Posts Tagged assessment
My schmick new assessment design!
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, research, university on April 26, 2012
Teaching at university can be tricky, mostly due to the emphasis on summative assessment.
Since starting this position in 2010 I have been attempting to infuse the unit I coordinate with greater amounts of project-based learning. However, in a context where students have little time or incentive to engage with classwork that isn’t formally assessed, it has been hard to reward things like student project work.
After three semesters of teaching English Curriculum Studies 1 I decided that a radically new assignment was in order.
Background:
Students used to do:
- Assignment 1 – Personal teaching philosophy statement and resource analysis
- Assignment 2 – Report on video lessons and learner needs observed
- Assignment 3 – Junior secondary English lesson plans
All of these assessment pieces were completed individually – no collaboration was required and no public audience was utilised.
From this semester onward, students now do:
- Assignment 1 – Personal teaching philosophy statement and resource analysis (same as before)
- Assignment 2 – Junior secondary English lesson plans (now completed in small groups of 2 or 3)
- Assignment 3 – A range of CHALLENGE TASKS published in a portfolio <– SCHMICK NEW TASK!
The New Task:
Many of the key ideas about inquiry-based and cooperative learning that I am working with can be found in a book extract provided by Edutopia: Teaching for Meaningful Learning by Brigid Barron & Linda Darling-Hammond.
Here is a brief extract – some words about project-based learning:
“Project-based learning involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event, or presentation to an audience. Thomas (2000) identifies five key components of effective project-based learning. It is: central to the curriculum, organized around driving questions that lead students to encounter central concepts or principles, focused on a constructive investigation that involves inquiry and knowledge building, student-driven (students are responsible for designing and managing their work), and authentic, focusing on problems that occur in the real world and that people care about.” (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 3; my emphasis)
What I’ve done in my new task is to create a poetry ‘project’ as one of 10 ‘challenges’ that students need to complete.
After trialling a poetry project last semester, I know that students see value in, and engage with this kind of learning. But, at the end of the day, students felt let down because the work they put into their projects didn’t ‘count’ towards their final grade.
Once I started messing around with a new assignment that gave them credit for their project work, it was too hard not to design a whole suite of ‘challenges’ that they could choose to take up! So, that’s what I’ve done – students decide what grade they want to get, and complete the number of challenges needed to obtain it.
‘Challenge-based learning‘ as a term has not gained as much traction as ‘project-based learning’, but I think there is something to be said for the difference in terminology. In my teaching context, students are completing a ‘project’, but there is a minimum standard they have to reach to be able to ‘pass’ the assessment. Also, there is less focus on a ‘driving question’ than a PBL task would have – more of an emphasis on the products needing to be made. Hence my use of the term ‘challenge’ in the overall task.
The Challenges:
OK, the easiest way to show you the assignment is to share copies of my assignment sheets:
CLB018-CLP408 challenge portfolio task
A matrix of challenge tasks is provided for students to choose from in assignment 3.
Students will receive a grade for Assignment 3 based on the number of challenges completed:
- 4 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = PASS
- 6 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = CREDIT
- 8 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = DISTINCTION
- 10 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = HIGH DISTINCTION!
CHALLENGE TASK peer assessment sheet
Note the peer assessment component of this task. This is something I am especially proud of, for a number of reasons! Not only am I hoping that this will result in a more sustainable marking practice for me (I will be checking/validating the peer marking, but no re-doing it), but it is also a strategy for getting the students to learn how to share their work and act as ‘critical friends’. I also think that having anopther preservice teacher assess your work in this context can be seen as providing an ‘authentic audience’ for student work.
Reflecting:
The student portfolios for this task are due next Friday, so I’ve yet to see how this new assessment plays out in real life.
One idea I have bubbling away about the teaching methods chosen is that ‘project-based’ learning can perhaps be broken down further as being either ‘inquiry-driven’ or ‘challenge-driven’ (and maybe even a third category, ‘play-driven’). But that’s a hierarchy that I’m still thinking through…
There is a lot going on here, I realise. But I’d seriously LOVE to hear feedback from my critical friends, including any students that end up reading this post 🙂
If you have any questions to ask, shoot them at me too! Obviously I’m quite proud of what I’ve constructed here, but in a few weeks it will be time to reflect again on how to improve for semester 2, so as they say…bring it!
