OTJ Poetry

A colleague sent me this poem written by one of her teachers as he struggled to make sense of overall teacher judgments.

So here I sit...asTTle looks back at me like a 2p audience with little content.
Child A's punctuation leaves me breathless as I stumble from below to way below,
And think back on all the incredibly imaginative dialogues I have had with these children,
Who now struggle to translate their thoughts into the written word.
Fault?...blame?...as child after child fails to meet the thin orange line on my spreadsheet.
They are like literacy athletes - puffed before the finish line
Desperately trying to reach some mysterious finishing tape that says they have made it.
If only a full-stop here. A capital letter there. It's all so possessive.
I marvel that some of them even make it here and have worlds they can write about.
Their experiences often are packaged in a paragraph......at most.
And yet at night when they are asleep. and there are no red lines in their dreams....
They are perfect.
Another Sunday at school......now for reports
Rod Davis

They changed the national standards - only they forgot to tell us

Today we discovered that the Ministry of Education changed the wording of the National Standards for Reading and Writing for Year 5 and Year 7. The wording for Year 5 has changed from 'as they work towards level 3' to 'working at early level 3'. The same changes were made for the Year 7 standard only they relate to level 4.

The new reading and writing standards were sent to schools about 6 -8 weeks ago (I rang the MoE's 0800 number to check), only they didn't come with a letter explaining that they had changed and the reasons for it. No - they came as an A2 poster which we thought was an additional resource to help teachers implement National Standards. We naively handed the posters out not realising that we should have read them carefully in case something had changed.

I might be wrong but this feels to me like this change was made surreptitiously by bureaucrats with their fingers crossed that we wouldn't notice or that we would notice too late for anything to be done.

In my head there is a huge difference between a standard that says 'as they work towards level 3' and 'working at early level 3' and I do mind that they changed it without telling us. If I behaved like this as a principal I am certain my Board would have some robust feedback for me!

Which brings us to the implementation timeline. At the end of this year - that is in 8 school weeks time we are supposed to report to parents about students in relation to National Standards AND submitted our National Standards data to the Ministry of Education - only they moved the goal posts on us two months ago and omitted to tell us.

When and where is all this going to end? And do you think there is a difference in meaning between the wording 'as they work towards level 3' and 'working at early level 3'?

The digital native is dead

Recently I have been preparing a workshop for the ICP Conference being held in a couple of weeks time. The most challenging thing about this exercise has been NO INTERNET for presenters - and it wasn't until I tried to put the presentation together that I realized how reliant I had become on flicking on and off line when I present.

It has caused me to think of other things that I now do very differently because of digital technology. The biggest one is writing. Prior to computers you had to think very carefully about each sentence you wanted to write and make sure it was fully composed in your head before committing pen to paper. Now I write what I think and then re-arrange it on the screen. Ready, fire, aim. I am not sure if I could complete exam questions anymore as I no longer think that way.

I keep track of my learning in MyPortfolio an online ePortfolio that is brilliant for aggregating your learning - no more getting a clever link to a resource and not knowing where to file it!!!

I have managed to download Kindle onto my iPad and have bought my first eBook - I can't wait to start reading it in the plane. It took a long time for me to change my book buying habits.

Could it be that I have become a digital native - nah I'm too old. I think that the notion of digital native caught on in the early days because young people didn't have to unlearn ways of doing things in order to do things digitally. It is often the good practices of our past that stop us moving forward.

So sorry young people in my book (opps I mean iPad) you no longer own the digital space. Us oldies are catching up as we ditch our old non-digital way of doing things and come into the new.

My Brilliant Board

At our first Board meeting for 2010 we spent quite a bit of time looking at and talking about the National Standards. We shared with the Board the difficulty we were having in interpreting what the standards were and our frustration that we were expected to report progress without the support of aligned standardised assessment tools.

Overall our Board are pleased with the way we manage assessment in our school. Their response was a request for us to carry on what we are doing, making adjustment to meet the National Standards requirements providing this did not detract from our current practice. They also asked us to come back to them if carrying out the National Standards requirements compromised our assessment practice.

I left the Board meeting feeling both affirmed and supported.

Assumptions about Assumptions

Over the last week I have been thinking about the assumptions that sit behind much of the information currently being promulgated about the national standards. So here is a list of my assumptions about these assumptions

Assumption 1 - National Standards Flyer (sent to 350,000 NZ families)
'National standards will ensure primary and intermediate schools regularly assess their students' progress in reading, writing and maths...' - this appears to assume that prior to National Standards primary and intermediate schools were not regularly assessing their students. There is clear evidence to show that this is not true. What a shame the writer of this brochure didn't make it clear that this is actually about 'all' schools regularly assessing.

Assumption 2 - National Standards Flyer (sent to 350,000 NZ families)
'National Standards will identify kids who are slipping behind'
This statement appears to assume that schools, prior to the National Standards, were unable to identify kids who are behind. As far as I know this has never been the case. We know which students are under achieving - the problem is having the resources, knowledge and skills to do something about it with high student/teacher ratios in classrooms, limited resources to employ teacher aides and many students behaving in ways that impact on learning.

Assumption 3 - Anne Tolley's Address at the Train the Trainers Workshop
'We all know the variance in student achievement is within schools not between schools.'
This statement is referring to research based on secondary schools. It assumes that the same pattern is found in primary and intermediate schools. Some leading educational academics believe that the variance between student achievement is within secondary schools but between primary schools.

On a final note if you were one of the 350,000 families that received the National Standards flyer do check out the kitchen in the background - not one your average kiwi family could afford!

Aligning Assessment Tools to the Standards

While driving to the gym tonight I was listening to Anne Tolley being interviewed for checkpoint on Radio New Zealand. One of the points she made was that schools have standardised assessment tools that are aligned to the national standards that they can use when reporting to parents. It is true that schools have a multitude of standardised assessment tools but my understanding is that the work to align them to the national standards is far from complete - term 4, 2010 is the timeline I have heard.

One of my leadership mantras is to underpromise and over deliver. At the moment it feels like our parents are being over promised (the assessment tools will not be aligned in time for the first round of plain english reporting) and we will be left to manage the resultant under deliver. This seems a little unfair on schools.

If it is true that the assessment tools will not be aligned to the natioanl standards until term 4 then it would be good if this is the message that everyone hears.

Unpacking the Standards

Since the standards have arrived in or school we have been spending time familiarising ourselves with them. At first glance the writing and reading standards for Year 7 and 8 appeared to be different but upon closer examination we discovered that they are in fact the same words but the margins are different which has affected their layout! There is an asterisked comment at the bottom of each standard telling us the difference for Year 8. The writing one says it is 'increased accuracy and fluency in writing a variety of texts across the curriculum, their level of control and independence in selecting writing processes and strategies, and the range of texts they write. In particular, by the end of year 8 students need to be confidently and deliberately choosing the most appropriate processes and strategies for writing in different learning areas.' We are not sure exactly what this means and are really hoping that,the material being developed to support the implementation of the standards and the training to go alongside this, will give us more certainty about what would be the criteria for judging a student's confidence and deliberateness as they choose an appropriate process and strategy for writing in different learning areas.

It is also our understanding that the national assessment tools are currently not aligned to the standards, and won't be for another 8 months, and so we won't have them available to us to help validate decisions we make about students progress towards the standards which we find pretty scary if we want to achieve standardised moderation.