Curriculum Council PD events

Curriculum council events are always attended with a healthy amount of skepticism. They have typically been fairly patronising towards teachers in their approach, devoid of usable content and fairly defensive of their purpose.

The most recent compulsory moderation was the latest shmozzle. The requirements sent to teachers during the reporting period were as follows for each course gathering materials for four students, an A, B, C & D student:

"Each file must consist of all completed assessment tasks that have contributed to the grade for the first semester unit or all tasks completed so far if units are being delivered concurrently, including:

• the assessment outline for the units/s
• the tasks/ task briefs/ task descriptions and marking keys indicating the allocation of marks
• a complete set of all marked tasks for each student (Including the Semester 1 Examination if one is used).

It is advisable that schools supply photocopies of the assessment tasks (not the originals). Where possible indications of the school and students name should be removed from each of the tasks and the student work."

This might sound like an easy task, but photocopying and anonymising 4-5 tasks for four students (up to 10 pages per task) plus a 10 pg exam, marking keys, unit outlines, descriptors is about 240 pages of photocopying and a fair amount of work at a busy time of year. Do this for two courses and it is 500 pages of photocopying.

Teachers would have appreciated knowing the requirement at the start of the year and then the task would have had negligible impact (as it could have been collected as the term progressed). As there is no moderation generally in year 11, these materials are not normally kept in the same ordered manner year 12 materials are kept. There were many stories of teachers needing to spend considerable time during the break gathering materials. This may have been exacerbated by a lack of feedback from school admin to teachers of requirements as information became available.

The task itself on the day involved 10 teachers examining the marking of fellow teachers and stating whether their grade based on a cursory inspection of the results of students. The process failed to some degree because 80% of DET schools were using the same exam (from the TDC). Thus what we saw was the same exam 5-6 times, we examined the percentage score of the exam and defined a grade accordingly (80%+ -A, 65-80% B, 50-65% C and 35-50% D) or thereabouts depending on the level of difficulty of associated assessments.

A better use of time (but not the purpose of the meeting as I was chastised by the Curriculum Council person at great length) would have been to swap EPWs, discuss timing and difficulty levels of the courses and how students are performing in the courses. I was told to ensure that I wrote my feedback down. I responded that I had been down that path before and would no longer spend time on unread feedback but she was welcome to feed back my concerns. I find my blog a much more therapeutic venue for developing my understanding of the coursework.

There were some key findings:

It was reported by teachers that there is major concern about students passing from 2CD to 3AB in year 12 as the difficulty jump is seen as more than possible for the majority of students (many students are destined to repeat the same course). Another issue has been raised that there is not enough "teaching time" for low ability students in the 1BC course which seems to be more focused on assessing past learning than having time to teach new material.

The Curriculum Council representative raised issues with the Saddler 3AB text stating that it was flawed and that the Westone resources were superior. I nearly fell over when she said that, as I have found the Westone resources near useless as it is far too investigative for my liking. It should be noted though that this may be my teaching limitation and a reflection of my cohort, rather than an issue with the Westone resources. The usability of the OT Lee materials were questioned by a number of teachers (although I like them as a supplementary text) and in general it was considered that Saddler texts were the preferred text, albeit you needed to be careful where content exceeded the course requirements.

There is a lot of confusion about what the TEE papers will look like and teachers are waiting impatiently for example papers. It was generally considered that it would have been preferable to have been given full TEE exemplar papers for each module before schools had to create and run courses.

My favourite issue raised though related to a hearsay Curriculum Council comment made by a teacher in the 3A MAS moderation meeting that the curriculum for the 3A courses is aimed at 30% of mathematics students as opposed to the old Introcalc & G&T course that aimed at about 10% of students. This raised mirth from the whole room of senior teachers who indicated that if this was the case, the course was failing in its objective.

As the most junior member at the 3A moderation meeting I attended, I did appreciate the feedback given by the more senior members. For this the meeting was worthwhile.

ta!

Board game supplies

I've been a fan of local stores, but paying retail Gamesworld prices is just ridiculous. I've recently made four transactions with Bestgames.com.au out of Sydney and been very happy.

Battlelore was $160 at Gamesworld and $115 at BestGames , and managed to get Runebound (Second Edition), Race for the Galaxy and Dominion for $213 (about $70 each).
Tactics (just off London Court in the city- a little hard to find if you don't know where to look) is cheaper than Gamesworld if you are looking for a physical store in Perth.

