‘Banning language teaching rules will leave us tongue-tied’

Another news snippet before I shut up shop. Interesting how this journalist manages to twist information to sensationalise complex changes in curricular policy. Why am I surprised?

Colette Douglas-Home is ‘appalled to read that teachers in England and Wales are being told by the government to stop teaching the rule, “I before E except after C…’ (I don’t believe that for a minute).
She writes, ‘If England continues down the route of government spelling edicts, Scotland could, ironically become the standard-bearer of the language as we know it. …There is an emphasis on literacy and numeracy within the Curriculum for Excellence. Spelling is now the responsibility of every teacher, not just those in the English department….’

I hope every teacher realises that the CfE outcomes and experiences cover a great deal more than spelling! Still, it’s good to read some positive comments about CfE.

Developing successful learners in the technologies in primary schools

I wanted to flag up – if only as a reminder to myself to read this when I’m less brain dead at the end of term:

A new report I have not yet had a chance to read yet, is the outcome of a task which focused on attainment in the technologies in primary schools. Inspectors visited a sample of primary schools across Scottish education authorities in 2008. The sample classes included children at the early, middle and upper stages. Schools reported that they had benefited from the constructive oral feedback and pointers for improvement during the visits.

This report links with the recent publication Technical Education: a report of current practice in Scottish schools (HMIE 2008) . A similar set of visits was undertaken with a focus on information and communications technologies (ICT). When the report on these ICT visits is published on the HMIE website later this year, it should be used in conjunction with the findings in this report on technologies to take forward practice and to improve children’s learning experiences.

Summer days are here again! No more sleeps!!

Boosting literacy and numeracy

The Scottish Government has announced the launch of a new learning resource which will help people training for vocational careers boost their literacy and numeracy skills.
The Work Skills Academy CD ROM has been developed by The Big Plus, the Scottish Government’s adult literacy and numeracy awareness raising campaign. It has been specifically tailored to help those training to work in the construction, hairdressing, retail and care sectors.
The resource will give practical advice and assistance on areas such as spelling, formal and informal writing, punctuation.

Assessment Paradigms

Which one do you subscribe to?:

All students are basically the same and learn in the same way. Therefore instruction and testing can be standardised.

There are no standard students. Each is unique. Therefore teaching and testing must be individualised and varied.

Norm- or criterion-referenced standardised test scores are the main and most accurate indicators of students’ knowledge and learning.

Performance-based, direct assessment, involving a variety of outputs, gives a more complete, accurate and fair picture of student knowledge and learning.

Paper and pencil tests are the only valid way to assess academic progress.

Student- created and maintained portfolios, which may include paper and pencil tests as well as other assessment tools and performances, paint a more holistic picture of progress.

Assessment is separate from the curriculum and teaching. There are special times, places and methods for assessment.

The lines between the curriculum and assessment are blurred. Assessment is always occurring in and through learning and teaching.

Outside testing instruments and agents provide the only true and objective measure of student knowledge and understanding.

Learners themselves and their mentors, friends, family and teachers, hold the key to accurate assessment of learning.

There is a clearly defined body of knowledge that students must grasp and be able to reproduce in a test.

The main goal is for students to learn how to learn, to think critically and creatively and to use intelligence in as many ways as possible.

If something can’t be objectively tested in a uniform and standard way, it isn’t worth teaching or learning.

The process of learning is as important as the content of the curriculum.

The efficiency of an assessment approach (easy to administer, score and quantify) is the paramount concern when developing tests.

The benefit to students’ learning is the paramount concern.

Assessment should be used to point out failure, make comparisons among students, and rank students to determine their standing and future prospects.

Assessment should be used to enhance and celebrate learning, to deepen understanding, and to expand learners’ ability to transfer learning to life beyond formal schooling.

Learning and teaching should be focused on curriculum content and acquiring data.

Learning and teaching should address the needs of individuals and focused on the learning process, the development of thinking skills and understanding the dynamic relationships between curriculum content and life.

Learning is a mastery (sic) or understanding of various bits of objective, factual information.

Learning is first and foremost a subjective affair in which the learner’s understanding of self and the world is transformed, expanded, questioned, deepened, upset, stretched.

Successful teaching is preparing students to achieve on various tests designed to assess their knowledge in different subjects.

Successful teaching is preparing students for effective living: for doing, being, learning and living with others.

Some more equal than others

The Outreach Team had an interesting day recently looking at the new Curriculum for Excellence outcomes and experiences for Literacy and English and Health and Well Being.

One of the outcomes under the Responsible Citizens heading started a lively debate which raised the whole issue of inclusion and equality:

 I can evaluate environmental, scientific and technological issues.

We discussed case studies of students with English as an additional language (including those who use British Sign Language) and wondered if such an evaluation carried out in English would be fair to them. Surely if it is their knowledge and understanding of, say Biology, that is being assessed, then a full answer in their native tongue would be a truer representation than one done in a second language.

If this does not happen, pupils who use English as an additional language are not fully included in Curriculum for Excellence until they are proficient in written English. We decided that their abilities in their own language must be acknowledged; just as learners with dyslexia are entitled to have poor spelling overlooked if the content is understood.

This of course raises enormous issues about availability of translators, apart from the more deep seated issue about a right to be included.

 Thanks to Janet Storey for the fascinating lead on this discussion.