Finding my Threshold Concepts
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, reflections, research, university on April 4, 2012
This semester I have been engaing in the final cycle of my teaching and learning action research project – part of what I do here at QUT as an ‘Early Career Academic’.
‘Constructing a community of practice in English Curriculum Studies 1 – online and offline’
Action research cycle:
- Planning and fact-finding: 2010, semester 2
- Phase 1 action: 2011, semester 1
- Phase 2 action: 2011, semester 2
- Phase 3 action: 2012, semester 1
- Report findings: 2012, semester 2
The buzz term for how to ‘do’ curriculum planning here at uni is constructive alignment. Anyone else having to use this term?
Basically, constructive alignment is what you do when you make sure your assessment tasks match your learning objectives, and that your lesson materials feed into this productively. (OK, so I slipped the word ‘productively’ in just there…can you tell I’m living in Queensland? Productive pedagogies, anyone?)
So, the first two phases of my action research have been all about getting the assessments to work for me and my unit, English Curriculum Studies 1. I inherited a bunch of learning objectives when I took on coordination of this unit, but in the end I found that the assessment tasks weren’t engaging students in the ways I knew could happen. In the ways I was sure could happen, anyway. All of the assessment pieces have now been modified or replaced (not allowed to change the learning objectives) and things are aligning much more constructively…
The last piece in the puzzle that I was really hoping to nut out in this third cycle is the establishment of threshold concepts for this unit.
A ‘threshold concept’ is the kind of concept that, once learned, cannot be unlearned. Once we grasp a piece of threshold knowledge, we pass over a barrier into new territory, where everything is seen anew with different eyes.
In the (bazillion) Powerpoint presentations I sat through last year as a new academic, I picked up the importance of using a few well-chosen threshold concepts to drive a unit of work. For teachers like me that prefer to use project-based and inquiry-based learning approaches, having a set of threshold concepts in mind that you want students to ‘get’ by the end of the experience looks to be an excellent anchor for lesson planning. Although these concepts are related to the official learning objectives of the unit, they do serve a different kind of function…and I really want to settle on what mine are!
Until this week I was still struggling to come up with suitable concepts.
But now, I struggle NO MORE!
I have been working on a summary video for students to watch at the half-way point in semester, while I am away at a conference. In the video I want to recap the main points learned from weeks 1-5 of the unit. The process of trying to identify what the ‘big ideas’ were amongst all of the super important stuff we learned wasn’t easy. But the process of having to present the ideas to my students (not just to my academic review panel at the end of this year…!) has really helped.
Which I guess just goes to show that even teachers need an authentic audience for their work.
Trying to keep the video short (under 5 minutes) also forced my hand – left to my own devices, I’m sure I could find plenty of threshold concepts, but you only need a few. The wording of what I’ve chosen isn’t quite right yet, but these are the six big points I have chosen:
- Your personal teacher identity is unique and reflects your personal experience, but will inevitably draw on many established philosophies and practices.
- In ‘English’ we study: semiotics, text and context.
- Language codes and conventions are socially constructed.
- Verbal/linguistic language is just one semiotic ‘code’; we also learn/teach audio, visual, spatial and gestural language.
- Literacy involves more than code breaking – we also make meaning, use texts functionally, and critique texts.
- Multiliteracies pedagogies are currently favoured in English curriculum theory.
I suspect this is still too many for 6 weeks, but there you go. We’ll see. Once I’ve finished the video I’ll post it up here on the blog. I still have to add the narration, but most of the images are in. I’m using Movie Maker and Audacity as my tools of the trade…I hope the students have time to watch the bloody thing! But even if they don’t, I’m glad I went through this process and am happy that I’ve found some threshold concepts to settle on, for now. And, with any luck, a shiny new resource at the end I can be proud of. Fingers crossed!
Guest Post: ‘I Have A Dream that the HSC Will End’
- Post to celebrate completion of my PhD: CHECK.
