Herding ducks in a barrel (Part 1)

The NCEA standards review, in English, has begun. And about time, too. As challenging as lining up ducks or herding cats? As easy as shooting those fish? Whichever way it goes, it's got to be done.

According to the NZQA website:

The review will be carried out according to six principles developed by the expert group:
1. The standard must be derived from a curriculum or established body of knowledge.
2. A standard must have a clear purpose.
3. A Standard must allow valid and reliable assessment
4. Where more than one credit-bearing grade is available, grade distinctions must be based on qualitative differences in achievement.
5. Credit Parity (between standards)
6. Standards should not duplicate one another. The review will also consider such issues as the conditions under which assessment is carried out.

For English teachers, our expert group is the NZATE, a fact for which we should be grateful. A colleague recently cast doubt on the idea of contracting subject associations to complete this work as, in their experience, subject associations tended to be unreliable and unrepresentative.

How far NZ English teachers are represented by their national association is an issue beyond the scope of this blog, but representation is but a subscription away. We have the advantage of being a large subject area (whoops, said the 's' word..) working across diverse deciles and areas of the country.

As Bali Haque points out, this is an opportunity to align curriculum with assessment (always useful). Perhaps it is an opportunity, too, for us to review what has happened to our programmes since the inception of NCEA: fragmented programmes, piecemeal planning, junior programmes with junior 'credits' (even the JCEA, in one school).

Somewhere in the middle of this drive for credits must lie the kinds of teaching and learning that transcend unit and achievement standards. How creative we all really want to be is a matter for debate later in the year when the proposals of the expert group go out for consultation. Until then, some points to ponder...

What should be internal? or external?

Do we still want Shakespeare to have his own special corner?

What about Level 1 formal writing - in school, or end of year?

Can we do something to bring those poor, sad but oh-so-useful unit standards into the happy fold?

And where are those neglected children, oral and visual, at the highest levels?

How can we 'future-proof' the standards to include new technologies?

What about the Key Competencies that we shouldn't be assessing but which we might have to usher in by the assessment back door? English does, after all, have its own Processes AO which is the KCs in all but name.

And aren't we all heartily sick of essays? Surely there are other ways to respond to the (short, extended, visual, oral and other arbitrary split) texts?

I say - let's go mad and take a risk. If the end result looks like what we have now, we will have missed the opportunity for change that it presents. And not even National will revise the curriculum so we can do it all again this soon.

Death by bullet (point)

"Students need to be effective oral, written and visual communicators" (revised NZC, English, p. 18) and "they recognise how choices of language, symbol and text affect people's understanding" (Using Language, Symbols and Texts KC, p. 12)

With so many of us using PowerPoint presentations these days, how can we make sure that they (and we!) use this medium for maximum value? Are we still using PowerPoint just as we did a few years ago?

Have a look at Ewan McIntosh's recent post, 'Why would you use words on the screen when they do just fine in your mouth?' for a fresh take on the what PowerPoint should look like in 2008: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2008/06/why-would-you-u.html

Sssh...it's the 's' word

What did you say? Your subject is English? Tsk, tsk. Don't you know we not allowed to say 'subject' now? How very siloed and partisan of you. 'Subject' is now a forbidden word, something only to be whispered when no-one can hear you. For now we live in the days of cross-curricular, integrated learning in which the Key Competencies are king, and studying your favourite 'subject' has been relegated to the dusty halls of the past. Three raps on the knuckles....

Clearly, I'm being facetious, but it's an interesting idea to toy with. A recent talk from the MoE reps involved in Schools Plus looked at the way schools, among a plethora of 'solutions', could timetable more creatively, and break down the barriers created by 'subject areas'. One speaker actually chastised himself, mid-flow, for using the dreaded 's' word.

I found this intriguing. It's as if, just by saying (or not saying) something, just by giving a concept voice, it will happen, emerge blinking into the light, fully formed and breathing. The implication is that, if we talk about our 'subjects' as secondary level, we will automatically be shutting ourselves off from a more integrated world, in which pedagogy and shared learning are crucial.

I don't disagree with the concept of integrated learning - in fact, I'm often actively pushing for it in conversations with schools. What puzzles me, however, is when people make comments like, "We shouldn't use the word 'subject' anymore," as though that will somehow offer a verbal band-aid to the issues of dis-engaged students and NZ's 'long tail'.

It is exactly this idea - that somehow, knowledge has been sidelined in the favour of process (this resonates with Mary Chamberlain's unfortunately-misinterpreted comment made last year about students as 'little knowledge banks') - that will ensure that it is the teachers, not the students, who will dis-engage from the MoE's, very important, messages.

So let that be a (integrated) lesson to you...

