Carolyn's Comments

OTJ Poetry

2011-12-05T16:38:00.003+13:00

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

2011-09-29T16:09:00.008+13:00

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

2011-08-08T16:31:00.003+12:00

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

2010-02-19T13:59:00.007+13:00

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

2010-02-09T12:33:00.007+13:00

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

2010-02-02T20:46:00.015+13:00

While driving to the gym tonight I was listening to Anne Tolley being interviewed for checkpoint on Radio New Ze aland. 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

2010-02-02T09:00:00.004+13:00

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.

National Standards

2010-01-27T14:29:00.012+13:00

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.

National Standards

2009-03-14T22:20:00.000+13:00

Some interesting ideas and assumptions are starting to surface as people begin to engage with what national standards might mean for our schools and ultimately our students.

Top of many educators' list is the harm that will be done if the media is allowed to get hold of the achievement results of individual schools and publish league tables.

Andy Hargreaves, who has recently been on a speaking tour of New Zealand, believes that public accountability for students achievement of standards is inevitable and trying to fight it futile. He suggests that we should be putting our energy into dictating the way public accountability is managed.

According to Hargreaves there are two ways to report against national standards - by census, where you report on the performance of every student, or by sample, where you report on the performance of a percentage of all students. Hargreaves points out that in the business of car manufacturing they know that they only have to test 30% of cars coming off the manufacturing line to get an accurate gauge of performance.

Reporting by census will make individual schools accountable for the achievement of their students. On the surface this appears to be a good idea. In reality though, it creates winner and loser schools, perpetuates white flight and unfairly punishes schools from our poorer comm unties. It creates competition between schools and facilities an environment of being better than others rather than all schools working together to be the best they can be.

Reporting by sample would protect individual schools, whilst holding all New Zealand educators accountable for increasing achievement in literacy and numeracy. Sample reporting is about system accountability and fosters an environment of everyone working together to increase achievement throughout our nation.

Resourcing for underachieving schools has been one of the sweeteners offered around the national standards. Within a reporting by census model I cannot see how this would work because the underpinning principle is the worse you are doing in reaching the national standards the more resourcing you will get.

If reporting by sample had a regional element to it then resourcing could be targeted to areas of New Zealand with the greatest need and would foster the development of schools clustering together - a concept that is already working well in New Zealand. Reporting by sample would not blame and shame schools but would show areas of strong performance and areas for improvement.

We already have a strong model of sample reporting in New Zealand in the NEMP project. We need to use this to convince our National Government that reporting by census will do enormous harm and ultimately undermine the very reason national standards are being introduced in the first place.

Web 2.0, Schools and the Media

2009-03-01T15:58:00.000+13:00

What a fabulous article in the Christchurch Press last week about Fendalton School being featured on the Google’s global blog highlighting excellence in application of technology in the classroom. How wonderful to be able to read about the way the school is using blogs, YouTube and photo-sharing to connect their learning with world beyond the school gate.

So why aren’t more school’s making use of these readily available web 2.0 tools? There will be a variety of reasons, lack of time, too much to do already or a requirement for teachers to become more up-skilled in these tools. It would be interesting to find out how Paul Sibson, principal of Fendalton School, succeeded in getting his teachers to embrace these tools for learning.

I am also wondering if there is a more fundamentally significant reason why many schools are not embracing the web 2.0 tools – fear! I know that my need to ensure student safety in online environments is the reason I haven’t been encouraging and supporting the teachers at my school to get into blogging with their classes. It is not that I cannot see the educational potential of students regularly blogging about their learning, posting onto YouTube, and using wikis to share and collaborate with audiences beyond the school. I can see the benefits and at the same I am scared of the potential consequences.

So where does this fear come from? Sure some of it comes from the unknown and the relative newness of these tools. My assumptions about the dangers of the internet have been greatly influenced by what I read in the newspaper and see o n television. How refreshing it was then to read such a positive article about Fendalton School in the Press last week.

The question that needs to be asked is whether or not the negative ‘spin’ regularly put on news items about the internet is because there is a real danger or is it because news organisations fear for their position in the world’s knowledge market as a result of the web 2.0 tools.