- Post with an update on my upcoming conference papers: CHECK.
So…where to next?
As fate had it, this decision was made for me, with the arrival of a piece of student writing in my inbox.
The author of the piece is a recently graduated HSC student, one whom I had the pleasure of teaching year 8 English, and coaching for debating 🙂 This is him counting down the days until the end of his exams:
I invite you to read his work (below), which he has given me permission to reproduce (along with his picture) in this post. Oriniginally published as a Facebook post on October 28th, it is a re-writing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous I Have a Dream speech, which has been adapted to make a satirical commentary on the HSC. It comes with a mild language warning (c’mon; it’s satire!), and is a brilliant example of a ‘textual intervention’.
I’m very proud to feature it here as my first ‘guest post’!:
*****
I Have A Dream that the HSC Will End
By B. Wylie
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our state.
Two score years ago, an a*shole bureaucrat, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, created the Higher School Certificate. This momentous decree came as a great source of pain and suffering to millions of NSW students who were about to be seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a sorrowful dusk which signalled the beginning of their long night of academic captivity.
But fourty four years later, the student still is not free. Fourty four years later, the life of the student is still sadly crippled by the manacles of standardised testing and the chains of rankings. Fourty four years later, the student lives on a lonely island of studying in the midst of a vast ocean of facebook updates. Fourty four years later, the student is still languished in the rooms of NSW high schools and finds himself an exile in his own class. And so we’ve come here today to dramatise a shameful condition.
In a sense we’ve come to this facebook note to cash a check. Read the rest of this entry »
Pedagogy or assessment – what comes first in PBL?
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, reflections, research, university on September 5, 2011
So many things to blog about at the moment…transmedia and transliteracy, the Gonski review of school funding…but in the thick of Semester 2 teaching I find myself inexorably drawn back to curriculum studies.
And goddess, please bless Bianca for coming through with a new blog post about Project Based Learning (PBL) to stimulate my thinking this week!
I have been trying to work out how to formally incorporate PBL into the structure of my unit English Curriculum Studies 1. This week I think I have a solution, which I’ll outline below. But first, to answer Bianca’s question: when I proposed this structure in a comment on her blog she asked:
Did you design the assessments or the pedagogy first?
And that question, RIGHT THERE, is our chicken and egg, am I right?
Because, as Bianca rightly points out, school teachers find it very challenging to engage in “inherent ‘assessment for learning’ within the rigid ‘assessment of learning’ framework already in place”. So, while it might seem logical that your pedagogy will determine your assessment, the ‘reality’ of teaching and learning puts this possibility beyond reach for most.
For some schools their ‘rigid assessment of learning framework’ is tied to NAPLAN exams, for others it is focussed more on Year 12 exit credentials. And in schools that claim not to be driven by external assessments, rigid assessment frameworks can still be constructed by Heads of Department (or others) who seek to place multiple additional constraints on teachers’ planning (e.g. “you MUST have a half yearly exam!”, “every Year 9 class must write an essay in term 1”)
The curriculum places constraints on assessment and pedagogy too, and I could start talking about the Australian Curriculum here. Instead I’ll show you what I built for the university semester context, and try to answer Bianca’s question from there.
Here is the draft outline for my unit in 2012:
- Weeks 1-4 focus: Inquiry based learning (assessment = critical/reflective essay) assessment as learning
- Weeks 5-7 focus: Project based learning (assessment = project + review of pedagogy used in class project) assessment for learning
- Weeks 8-9 focus: Challenge based learning (assessment = make lesson plans for English) assessment of learning
I can safely say that for this unit, I started with the assessment. Literally, I have adopted an existing unit with existing assessment pieces that take at least 6 months to get formally changed. So, while I have been tweaking each assessment piece each semester, I’ve been teaching it for 18 months now and a full overhaul of the structure is now needed to fully incorporate PBL and other constructivist approaches.
Beyond that initial point of departure though, I have oscillated between a pedagogy focus and an assessment focus each time I plan and change something in the unit.
I would say my major points of development around pedagogy and assessment were:
- Reviewing the balance of assessment FOR learning and OF learning in the existing unit. In the university context it is only possible to mandate summative assessment…so I had to reconsider my approach to build a learning environment where the learning process was valued.
