The Educated Kiwi
Posts tagged assessment
Moodle Assessments
Mar 28th
Over the past two weeks my year 11 History class has been completing an Internal Assessment Achievement Standard worth four credits of the 24 on offer in year eleven History.
They had two weeks to complete a task where they had to write a newspaper editorial from 1954 based around the events of the Civil Rights Movement at that time. The task involved them writing from the perspectives of someone supporting the decision of Brown vs Board of Education and someone against. I allowed submission of the assessment either on paper or electronically via Moodle’s assignment activity. They were allowed to submit as they revised their answer which allowed me to point out areas that they were weak on and many of the students took full advantage of this.
The boys in my class were especially impressive as they got into the task but even though they had plenty of time to do the task this picture shows some of the times the assessment was handed in.
It was due at 8:30am on Friday and I can see there were some late nights on thursday. In all however using the Moodle assignment feature has been very successful and made things very easy for me to provide feedback and feedforward even when I see most of these students every day.
Overall a useful addition to good classroom practice.
Why do we retain the status quo in education?
Oct 13th
At a recent home group meeting the conversation turned to assessment and the debate was hotly discussed. During and since that discussion my thoughts turned in part to Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti, the special character school in central Christchurch which I have been lucky enough to spend some time in recently.
Unlimited seem to really embrace their special character and have made changes to a number of systems that often appear to hinder real change in the majority of our secondary schools. Some examples are:
- Timetable — they tell me that they originally didn’t want a timetable at all, but as their roll grew from 40 to 400 they found it necessary to make some sense of their day. But despite this they still do the timetable differently. The school day runs from 8:00am until 4:00pm which leaves students with more flexibility about when they attend. The students also sign up for classes in three week blocks, so the courses are all modular to allow for this to happen. I am told that each module gets three hours of teaching time in the week, but that there is basically no discipline issues as all students have chosen their courses and even a bad choice only needs to be tolerated for three weeks.
- Individual Education Plans — each student spends 30 minutes a week with their Learning Advisor going over their current work, their future plans, making sure that there is rigour in the work they are doing etc. I think I was told that once a month the student’s parents/caregivers must be present at the IEP meeting.
- Community involvement and focus — the traditional classroom exists at Unlimited (but the students sitting in it come from a variety of year levels) but a part of their special character is the fact that a variety of people can teach/mentor/provide expertise to learners and that the community is used as a learning environment. This means that often students are working offsite and involved in everything from university courses to drama.
Those are just some of the things that clearly differentiate them from a lot of other state schools. It may have occured to you already as you read what I have written already that the student learning is driven by the the things they wish to learn, and not by assessment (I am not looking to buy into an argument about if NCEA allows the flexibility to assess what is taught rather than teach what is assessed).
Which brings me finally to my point, towards the end of Term One their local paper carried a prominent news article that slammed the performance of Unlimited as judged by their students NCEA results. The principal responded in what I thought was a very clear and level headed fashion and made the point that because of their IEP’s the students made the choice about what they learnt and that many of them were not aiming to achieve NCEA at level 1, 2 or 3.
It is a brave school indeed that flouts the status quo and risks being portrayed unfavourably by the league tables that the papers seem to love publishing (I guess because parents love reading them). It seems we need more brave schools to speed the move of education from where it is to where many educationalists believe it should be.
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