to be more teachers. Or there needs to be less children.

    Let’s assume that infanticide won’t go down well in 21st Century New Zealand, the government is forced into the first option.

    Please be advised: There are a lot of links to news articles in this article. I encourage you to read each article in full to gain a better perspective on the issues at hand. There is more than just one factor in all of this, and having a full picture of it all will assist you in understanding the complex array of issues raised.

    As I write this article, NZEI have just released a damning report regarding student numbers and the teaching profession, saying a crisis will hit by 2030 – a date that I bring up later on in this article as well!

    Point one.

    We’re already losing teachers by the bucket load. Earlier this year it was reported that half… HALF of all high school teachers quit within the first five years. That means that every five years we have to replace half of all the high school teachers. And that’s just to maintain the current teaching workforce. Similarly, 17% of all new ECE and primary graduates EXPECTED to leave within the first five years into their careers.

    “They often leave because they are burnt out by the demands of teaching, an increasingly narrow and prescriptive curriculum, and by policy initiatives that promise much, deliver very little, and are quickly replaced by some “new” policy that is equally ineffective and short term.”

    – Stephen May, January 22 2018

    Point two.

    We’re losing not only good teachers, but experienced ones, by the bucket load. I’m not talking about teachers with 10 years of experience. We’re talking deputy principals with 30 years of experience. We’re talking teachers with 23 years of experience as a principal, and 40 years in teaching. That kind of experience doesn’t just grow on trees. Simon Bridges was two when this principal BEGAN teaching.

    Point three.

    To try and address the dwindling education workforce, the National government sent an ambulance to the bottom of the cliff. From the ambulance came the idea that we’d just train new teachers, rather than trying to stem the flow of valuable, dedicated, and experienced teachers jumping from the top of the cliff face.  We all know why they did this – paying beginning teachers is a lot cheaper than continuing to pay experienced ones. But needless to say, the results are as expected.

    The course was introduced and graduates rushed through in record time. I trained for four years to become a teacher, and I was nowhere near prepared enough for the daily rigors of school life. Furthermore, while the introduction of this was (in my opinion) a good one with a step in the right direction towards ongoing apprenticeship where teaching students are placed in a school and get used to “the grind” with some real-life practice, it only had room for 20 applicants in it’s first year in 2016.

    Nine MILLION dollars was injected into “a raft of new initiatives” to help address the shortage in 2016. Money well spent by Hekia and the National Government? I guess proof will be in the pudding.

    On top of this, the numbers getting trained are subsiding as well. I’m not at all surprised. The number going through education training at the moment is a third of what it was when I trained in 2010. Continuing that trend we will no longer be training any new teachers by 2034. Poor pay, high stress, and better career options in other professions are being blamed.

    In addition to this, we’re not even getting the brightest or best for the profession. Just read this article from 2016 which states that graduates accepted into teaching degrees were some of the lowest scores across ALL bachelor programmes. It also explains saying that “The number of entrants into teaching has dropped by 25 per cent in five years, putting pressure on universities to accept even lower entry grades to maintain numbers”.

    Point four.

    So as we can see, getting more teacher’s isn’t working. Why not?

    Well – as a teacher, I’m certainly not recommending that anyone choose the career over any other. I’ve heard it on good authority that at least one local principal discouraged his own children from becoming teachers, stating that it isn’t like it used to be when he was a teacher while raising them in the 90’s.

    As stated: Poor pay, high stress, and better career options exist out there for anyone wanting to earn a living in this world. We’ve already seen a teacher shortage in Auckland, not just because of the lack of teachers, but because of the cost of living, the cost of housing (renting or owning) in Auckland (and elsewhere around the country) is beyond their means. Even those that moved in to try and plug the gap are now looking at leaving.

    Put simply, Teaching is no longer valued as it once was. And it is a detriment to our society.

    So how do we show value in Teaching as a profession? Well. Pay is one way. If the job is paid well, there will naturally be more interest in it as it becomes a viable career on par with other options that are out there.

    Check out these stats from a bit of research a Twitter follower did:

    When a Corporal in the New Zealand Army can earn as much as the TOP tier experienced teachers (besides units, or senior management), then it speaks volumes. And don’t for a second think I am belittling Corporals in the New Zealand Military.

    Heck; just look at the salaries of members of parliament. You have to go back to 1979 since the pay for a back-bench MP was the same as a Teacher’s salary. Now, a Back-bench MP brings home $168K worth of bacon each year – and then vote to increase their wages which gets passed almost before the Yay’s can say ‘Y’.

    That’s a 40% difference, in nigh on 40 years. There’s no way that we’ll get back to where the pay scales will be anywhere near the same.

    It can’t happen, I hear you say…

    It did. Back in 1985, under a Lange led Labour government, a 40.17% pay hike was given to secondary teachers across the country.

    I’m not saying that it will happen again. But if the government (and the people the MP’s represent) are serious about the future of the country, then they need to get serious about making Teaching a viable career.