- Reviewing the first summative assessment, which was a critical essay, gave me the idea to make the relevance or ‘connectedness’ of the opening weeks of the unit more apparent. Students now do a range of inquiry-based activities to help them engage in the scholarly material, motivated by the need to interrogate their own perspective.
- Activities planned for the first few weeks of the unit were redesigned around a new assessment that focussed on the students personal teaching philosophy. This increased the potential of the assessment to be FOR learning, I thought.
- Teaching the new opening to the unit was really affirming, but showed up the weaknesses in the pedagogy of weeks 5-7. A PBL approach was therefore introduced to ‘liven up’ this part of the unit. This coincides with the time in semester when students begin having heaps of assignments due, and I felt they needed a pedagogical experience that was less ‘intense’, and enjoyable enough to get them through the ‘hump weeks’!
- The PBL appraoch worked really well, but the students put a lot of work in that wasn’t rewarded in assignment grades. So I am now redesigning assignment 2 to include ‘project participation’ criteria so students can get their work on this counted in their final grade.
- aaand…MOST recently: because the final assessment of creating alesson plans really has proven a ‘challenge’, I’m going to use this to explore Challenge based learning. I see this as being the same as Project based learning, but where the outcome does not have to be presentation to an audience. Instead, the project outcome must ‘meet the challenge’. Think Mythbusters 🙂
You can see how thinking about assessment and pedagogy are totally bound together – thinking about one always raises questions for the other. Or, it should!
I’m still searching for material that can explain the realtionship between Inquiry, Project and Challenge based learning. I’ve tried to use them here in a complementary way, but tbh it’s been tough to find sources that relate the approaches to one another. I started off this process thinking they were slightly interchangable. Now I can see that each one is informed by a respect for ‘learning by doing’, but has its own unique flavour. But are these three the only three? Do they sit in a hierarchy of some kind? Are there other ‘Something-B-Ls’ out there that I don’t know about??
Who knows.
If you do, please add a comment! (I hope this helps someone out there!)
Challenges to developing a blended learning course
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, Lit_Review, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on June 17, 2011
This extract is from the article Development and Implementation of a “Blended” Teaching Course Environment in the most recent issue of JOLT:
Roadblocks/challenges to Developing a Blended Course
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to developing a blended course is the student fear factor. Many individuals in my class had never crafted a PowerPoint presentation, much less navigated in an online
discussion. Despite their familiarity with Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, MySpace, and instant messaging, the thought of being graded for online participation was somewhat threatening and intimidating. It was also difficult initially for students to understand the rationale for some assignments (such as Second Life). In future classes, more emphasis on business necessity, future usage, and SL current applications will be incorporated into the course pedagogy. Because there were many different types of assignments in this course (including group work, both on and off line), some students also expressed dissatisfaction with having to rely on team members. Use of the Team Agreement did however help to coalesce groups, and to give members a framework for expected behavior. Instructor feedback on the Team Agreement is essential in providing guidance regarding conflict resolution, assignment schedule, and interpersonal interaction among members.The blended model is a student-centered approach that allows the instructor to behave as a coach, a facilitator, and a cheerleader for his/her students. It is a way to let students lead in an environment in which they’re guided to success. In the words of Singh (2002, p. 476), “To be successful, blended [teaching]… needs to focus on combining the right delivery technologies to match the individual learning
objectives and transfer the appropriate knowledge and skills to the learner at the right time.”by Jacqueline Gilbert and Ricardo Flores-Zambada
Development and Implementation of a “Blended” Teaching Course Environment
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2011 pp. 244-260
This interests me because I have been considering including an assessment of online PLN participation in my unit next semester.
Given that this study found that “the thought of being graded for online participation was somewhat threatening and intimidating” for students, I’m going to avoid actually grading their participation per se. Rather, I’ve decided that students must show (in an assignment appendix) participation in their online PLN for the unit to achieve a Distinction (Grade ‘6’) or High Distinction (Grade ‘7’). That way, they either do it, or they don’t. They don’t have to feel anxious about quality.