Don't tell the boss - unless they love books, too

Ever wanted to pretend that you are working hard when you are actually revelling in the words of Emily Dickinson,. Brian Turner or George Orwell?

Here's your chance. The NZ Book Council has developed the amzingly slick and clever Read at Work site [www.readatwork.com]

Just go there and click on Book Council, before choosing what you want to read.

Top tip: take your lap top into the next meeting, smile and nod wisely as your manager holds forth and let yourself slip gently down to Turner's river, sip Emily's 'unaccustomed wine' and stroll into Nixon's 'autumn'.

Just remember to keep nodding.

[Thanks to Raewyn for the nod to this site. Loved it]

The meat in the bun

I always thought I knew what an essay was. Long, tightly structured, formalised discussions, unwrapping layers of textual criticism in tightly constructed phrases, a pinch of rhetoric, a spoonful of debate, a pipkin of pep.



But what is an essay for? What is the 'deep learning' that we would like our students to grasp regarding this genre of writing? Under the pressures of the assessment-driven senior programme, a Year 11 student might be forgiven for saying that an essay is "a test", "to tell the story" or "to say what my ideas are about a book".

Essay: "An analytic or interpretive literary composition"



And yet, how often does an essay become a formula, a grid, three SEXY paragraphs and a quick conclusion?





In our current Curriculum workshops, we have been trialling our English version of Rosemary Hipkins' aforementioned 'water cycle activity' (see previous post): five different resources used to teach essay writing, from the hamburger to the grid to the mix & match.



By comparing different versions, we begin to ask ourselves:

1. what do we intend to teach in our choice of resources?


2. what are the unintended messages?


3. what contexts are relevant/important? (what if your culture does not eat hamburger? what if you're vegetarian?)
   

And so, what do we think is important? What are the over-arching messages we are wanting to convey about this (often dominant) genre of writing? And do our materials reflect this?

We bring so many assumptions to teaching the topics that we do - that once in a while, it's good to sit back and try to unpack what they might be.

Even if, in the end, we conclude that what we're doing is what we want to be doing.

Reap and sow / compare and contrast

Oh dear.

I've been so busy churning out essays for the MEd ( a tough master, pun intended), an online workshop for the NZATE conference (more about this soon) and just keeping body & mind together, this poor wee blog has been rather neglected. Still, like the wasteland that is the bottom of my garden, sometimes leaving things for a while can allow ideas to grow.

Rosemary Hipkins (NZCER) came to speak to our team of advisers recently, exploring the Key Competencies, and presented a particularly intriguing activity, creating a productive dissonance (Baumfield, 2005) for me.

Comparing several versions of the water cycle enabled assumptions we hold, about the way we might usually teach this concept, to the surface. Comparing and contrasting diagrams, exploring similarities and differences, allowed us to see what the intended and, more importantly, the unintended learning might be. Context becomes important, too. How many of us believed, for example, that rain always fell on the mountains, as shown in the pictures of the water cycle used at school?

This 'comparing' technique is explored by Marzano, Pickering & Pollock (2001), in one of their 'nine instructional strategies' that work:

1. Identifying Similarities and Differences

The ability to break a concept into its similar and dissimilar characteristics allows students to understand (and often solve) complex problems by analyzing them in a more simple way. Teachers can either directly present similarities and differences, accompanied by deep discussion and inquiry, or simply ask students to identify similarities and differences on their own. While teacher-directed activities focus on identifying specific items, student-directed activities encourage variation and broaden understanding, research shows. Research also notes that graphic forms are a good way to represent similarities and differences.

As a result, back at the office, we have been developing a similar way to help English teachers unpick/unpack their thinking about how to teach certain concepts in English. More to follow.

Perhaps letting the land lie fallow reaps rewards eventually...

Teachers on TV

Still mulling over the differentiation workshop (see Backwards Planning post previously), I have been exploring the videos available on teachers.tv.

You wouldn't think that we teachers would make compelling TV, but perhaps we do for other teachers. The UK has a whole channel dedicated to teaching and all things educational (lucky things). And although it's all aligned with the UK curriculum and education systems, there are some useful resources on the fully-searchable website for downloading here in NZ. [Years 7-9 = Keystage 3; Years 10-11=Keystage 4]

For example, the following video gives a neat 15' introduction into differentiation, complete with examples from the classroom and commentary from Christine Harrison, education lecturer at King's College, London.

Review of video :Excellent ideas about how to engage and involve students in learning while supporting their knowledge and skills. It's great to see students in action. This will make more sense to teachers than just talking about it. (lazz04, 11/11/07).

And we all know how useful it is to watch someone else having a go before we try it ourselves, modelling being a powerful form of professional development (and much less risky than experimenting with our lively Year 10s on a Friday afternoon...)