The Fenyman Series
Reply
Category Archives: Education
NAPLAN Testing
An opinion piece by Trevor Diogenes (of Lowbottom High Diaries) in today’s Crikey: NAPLAN tests and My School: one size doesn’t fit all
Teaching to the test is what education authorities increasingly require of teachers. It already happens in Year 12 where students are coached to reproduce the answers that the assessors expect. If students learn anything in Year 12, it is that competition is king in the world they are about to enter. They will also understand that they are expected to conform. At which point students would have every right to feel betrayed by their teachers who, up until this final year, have sought to open the minds of their charges to the infinite possibilities of learning.
Parents have every right to know how their child’s school is performing in relation to other schools. The only problem is that the information is based on flawed data since it is largely derived from the results of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) diagnostic testing. NAPLAN is a version of those ghastly tests that students have been made to submit to since the 1960s. You know the kind of thing: brain teasers about relative velocities and the like. Horrible. And of very limited educational value.
The article is in the free section at Crikey, so probably best just to read the whole thing.
The way that is a way is not the way
An interesting article in The Age by recently retired teacher Nigel Jackson: Best to let teachers wander once more
This task is to lead or guide each individual student out of the relative ignorance and incapacity of childhood and youth so that he or she will more and more readily find a suitable path through life in which to find unique fulfilment. There are no fixed rules for completing this task. This makes teaching open-ended, challenging and glorious.
Really, this view of good teaching that I am proposing is just the incarnation of the wisdom contained in the Chinese Tao Te Ching’s ”the way that is a way is not the way” and the Bible’s similar reminder that ”the spirit blows where it chooses to blow”.
This means that much of the very best teaching and learning that occurs in schools and in classrooms is informal, unexpected and illuminating. And for this to happen often, the educational structure must not become too regimented and fixed. My great fear is that school-teaching in Victoria is threatened with a kind of stifling.
Since then I have observed a gradual but ever-continuing bureaucratisation of education in Victoria, with various inappropriate exaggerations of the importance of assessment, fixation on state-mandated curriculums, the ”latest educational research”, ideological indoctrination or career preparation.
Teaching Climate Change
Teaching Climate Change, an interesting resource from The Australia Institute (with the support of Australian Ethical Investment).