NCEA review a titanic challenge
According to Auckland secondary school principals (Sunday Star Times, July 2), there are 15 different reviews of education going on right now. This number, although possibly ‘‘groomed’’ to bolster the principals’ agenda of slowing down the current NCEA review, made me feel very tired.
One reason I’m happy to be a retired teacher is that I’ve escaped the relentless cycle of change to which exhausted and harried teachers are constantly subjected.
Sometimes educational reforms are based on sound research and focused on the interests of ‘‘learners’’, as we call pupils now, but in my experience, rarely did any reform come with enough support or resourcing to make it effective.
I struggle to remember anything more than a few workshops or an ‘‘expert’’ parachuted in to deliver the latest ideas, often in a format that exemplified the least effective kind of teaching. Oh, the irony.
Sometimes we got supporting resources, but they invariably needed adaptation – certainly that was the case with NCEA assessment resources.
On one memorable occasion in the 1990s, the ‘‘experts’’ arrived to educate a large group of teachers at my school on the latest Ministry of Education take on assessment, the details of which are happily erased from my memory. What I do remember is our uncharacteristic rebellion when presented with ideas we found unreasonable and impractical.
What was worse was that the ‘‘workshop’’ was delivered in a tone that implied we were unforgiveably behind the times and not to be trusted as teaching professionals. We were, unusually, united in our disgust at the waste of our time and the taxpayer’s money.
There’s no question NCEA needs reviewing. It has many good features, but its problems – such as over-assessment, the crushing teacher workload, a puzzling complexity, and a widely held suspicion that grading of internally assessed Achievement Standards is not fair – have hamstrung its credibility.
However, going by past experience, teachers will be at least nervous and probably cynical about both the review’s process and its proposed reforms.
I won’t bore readers with the details of the Ministerial Advisory Group’s discussion paper – you can read it online for yourself (www.education.govt.nz/ ministry-of-education/consultation). In summary, it contains six ‘‘Big Opportunities’’ – the suggested reforms – and lays out their pros and cons and how they might be implemented.
Some have instant appeal – for example, easier access to special assessment conditions (like reader-writer assistance) for students hampered in external exams by learning disabilities.
Some ideas, like the project-based Level 1 NCEA, read like the fantasies of a cotton-brained dreamer who has never been inside a secondary school, let alone dealt day-to-day with the varied range of 25 to 30 15-year-olds that front a year 11 subject teacher at the start of the year.
This ‘‘Big Opportunity’’ doesn’t take account of the ‘‘single-cell’’ design of most secondary school classrooms; the sparse resourcing of almost everything a teacher needs to do their job properly; and staffing ratios that fund one teacher for around 25 pupils.
I know I sound like the classic grumpy old teacher, resistant to change and prickly about newfangled ideas. But I’m not. I know from my teacher friends and acquaintances that new and exciting approaches to teaching and learning are coming down the pipeline.
If they are successful and supported in their innovations, primary and intermediate schools will deliver a quite different kind of pupil into the secondary system, and it will need to change in response.
A number of secondary schools have started down the path to change, albeit hampered by sparse support. But the NCEA review implementation timelines of one to five years are unrealistic for the majority, and must take into account education from year 1 up if the more radical changes proposed are to have any chance of success.
Let’s hope that Education Minister Chris Hipkins is true to his word that the discussion document’s Big Opportunities are merely suggestions, and that more practical reforms will emerge from the discussion, the kind that will take us further down the road rather than pitch national assessment over a cliff.
Politicians, and those they recruit to do their will, appear to think that changing the structures of education will be enough to secure a bright future for New Zealand’s young people. Why is it not obvious that assessment systems, curriculum documents and flash new buildings are peripheral to the most important element in education – the teachers?
Reforming educational structure alone amounts to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, because without a top-rate teaching profession to make them work, even the most expensive, extensive reforms will fail. The most important question for Hipkins to answer is this: where are the reviews and reforms that prioritise a strong, dedicated, and highly knowledgeable teaching profession?
Where are the reviews and reforms that prioritise a strong, dedicated, and highly knowledgeable teaching profession?