Has anyone else done something similar to this? Making students demonstrate their PLN building? How can I do it – get them to attach a screen shot of three blog comments and five tweets? Would that suffice? Hmm…
The HSC again. and again.
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, HSC, reflections, school on December 16, 2010
In NSW yesterday Year 12 school leavers got their HSC results back. And again, we reflect.
so-and-so got x amount of Band 6s this year…should I teach more like them?
my kids didn’t go as well as they had hoped…did I fail them?
there were some great successes at our school…what pressures will this bring next year?
The dizzying heights…the devastating lows.
I’m sure this post / these tweets should have some ‘IMHO’s peppered through them, but stuff it – the HSC is an evil device.
I’m so proud of every HSC student who got through the year, and was beyond excited for my ex-students who got the results they sought (I always will be). Motivation, goals, mastery, achievement, I believe in them all. But the HSC provides them too sparingly, for students and their teachers.
And now it’s time for recovery. again.
Congratulations one and all – bring on 2011…
HSC English
For anyone wondering how Year 12 HSC students in NSW feel about high stakes external exams as a measure of their learning in English this year:
Sorry, I can’t confirm which school it came from…
(PS: Good luck studying for Paper 2 my dears!)
The nature of the beast
NAPLAN. MySchool. Data. Accountability. Planning.
Roger is bang on when he says that there are so many conundra in education.
But why? Is this really a result of ‘rank-and-file’ teachers unjustly mistrusting ‘the boss class’? Perhaps, in part.
But the problem we face in overcoming this is not as black-and-white as it seems. Historically schools have evolved to serve multiple functions in society, and it is these often competing functions that school leaders, edu-crats and politicians are faced with negotiating every day. This is a tricky business, and people will not always agree on what is being prioritised.
In my PhD research on the English curriculum I have explored Hunter’s genealogy of the major functions of schooling, and used this as a lens to reflect on the contradictions and challenges that are embedded in the HSC English syllabus. Hunter (1993) outlines the following functions of mass schooling in Australia:
Hunter rejects the notion that schools have ever served, or even aimed to serve, a singular, unified function in society. Rather, the various functions described above are contested and emphasised more or less at different points in history based on the political, cultural and economic imperatives of the time.
The idea that schools serve different functions is not controversial. What is important to recognise, however, is the importance of each of these functions, and the need to treat them as interrelated. Our role as educators cannot be to simply ‘back’ one function over another – for example, promoting individual expression and pastoral care while decrying the goals of skills and human capital development. Although these functions historically have come into competition, it is essential to recognise the important role that bureaucratic structures play in safeguarding equality within a social welfare state such as Australia.
In regards to NAPLAN, it is not the case that politicians want to crush individual expression in the pursuit of higher literacy standards. It is also not the case that teachers don’t care about skills development and resent regulative goals of ‘the boss class’ as a matter of principle.
What is worth considering, however, is this: what political, cultural and economic imperatives are reflected in the priorities set by the bureaucracy?
Despite reservations about standardised literacy and numeracy testing, teachers ultimately were asked to support ELLA/SNAP, and later NAPLAN, in good faith. The tests were framed as a diagnostic tool. Schools were dissuaded from ‘cramming’ for the tests, as this would negate its diagnostic capacity. We were promised that these tests were an example of schools fulfilling an essential bureaucratic function – ensuring that all students had equal access to diagnosis of their skills, and that resources could be allocated efficiently to areas of need.
The introduction of the MySchool website, however, betrays a warped set of priorities…the political, cultural and economic imperatives of publishing NAPLAN data as a means of measuring school success over-prioritises the regulative function of schooling. Orderliness and control emerge as the ultimate product when systems are put in place that construct and solidify school hierarchies, encouraging a consumer culture in schools where the discourse of ‘parent choice’ trumps the discourse of ‘school community building’.
I hate the MySchool website. Not because I don’t want parents to have access to information about schools, but because I believe that the information that is currently privileged does pose a destructive force to schooling functions that I hold dear. I believe that comparing schools based on test scores poses a serious neglect of the pastoral function of schooling – it is difficult to foster a caring and humane environment in school in which to grow and develop when your school is labelled as ‘failing’, and parents of ‘good’ students start shopping elsewhere. Likewise, in successful schools, staying on top of the ‘market’ can lead to undue pressure to succeed in external testing, and a neglect of student welfare and broader curriculum goals.