There was a problem with Race for the Galaxy, Bestgames tried to rectify it, notified me and offered to refund my money or to wait another week. It was one game of three, I'm happy to wait.

The web based orders from Bestgames were ~3 days delivery by courier. They even offered me a discount when I wrote a review for them on Battlelore. Shipping is free over $100. Nice people.
There are others; serepeco.com.au (offer to beat any price), gamesparadise.com.au (that has Battlelore at $99, free postage over $85 and also has physical stores) are two I have looked at but not ordered from.

I like the instant gratification of buying and playing games on the same day, but a 50% markup is just plain silly. Shame on you Gamesworld, because of you I'll wait my three days by mail order.

If you're thinking of playing some out of the ordinary board games, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ is a good place to start. Days of Wonder, Rio Grande, Fantasy Flight and Z Man all publish great games.

Now to wait and order Arkham Horror, Steam and Power Grid later in the year.

:-)

Arkanoid Clone

Here's a basic outline of an Arkanoid clone, made by modifying the space invaders code of last week (it was done in a day!).

Click here to play.

Click here for source.

To complete this I had to use polar coordinates, bearings, reflection, complementary/supplementary angles, recursion and a lot of boolean logic.

The paddle reflection is not perfect and the game could use more levels. There is an issue with ball speed that I need to resolve. It doesn't work in other than 1024x768.

A link here to the space invader clone of last week.

As always, the games are written in Java using Netbeans. All of the game logic written by yours truly. Feel free to do use the code as you see fit.

Enjoy!

Ms Gillard you are a dill!

Here's a link to the latest nonsense by Ms Gillard.

"It's not about raw scores," Ms Gillard said.
"We want to compare like schools - schools serving similar populations, so we can tell what difference the teaching is making."
"If you see one school going streaks ahead, that means there is great practice there we should be sharing.
"And if you see one school that is falling way behind, that means we should be doing something about that school because it is under performing and it can do better."

Ms Gillard - teaching is not the only factor in performance. Shall we also grade community support, funding, parent capability, parent education, family income, proportion of single parents, strong administrative leadership and support, an interactive P&C, effective behaviour management policy. It is not just teaching that makes a school good and these factors cannot be graded in simplistic socio-economic indicators.

So.. do we just teach to the test to gain good results and forget about whole student needs? If a student is not academic, do we give them the weakest teachers and reserve our finest teachers for those that bring academic results? Do we pander to teachers that only will stay if they get certain classes? Will the tables measure actual progress or focus on academic performance (if they do measure progress will they use NAPLAN/WALNA and ignore the basic timing issues that occur in low socio-economic schools?).

So I ask again.. what purpose does this have in being released to the public? To remind parents that the school they are sending their child to is not as good as the elite schools in the Western suburbs or the G&T schools in the state school system?

If we are only looking for improvement - release league tables to staffing and strategic planning. After all it is these two parts of DET that need the information. By releasing this information to parents you are seriously hindering reform in troubled schools. The students that the school needs most to benefit from reform just won't come.

If you want to release this information - do so when schools are well funded and outperforming private schools. To do it now after years of underfunding in the system and poor curriculum support is inappropriate. Unless of course the agenda is to close schools and sell assets. After all education is the single biggest burden on government (and the single biggest eliminator of class difference as we are all entitled to a good education).

It is just another teacher bashing that is on the way, with primitive statistical analysis used to try and correct schools in political time frames inappropriate to education.

I heard a suggestion that we should create league tables for politicians.. Promises vs actual over the past 10 years. Set up league tables for local pollies on how often they are seen and how many members of the public they have spoken to outside of polling times. Identify how many times they have spoken in parliament and made a contribution to government (as opposed to oppositional backbiting). How many times they have been seen doing stupid things in public. Then we could re-release this information at polling time.

Education has no place in politics and league tables are just nonsense, aimed to appeal to naive voters. I'd like to meet a person in education that thinks league tables are a good idea.

Only the best possible education for all our children is what matters. The rich should not be the only ones with access to the finest education. Education is the most valuable privilege in Australia and it is our way to ensure that all in Australia feel Australian and have an opportunity to succeed, regardless of race, religion, sex or any other demographic you care to mention.

.. and that's the way it should stay.