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.