The Broadford Secondary College approach to understanding history.
Impressive.
Students from across the year levels at Broadford Secondary College will be travelling again to England, Belgium and France to study and experience first-hand, the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars 1914-18 and 1939-1945.
They have been honoured by an invitation to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate.
Teachers teaching misconceptions: a study of factors contributing to (US) high school biology students’ acquisition of biological evolution-related misconceptions
Research has revealed that high school students matriculate to college holding misconceptions related to biological evolution. These misconceptions interfere with students’ abilities to grasp accurate scientific explanations and serve as fundamental barriers to understanding evolution. Because the scientific community regards evolution as a vital part of science education, it is imperative that students’ misconceptions are identified and their sources revealed.
The purpose of this study was to identify the types and prevalence of biological evolution-related misconceptions held by high school biology teachers and their students, and to identify those factors that contribute to student acquisition of such misconceptions, with particular emphasis given to the role of the teacher.
We shouldn’t have to!
It appears from contact with family and colleagues at what appears to be the largest state-wide teacher stop-work action ever held in Melbourne, Australia today, we are still very much in the cycle of what I like to call “retail economics and policy planning”.
It is sad to see such limited public debate about what is REALLY happening in schools, not just in Victoria, but across the country.
At a time when we have more information, data and knowledge about both TEACHING and LEARNING, we are still destined for what appears to be a policy debate that does not get much beyond either “kicking a teacher” or demanding unlimited funds with little or no accountability.
It is an insult to offer those in the service of educating our young such limited salaries, career structures and resourcing. Likewise, this will always appear to be the case as long as the teaching service allows a quasi-profession to be externally controlled, cajoled and manipulated because it does not manage and oversee its own standards and status.
It seems, the major actors in current policy are happy to frame the debate in terms of choices that perhaps even Faust would not consider. Although such policy positions play well on TV and Radio i.e “We need to reform teaching”, “we need to get rid of poor teachers” or “our schools are crumbling”, ” our rankings are falling”, we seldom discuss the opportunities a bi-partisan, multi-party commitment to education would bring to the country as a whole.
The half-truths and selective reasoning for political-gain, [at all levels] while well-crafted, is simply that, well-crafted. Our lack of cohesion and focus, our lack of collective support for the teaching service as one of the key strategic industries of our country’s current and future prosperity, is the key to many other social and economic policy dilemmas. Just ask the residents of Hackney.
We have in fact seen enrolments in non-government schools reach approximately 34% of total enrolments and yet concurrently, we have seen the rise of policy and public debate about “falling standards” and “falling rankings”. The shift of student enrolments to non-government schools [without apparent academic improvement] and the concentration of lower-performing students in many government schools is a challenge often simply ignored, it appears, by many policy makers.
A lot has been made of discussions about spending and OECD rankings in the last few weeks and months. Here is a little chart that shows spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product and the OECD Country Rankings in PISA Tests in Maths, English and Science.
Dear reader, I would simply ask you to look closely at this graph below and ask yourself a few things about Australia’s rankings, mindful of the fact that MOST of the TEACHERS that were responsbile for the PISA results in 2000 are still in schools now.
Question. What has changed?
Question: What should we do now?
This chart requires flash.
Could you pick two of these? Education, Competitiveness, Civil Society
Vale Jack Keating.
A teacher, colleague, mentor and friend; Jack, you will be missed.
Those that have had anything to do with post-compulsory education in Victoria, Australia or around the world, will understand the loss to our field.
Thank you Jack.
Lector si monumentum requiris circumspice
On a warm, almost balmy evening in Melbourne, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural [and very heavily subscribed] Professorial Lecture by Professor John Hattie, entitled “The Future of Measurement – making learning visible” as part of the Dean’s Lecture series at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.
Returning to the university grounds is always a pleasure and the 1888 courtyard did not disappoint. The work of the Univeristy of Melbourne in the field of education has always been innovative and often challenging the status-quo. The work of the Graduate School, in general, and that of centres such as the Centre for Research on Education Systems (formerly CPELL), are always at the fore-front in their fields.
Adding once again to the impressive depth and breadth of research talent, the Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Professor Field Rickards, introduced and welcomed Professor Hattie, who has recently been appointed as the Director of The Melbourne Education Research Institute (MERI) which is the umbrella agency for research activities of the Graduate School of Education.
The focus of Professor Hattie’s presentation was the evolution of testing and measurement techniques and the opportunities that new developments in technology bring to the development of measurement and feedback systems for classroom teachers.
As someone that has a healthy, constructive and professional suspicion of schools and teaching, I view the work of John Hattie as very important.
He posited that we are at a cusp in understanding, technology and delivery that would allow a new regime of online and other feedback systems, encouraging teachers to genuinely and routinely moderate and explicitly apply what they learn about the progress of students they teach.
This can be near-or-real-time, moderated, researched based and most importantly,
replicable between class-room teachers, across schools and even systems. This has the potential to profoundly effect what we understand is possible in a classroom and school.
I have no-doubt it would also fundamentally reform teacher-education.
The abstract for the lecture stated:
Measurement invades so many aspects of our life, particularly in our schools. Indeed schools are awash with test data. Most of these tests look like those of 50 years ago. During the past ten years a new revolution has been occurring leading to fascinating new ways to think about measurement. These include the use of technologies, changing conceptions of how to assess the qualities of tests, the measurement of progress, assessing cognitive processes and the globalisation of measurement.
This lecture will outline this revolution, showing how many of these advances can be included in a reporting engine accessible to teachers. These assessment reports can make learning more visible to the student and the teacher.
Professor Hattie referred to his vast research [those of you who have followed my posts over the years will be aware of these] on student learning and his major meta-analyses on influences on achievement.
Those interested in student achievement, teacher effectiveness and the mysteries of cognitive improvement will do well to follow the work of Melbourne Education Research Institute over the coming years.
Links:
If ever there was essential reading for every teacher and every teacher-educator, the work of Professor John Hattie from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, would be at the top of my reading list.
The clarity and focus of such an extensive, system-wide meta-study that focusses on the EFFECTs of what teachers, schools and education systems DO is very compelling.
Professor Hattie delivered one of the key-note presentations at the 2007 EARLI conference [European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction]
The abstract states:
The session will overview a synthesis of over 600 meta-analyses of effects on achievement, highlighting the major themes that influence student learning. From these themes, the presentation will demonstrate the development of an assessment model of student learning that has been available and extensively used in NZ elementary and high schools over the past 5 years. A particular theme of the assessment model has been methods for helping teachers see and understand student progress, enable them to set targets/high expectations, and provide feedback so that there are more aware of the importance of some of the key competencies that act as enhancers or barriers to learning.
I would highly recommend the work of Professor Hattie to all involved in educational research. I would suggest you start by reading his Inaugural Lecture from August 1999; see the link at the bottom of this page.
In this presentation, Professor Hattie presents three parts to his “story”. These are
According to reports, TEACHING students would not graduate from university unless they passed national skills tests, under a Labor plan to improve literacy and numeracy in Australian schools.
Source: Labor plan to lift skills of teachers. Theage.com.au
Teacher inquiry report now available. A unified, national approach to improve teacher education in Australia is the predominant theme of the House of Representatives Education and Vocational Training Committee’s report on the inquiry into teacher education.
The report, Top of the Class, makes a total of 12 recommendations. It proposes a powerful reform package of practical and achievable measures that address the most pressing and long-standing issues in teacher education. [Government Education Portal News Headlines] [Central Ranges LLEN CEO Library]
How and why has teacher quality changed in Australia?. International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, the report compares those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. [Andrew Leigh]