11 December 2017

Newsletter Articles

Principals supporting Principals… Principals supporting Principles!

Kia Ora

Please find this week’s Monday Mailing below.

This is the last Monday Mailing for the term (I will be in London next Monday). I hope you have planned a lot of rest and recreation for over the break. This is an important time of the year where you should be enjoying all the good things life gives us, so make sure you do.

You can access all previous Monday Mailings by clicking here or going to http://www.wpa.ac.nz/1/newsletter_sets/1-monday-mailing/years/2017 in your web browser.

Kind regards

Tony Mangan
Glenview School

WPA Dates

Rant –

New Zealand Year 5 Students slip 10 places in International Reading Survey.

So in six years we have slipped 10 places 22 down to 32 out of 50. Heaven forbid we are even lower than our neighbours Australia (they will be singing the praises of Naplan). Is anyone out there surprised by these results? So what has changed in recent time. Let’s look at education in the last seven years.

Firstly. Education became a political football. The politicians knew best how to improve our ranking in the world and lead us to the promise land. They pitched schools against schools and parents against teachers and schooling in general. We, the teachers, were the enemy. If your child was failing, it was the schools fault. But wait, they had the answer, National standards. They were going to tell the teachers how best they should teach. This was going to be our saviour. Well it does not look like it has. National standard results have tended to be static (apart from the fact they aren’t standard). The best evidence of this is, especially with these latest results, the fact that even our more advantaged children are now falling behind.

Secondly. ERO too has become a political football. Where, before they were about improving education and schooling in general. They morphed into becoming the Government education police force. Overly obsessed with National standard results. It didn’t matter if your results were an accurate reflection of what was happening, if they weren’t over the 85% you were failing. Then there is this obsession with tracking progress and priority students. Is this the reason our more advantaged children are slipping?

Thirdly. Our New Zealand Curriculum document. A great document it is. But, the folk who developed this document based it on knowledge and teaching experience they had formed from the seven curriculum statement documents that came before. How many of our teachers today are aware of those documents. Even though I am not a fan of the endless objectives that came with them it did give you a sound understanding of the learning expectations in the different curriculum areas. Where do todays teachers get this now?

Fourthly. Professional development. What professional development is out there related to reading? I can remember when the MOE had reading advisers. These were teachers who specialised in reading. They went out into schools to work with staff. They trained lead teachers to run ERIC and LARIC programmes in their school communities. Great programmes that served teachers for many years. The PD out there now is usually based on some private company trying to sell a quick fix programme.

Finally, teacher training. Where does one start! How prepared are our trainees for the demands of teaching? Many of the trainees now do the one year graduate course. I am sure the advocates for the one-year course think it is more than enough time to train graduates to go into teaching. Well try and do a one year plumbing, building or electricians course to get your ticket, not likely, the industry will laugh at you. (Funnily enough if you have got your trade certificate in any of those trades you do qualify to do the one-year teacher course.) When the graduates do come out, they need to be well supported in their schools to develop further on the job. Are schools geared up today with the general expertise to do this? Don’t get me wrong there are some very promising graduates coming out of the training centres. But one has to ask, how many are really choosing teaching as a life-long vocation. Not many when you look at the statistics of how many leave within the first five years.

I have not even mentioned the other factors that have an impact on children’s ability to learn, social conditions in the last ten years, housing, dysfunctional families, impact of drugs on our families, the widening gap between rich and poor etc. Let alone the ongoing demands on teachers for having to fill the gaps of parents in bringing up children.

So what is the answer?

Do we need to go ‘Back to the Future?’

Do we need to overhaul our training institutions and programmes?

Should we be enticing the best students at school to choose teaching as a career or can any-one become a teacher? (After all we all went to school)

We seem to have a lot of research around what good teaching and teachers practice looks like. So why aren’t we seeing it coming out of our institutions?

Does the curriculum document need other packages behind it? Are all the answers on TKI?

Should the MOE be providing curriculum advisors like in the past (without a political agenda)?

Or is it simply that we are over reacting to these results.

As many of you have your final assembly, and you farewell your Year six or eight children for the last time. Is your thinking, the large majority of my children really are literate? I say yes. They may not all be achieving where we would like them to be (not everyone can run a 4minute mile, let alone a 10 minute mile for that matter), but we must send them out the gate knowing that education will help them get where they want to go, and be who they want to be. As long as they leave with that hope then education is serving its purpose. Perhaps the more discerning results of the survey where the statistics around bullying, tiredness and feeling hungry. Perhaps we should have National Standards for these!

Note: Opinions expressed in The Rant are those of the editor, and not necessarily those of the WPA.

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