Dyslexia Friendly Schools Pledge

Dyslexia Friendly Schools

Here is a video clip from teachers tv. I can’t seem to embed it. Sorry. It’s worth looking at if you have 15 minutes. It looks at ‘increasing the understanding of what it is to be a learner with dyslexia at school and offers innovative classroom strategies to help dyslexic pupils to achieve’.

This session I have been working with 5 primary schools piloting our own Dyslexia Friendly Schools Pledge. I have worked with staff to audit extant provision and set targets, acting as consultant and verifier throughout the process. The aim is to encourage schools to promote excellent practice as it carries out its role of supporting and challenging learners with dyslexia to be successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. An effective school (with strong leadership which values staff development and pays close attention to the quality of learning and teaching) is inevitably going to be dyslexia friendly.

A Dyslexia Friendly Schools Pledge is recognition of how a focus on dyslexia can lead to improved learning and teaching for many pupils. To be a Dyslexia Friendly School, the issue of dyslexia needs to be seen to have status. All staff need to commit to supporting learners with dyslexia across the whole curriculum. A whole school, and ultimately region-wide, approach is necessary to translate policy into practice.

The Dyslexia Friendly Schools Pledge aims to support schools to:

• audit current practice,

• identify areas for development,

• ensure excellent provision for learners with dyslexia

• share best practice.

At the beginning of the session, senior management and support for learning staff and I, as the Outreach Teacher in the Dyslexia Support Service, examined provision for learners with dyslexia in the following areas: • identification of dyslexia

• intervention

• school ethos

• transitions

• training and awareness raising for staff and pupils

• practice within the classroom

• homework

• role of senior management and promoted staff

• information for parents/carers.

 We collated our audit into 4 areas:

• Focusing:

• Developing: meeting the needs of dyslexic learners satisfactorily.

• Established: supporting and promoting good practice in all areas of the school.

• Enhanced: extending outstanding practice and sharing across the region.

 A report on the progress of each of the 5 schools and a plan for further development in the next session will be presented to the department of Inclusion and Equality who will then decide whether to take the Pledge forward in other schools in the session 2009/10.

I am grateful to the BDA for its guidance on Dyslexia Friendly Schools and to Liz McKelvie of Stravaig E Consultants Ltd for advice.

“They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.” (Richard Yates)

It seems that many in education hold the basic institution of school in such reverence that they simply cannot conceive of ever doing more than tinkering with it. To think as deeply as we need to do in order for the radical changes to be made in order for our  young people to be nourished and nurtured and challenged and stretched seems to be so hard it is almost like sacrilege.

I am minded of the old story of the man on his  hands and knees underneath a street light. A helpful passer-by asks him what he is doing and he says he is looking for his car keys. ‘Where did you lose them?’ enquires the stranger. ‘Down that alley-way over there.’ says the man. ‘But it’s dark down there. This is where the light is.’

We have to dare to go down the alley-way if we are to find what education has lost.

“We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides” (Saint Ignatius of Loyola)

John Connell’s superb dissection of The Delusion of Status-Conferred Authority has prompted me to write this piece:

Imagine this.

A teacher who, like many others, spends much of her non-working life reading, thinking, breathing education, is denied permission to attend an event not unlike the one described here. Denied, because she does not have a strategic role in The Authority (though the manager’s name was not Mrs Coulter!). Denied because it is not her place to have opinions about the future of education. She is to wait patiently until her superiors deliver directives, which she should then carry out. And to stop being so uppity.

This, despite the fact that she offers to cover the (not inconsiderable) costs (or to take unpaid leave); despite the fact that she needs no supply cover for the 31/2 hours she needs to be away from the chalk face; despite the fact that the rhetoric of distributed leadership is loudly proclaimed.

The teacher requests a rationale for the decision. Others are attending, so the quality of the event is not necessarily in doubt. It must be a question of status. Another professional – one with a larger pay packet – is referred to. The event is pronounced ‘bone fide’. (No one was to know that the reality reflected a little the hierarchical mindset of her own managers.) After many negotiations, the teacher (eternally grateful for the beneficence of her betters) is allowed to go.

But when she returns she shares her learning only with those colleagues with a like interest, surreptitiously so as not to rock any boats. And she dreams of a future education system in which all are recognised as learners; one in which even those who have taken conscious decisions to remain in the classroom are treated with equity and respect.

But she’ll be long retired by 2020.

(Thanks to agrewe22 for the photos)

Anthony Browne for Children’s Laureate

What good news! I actually don’t like ‘Gorilla’ very much but love some of Brown’s other books, notably ‘The Tunnel’ and ‘Changes’. Browne’s near-photographic realism is always sprinkled with touches of the surreal, and a plethora of visual puns. And I, along with millions of others, find them very touching too.

The Guardian reports: Browne said that he would use his two-year stint as laureate to focus on the appreciation of picture books, and the reading of both pictures and words. “Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book,” he said. “Sometimes I hear parents encouraging their children to read what they call proper books (books without pictures), at an earlier and earlier age. This makes me sad, as picture books are perfect for sharing, and not just with the youngest children.”

Interesting that in yesterday’s Guardian the outgoing Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, deplores the programme to teach children to read that has no policy on reading books. Children who come from homes where books are being read get access to the kinds of abstract and complex ideas that you can only get hold of easily through exposure to extended prose. The rest are being fed worksheets.

Rosen quotes with horror – shared by us all I trust – the teacher whose pupils have been working on his poems: The ‘quicks’ have been making up poems of their own and the ’slows’ have been doing a wordsearch. OMG! I had no idea that poetry could be streamed!