In the days of old, before web 2.0, news organisations were the authority and lens through which we learnt about the world. The spin they put on reported events coloured the thinking of the majority of the population. If they reported something in a positive light we believed it was good; if they choose to portray it negatively then we knew it was bad. For years they have had the ability to influence politics simply by the stories they chose to either print or ignore. But all that has changed.

The web allows anyone to post their ideas or comments for the rest of the word to see. We are no longer reliant on the six o’clock news to see footage of the latest disaster. Ordinary people with cell phones can film events and upload images to YouTube and other online forums.
It is true that news media organisations are beginning to embrace digital technologies. You can down load news items, and read the paper on line. And whilst provision is being made for people to comment on events, through blogs and wikis attached to news websites, it is still channelling thinking down the lens chosen by the media company.

I am beginning to see strong correlations between the behaviour of today’s media organisations and the persecution of the inventors of the printing press by the established church in the 15th century. The church was hugely threatened by the thought that people other than priests and nuns would be able to read God’s word thus allowing individual thought and interpretation. Today’s media organisations are fighting a similar battle.

I am not sure where that leaves me. I am too busy running a school to be able to investigate and think deeply about the safe and effective use of web 2.0 tools for learning. It is no use thinking that we will wait for the revolution to happen and then we will react. The revolution has been and gone and the way we learn about things has changed forever. We now need to decide what we will do about this in our schools.

Well done Fendalton School for leading the way. We are grateful for your vision and your courage.

Voices in our heads

2008-12-12T16:04:00.001+13:00

Joan of Arc got into no end of trouble for telling others about the voices in her head. Feeling relatively safe now that they no longer burn outspoken woman at the stake here is some thinking about the voices in our heads.

When I was growing up someone once told me that the first sign of madness was hearing voices in your head and the second was answering them! As a child I really worried that I was possibly mad because I always had a voice in my head that I interacted with.

It was with much relief that I finally learnt about self-talk and that we all do it. Self-talk got me through my years at home with young children as I constantly reminded myself as I battled dirty washing and never-ending housework "You don't have to like it- you just have to do it!"

The language we use in our schools is pivotal to the growth and development of a learning culture. Positive language that speaks of what can be done, of high expectations, effective relationships and collaborations slowly and surely changes the voices inside all learners heads.

Voices in students' heads can either say "I mucked it up again, I am so dumb" or "Mistakes are part of learning - I need to try again and this time I will...".

The adults in a community can change the voices that mimic the thoughtless comments made by others. It is a tough job. We can increase our effectiveness in changing the voices if we determine together the key messages we want to give the learners. Some of the messages I want to deposit in our learners heads are: 'some learning is tough,' perseverance is important', 'mistakes are great things to learn from', have a go you never know what you can achieve'.

What do you want the voices in your head to tell you? What do we want the voices in our student's head to say?

The power of language in our schools is that it does irrevocably change the voices. The more people saying the same thing the greater and quicker the change.

Now where are those matches...

Time for Change

2008-12-04T18:28:00.000+13:00

There are lots of commentators giving their opinions about how to embed sustainable change within an organisation. One I heard of recently stated that it takes about 10 years to embed lasting change. But what if you don't have that long?

Whilst authentic change doesn't happen overnight the rate of change can be strongly influenced by the way a professional community operates. Relationships built upon and supported by meaningful dialogue create trust between members of a community. Trust enables people to work together to create a dynamic community of learners who continuously reflect on their practice.

Reflective practitioners are always looking for ways to be the best they can be. Reflective pratitioners identify the things they do well and look for areas in which they can improve. Reflective practitioners know that the only thing they can change is themselves.

We might think that a school, business or organisation needs to change. We are wrong. A school, business or organsation cannot change. It is only the individuals within the school, business or organisation who can.

Many long serving community members talk about wanting change. What they often forget is that for change to occur within the organisation they themselves will need to change. Relationships that support and challenge are the only way to get these people to abandon their practices of the past and do their bit to bring about organisational change.