National Standards

National Standards

It is going to be an interesting year in education this year with the introduction of National Standards into all New Zealand primary and secondary schools. I have decided to use this blog to record the journey of my school, Tawa Intermedaite, as it implements the National Standards.

Over the past two years our school has worked really hard to put assessment for learning at the centre of the learning process. We use assessment to:

• help students understand what it is they can do well and what are their next learning steps;
• ensure that the programmes of learning meet the needs of our students
• give teachers feedback about the effectiveness of their teaching programme
• give parents accurate information about the how their child is going at school
• inform our Board of Trustees about the progress and achievement of the students in our school.

All of our students have a learning portfolio into which they file evidence of their learning. The portfolios contain a variety of artefacts including writing samples, test scripts, specialist teacher reports and other assessment tasks. Students regualarly share their protfolios with their family and the portfolios underpin our learning conferences and the written reports we give our parents.

Our challenge, as we begin to work with the national standards, is to find out how we meet the legislative requirements, whilst continuing to hold onto the sound assessment practices we have developed at our school. We do not want to increase teacher work-load and we want to keep students and their learning at the centre.