I fully support schools and teachers who will join the moratorium and refuse to deliver the NAPLAN test this year. Not because I don’t see the value of NAPLAN, but because as educators who oppose harmful government policy it is the only card we have to play in a system that gives teachers virtually no voice in the policy and structures they will have to work within.
It is a shame that teachers who oppose the MySchool website, and are prepared to take action despite political pressure, are often painted as ‘data-haters’, ‘parent-haters’ and ‘boss-haters’. They are none of these things. They are just people who feel out-and-out ignored by their political leaders and think that something bigger is at stake than missing a year of data.
Sir Ken Robinson FTW!
The first TED talk I ever watched was by Ken Robinson, and I was enthralled and moved to reconsider my own practice by his explanation of how schools work to kill creativity.
He now has a book out called Element . Thanks to Raman for posting a link to this five minute interview with Sir Ken about the new book and his views on standardized testing:
HSC English: Standard or Advanced?
Does your school offer both Standard and Advanced English courses for the HSC? How about ESL? Extension courses? If not – why not?
This is a question that has been debated over the past couple of days via email between members of the NSW English Teachers’ Association.
One member asked: Do you think it is wise to only offer the Advanced course to students? His school leaders have been advised that this will lead to higher ATAR scores for students at the school.
Here are some of the responses that were given via email in support of offering a diverse range of courses:
“The emotional pressure on students to learn (=compete and achieve) at an Advanced level was very detrimental in the schools I observed [that had decided to take away the option for Standard English]. Students’ self concept was very low for the bottom achievers in the Advanced stream, where in schools that also run Standard these kids might still perform lower, but they do so with the knowledge that they are in a different, less ‘academic’ course. Or, they find themselves at the top of the Standard course, and their self concept goes up. Offering Advanced-only also limits your capacity to differentiate learning for students, and it builds a distorted sense of entitlement and expectation among parents.”
“I have been discouraging some students who want to do Advanced. Last year when I arrived there seenmed to be some students who really should have taken Standard. Advanced can be soul destroying for them and can impede the progress of others.”
“I was also put under pressure [to increase] value-added – they argue that it is better for everyone to do Advanced because scaling boosts poor Advanced marks above good Standard marks and there may be an infinitesimally better uni ranking as a result. Whether this is actually the case or not is difficult to accurately gauge – there seems to be a lot of numerical flim-flam in the value-adding business. What is clear, however, is that students who struggle in Advanced and then withdraw from discussions and activities they feel are beyond them engage much more readily in Standard classes and find themselves enjoying English – heaven forfend!”
“I remember this type of pressure being applied at a previous school of mine – with the result of good Standard students being forced to do Advanced. That type of auditor-driven statistical analysis does not take into account the different kind of intellectual demands required to be a success in Advanced. At my current school, we have scaled back our Advanced classes because there were a number of students who were not suited to the contextual and researching demands of the Advanced syllabus – they were also not motivated readers”
Comments like these about student welfare were reinforced by teachers who had marked HSC English scripts and saw the outcome at the other end:
“Anyone who has marked Advanced will know there are many students out there who really should not have sat the course and would have been better off in Standard, where they would have had a much better opportunity to show what they knew and understood.”
“From the point of view of Advanced HSC marking, as many of you will have experienced, it is becoming more frequent to see that “poor child” who should have been advised to do Standard, often in the middle of a bundle of very competent students.”
Some teachers were in favour of pushing the Advanced course, and gave a mixture of pedagogical and statistical reasons for this:
“There is an ongoing debate about this in schools around mine. The pressure in schools is to achieve better than state mean and this can be easily achieved by encouraging students to do Standard rather than Advanced… I believe this is anti educational and think any student who is interested should have the opportunity to do the more interesting and challenging Advanced course. In terms of value added, this does us no favours [to push students into the Standard course]. Have a look at the difference in the curves for Advanced and Standard on the value added graph. Again I could easily make the actual course results look better by encouraging more students to do Standard and indeed have at times been pressured to do so. If you run the Advanced students against the overall English Value Added curve you get a different picture, however.”