    You can come out and say that you want smaller class sizes, but to get to smaller class sizes, you need more teachers. And to get more teachers you have to make it a job worth staying in (less work pressure) and pay them more so that teaching is on par with other careers.

    Everyone knows, thanks to Whitney Houston, that children are our future, and we’ve all had a teacher who has inspired us to be more than we are, or more than we were. You put money into education, and you get it back in droves in the generations to come.

     

    The good news is, Minister Hipkins is aware of it and is doing something about it. Quite what it is that’s doing is largely unknown – given the latest purchase in the Defense force, but hey… at least it’s not a U-turn.

     

  • PTC Portfolio – Example Template

    So part of my job is providing PD for our staff on a variety of things, usually anything to do with ICT.

    I have been asked to run a workshop on online PTC portfolios, and so as part of that, I built an example PTC site, complete with How-To guide to get your own PTC Portfolio set up just like it.

    ptcportfolio.wordpress.com

    You can head on over to the site and use it if you’re looking at putting your PTC Portfolio up online. Don’t worry, you can keep it all private and make the most of being able to access your portfolio from anywhere.

    Of course, I used WordPress.com, one of the most widespread CMS’s available, and is what I use personally for my own PTC Portfolio.

     

  • Individual Testing is Killing Teaching

    When I was at school, I can’t remember ever doing a one on one test with my teacher.

    I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m saying I don’t remember it. I do remember being tested, in whole class tests, PAT mostly. Colouring in blank circles was fun.

    At some point, teachers or schools or ERO or MOE wanted to know more. They wanted to get more specific information on the learners, to track, to identify gaps, or simply to report against National Standards for.

    And it lead to each individual child in every class being tested individually. Each child’s strengths can be identified, and the gaps they have can then be specifically targeted. Teachers knew what each child needed, and could pass comment on this first hand to their parents or caregivers, through the wonderful National Standard reports that were sent home twice a year.

    Great.

    Except that it is unmanageable.

    28 kids in your class. That’s 28 tests, all carried out individually with the teacher. That’s 27 students who are left to quiet independent work while the teacher questions 1 child. Rinse and repeat. Let’s say that each test takes 5 minutes with the teacher, allowing for arrival, sit down, thinking time, and several correct questions that lead to more difficult ones (and therefore more thinking time) and then leaving time. At 5 minutes a test and 28 students, that’s 140 minutes of testing. 2 hours and 20 minutes to conduct one test for the whole class. 

    This of course does not account for the additional time of hushing students, interruptions, and maintaining a semblance of order over the class while trying to test one child at a time. The testing can take days, usually weeks to get through the whole class one at a time.

    This is the problem though. During those weeks, there is no teaching happening. It’s simply independent work while I test. It becomes too hard to switch between teacher and tester, and so constant switching between these two roles sends one spiralling into minor bouts of schizophrenia.

    Add in that this is one test, for one subject, say Maths. Add in Writing. Add in Reading.

    The stain of National Standards lingers on. While many schools have ditched them, the mindset of the assessments that have been left behind are still causing teachers to be testing, testing, testing – not because of the National Standards, but because of the style of assessment that schools are now using.

    There is no doubt that these tests produce a very accurate and specific picture of what each child knows and doesn’t know, and it becomes very hard to argue against. However, there needs to be some compromise, otherwise we will continue to fall into one of the two modes – teaching or testing – throughout the year.

    But why?

    Why do we test at all – in all honesty?

    In this article, there are numerous points made. Most poignantly is where it says “some countries have achieved better outcomes from their state systems by deliberately shunning standardised testing. In this informative Atlantic article, the Finnish journalist Aru Partanen cites the attributes of a Finnish school system that regularly outscores the US ( and New Zealand) in international rankings of student achievement. Among other things, Finland has no standardised testing, and no private schools at all.”

    In the opening paragraph, it raises exactly where we are at in New Zealand education right now. It says “Testing kids in the classroom sounds like a good idea. Surely that keeps tabs on how they’re doing, and identifies which kids might be falling through the cracks…and that’s all good, right? Well…except that most teachers have always done testing, have always sought to detect kids at risk, and have always managed to strike a healthy balance between teaching and testing. The issue is whether the demands to follow standardised testing procedures (and the practices and attitudes that go with them ) may now be poisoning the whole environment for learning.”

    This was written in 2013. Five years ago. I had been teaching for three years. Now five years later, and approaching a decade in the classroom, I am still teaching and then testing. Now, with the removal of national standards, we have the opportunity to make a change. Something has to change.

    I didn’t become a teacher to make kids sit tests, or even interview kids about what they know and if they can tell me different ways of solving the same problem. I didn’t become a teacher to spend hours on end analysing data and working out what kids don’t know and feel guilty for how much more I should be working.

    I became a teacher to teach. I became a teacher to help kids learn.

     

    Related Reading

  • Russell Howard: Hardest Job in the world is a teacher

    View Video on YouTube

    Thanks Russell for standing up for Teachers everywhere.

  • Survey says teachers’ mental health declining

    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.

    Read more here.

    Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/30/survey-teachers-mental-health-declining-amid-job-stress/811577001/