“Our students do seem to get a strong sense of achievement from doing Advanced and actually engage well with texts which have not much relationship to their lives and experience. I agree that the Standard course is difficult since it is so language based and that is what students have trouble with…We don’t not offer Standard because it is too easy, but because our students can and do gain a great deal from the Advanced course and they value it. Or is it their parents? It just seems a pity that it is much more difficult to get very high marks in Standard than Advanced but it is historic. Remember why we brought in the common strand in the first place?”
Other teachers had arguments that spoke to the benefits of or need for the Standard course:
“What we have done is to present the challenges of the Advanced course to Year 10, outlining exactly the demands. We have also challenged Advanced students in Year 11 to consider seriously the demands of the course. This has meant many more “borderline” students have chosen Standard, either at the end of Year 10 or the end of the Preliminary course. As a result, we have had excellent Standard results from students who either deliberately chose to do Standard, or changed at the end of Preliminary when they struggled in the Advanced. The end result in those cases were very happy students and parents.”
“We certainly could not omit Standard from our curriculum, and fortunately, we are also able to maintain a more academic focus by running one advanced class. I hope that by doing that, we are meeting the diverse learning needs of the type of students who attend a school such as ours. I know this is not the same issue – but spare a thought for the large number of country schools who are struggling to offer courses and to do that, both Standard and Advanced are offered in the same room, sometimes with both 11 and 12 together as well. That is the only way their wide range of learning needs (for just a small number) can be met – either that, or Advanced is not offered at all.”
The role of school administrators in balancing the need for high results against student welfare and quality learning was also raised:
“Perhaps some school administrators need to be reminded of such determiners for course choice as “needs, interests and abilities of students”- not to mention their health and well-being. When there is a significant percentage of boarders these factors are particularly critical.”
“I think the whole debate is disgusting because no-one is talking about what we think students should know; i.e. education. Instead the whole debate seems to be about what puts the school in a better light statistically. Let’s worry about what our students should learn and where they are at, not what looks better for our school. How has this abominable shift in what teachers are thinking happened? Well we all know the answer to that: and the answer is not the National Curriculum.”
“It has been interesting to see two distinct problems emerge from this question and also dispiriting that in both cases it is all about perceived numerical and statistical success, with anti-educational ‘solutions’ imposed on English faculties from above.”
The debate itself was in fact surprising to some:
“Coming from an area of the state that is maybe too far in the bush, I have never realised that this would be an issue. I know that some schools, for very good reasons such as being selective, have none or very few Standard students, and that is just a given, but I would have thought that the majority of schools in the state would not fall into that category. I guess that might be blissful lack of knowledge or awareness on my part!”
I’d (we all!) be interested to hear how other schools and English faculties are approaching this question.
When I put the question out to Twitter this afternoon, this is what tweeple had to say:
“I think English should be an elective course. If they haven’t got it by year 10 why go further?”
“Really? [that not all states have mandatory English] so only NSW is dumb enough to think senior english is for all.”
“I think students should be allowed to go with what interests them – as long as they understand the possible implications 4 ATAR”
“NO! [to only offering Advanced]…particularly for gender focused classes, does the fact 45 marks are the same Area Of Study matter?”
“Imagine a male, studying Chem, bio, physics, a couple of Maths subjects, Standard English is perfect…”
“What about the kids doing 2 VET, ITP, PE, Industrial tech, do they need standard English?”
“Eng so much more than writing essays 4 exams. Lets push boundaries so studs fall in love with English”
“I know pressure of getting good results! Would like to think we can make results gr8 via love of learning. Combine both 4 synergy”
How do you decide what HSC Engish courses to run and who gets to do them??
Nominated!
- Australian English Teachers
9 members
A group for English teachers in Australia to discuss the books they are reading, and the books th...
Books we've read
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Share book reviews and ratings with Australian English Teachers, and even join a book club on Goodreads.
Kelli McGraw 
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