Category: A Curriculum for Excellence

Assessment of vocational training, Australian style

An interesting principle we should adopt?

Discovered via a comment (No. 9) on Matthew Taylor’s fascinating open letter to Michael Gove about where he’s trying to take education in England.

In Australia’s vocational training system, they have a principle that you can’t use as an assessment tool anything that is not required to do the job for which you are being trained. So, when assessing a welder, you can’t ask them to compose an essay about welding as part of the assessment: the job does not require that degree of literacy. You can ask them to complete a safety form, as that is a requirement of the job. This principle makes traditional teachers uncomfortable at first, but what you soon learn is that it is no less rigourous to ask them to be able to perform different types of welds using different materials under exam conditions. And in the end, would you want the guy building the train you ride to work to have been assessed that way, or to have written an essay about it?

The emerging role of student as contributor


Find more videos like this on NL Connect

One of the key benefits from the use of the web in schools is its ability to turn artificial, “pretend” learning activities into authentic, relevant experiences. For example, writing for a real, potentially world-wide audience is more engaging than writing in a jotter for an audience of one or two people.

This video, from Alan November, takes this idea further than I’ve seen before. He starts from the gradual erosion of the contribution historically made by young people to their community, and then shows how this property of the web can be exploited to enable learners in classrooms to now become contributors by taking on jobs such as global communicator, global researcher, tool builder and internal collaborator. These, of course, are exactly the sorts of skills now being identified world-wide as important to 21st century societies, such as the “four capacities” of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence.

Via Frank Crawford

Helping students survive recession: an enabler of school change?

What might schools do to help students find employment during a recession?

Charlie Hoehn‘s e-Book “The Recession-Proof Graduate” has been getting a lot of readers since it caught the attention of Seth Godin.

He includes this frank perspective on the value of being able to use typical productivity applications in today’s job market.

If your skill set on your resume consists of “Proficient in Microsoft Office”, then you have no marketable skills. Knowing how to create a document, format a PowerPoint, or organise a spreadsheet are not things you can brag about — those are things every employer expects, like knowing how to pronounce your own name, or remaining continent during office hours.

So, if those skills are taken for granted, what does Charlie think does matter? His examples include:

  • using Google Reader as a learning resource
  • learning to craft good blog posts
  • learning to work remotely (i.e. working virtually, without supervision)
  • learning skills that are in high demand, and slightly difficult to learn (e.g. from free web tutorials)
  • creating a blog, so that prospective employers “Have something positive to look at when they Google your name”

Schools could help with developing these skills, but we’re certainly not there yet. How do you teach a student to create their personal blog, or craft blog posts, for example, if blogs sites are banned by your school’s web filters?

Maybe, though, starting to flesh out a set of “recession survival” skills and finding ways to integrate them into learning activities through Curriculum for Excellence outcomes and experiences,  could be a worthwhile direction to take?  Who knows, the urgency of helping students get through the recession might just enable us to dismantle some of the current barriers.

Edinburgh Chamber Looking to Glow to Improve School Links

Glow Meet could soon be enabling new links between schools and industry across Edinburgh, thanks to Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Education Policy Group.

At today’s meeting of the Group, chairman Ray Harris of Edinburgh’s Telford College identified the development of school / industry links as one of the key themes to be progressed this year. This links strongly with the Curriculum for Excellence principle of Relevance.

Children should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future.

Earlier discussions on this had flagged up that many of the barriers to developing links were associated with the overheads involved in organising the physical travel and supervision.  Not only does this present difficulties for schools, there are similar difficulties for organisations faced with hosting school children on their sites. Glow Meet offers the possibility of developing virtual links at much lower cost, so I’ll be meeting with Roger Horam of the Chamber to explore the possibilities and get a pilot link-up organised.

Possibilities discussed included:

  • Link-ups with a experienced professionals, to allow students to find out about their jobs
  • Link-ups with recent school-leavers, to find out what was and wasn’t useful from school
  • Link-ups with specialised people, of interest to only a few students, which could be advertised to schools Edinburgh or Scotland-wide
  • Recording of these Glow Meet sessions for future careers staff use

It was also agreed to set up a blog to record progress, which will be set up on edubuzz soon.

Curriculum for Excellence: Building the Curriculum 3

Building the Curriculum 3, a recent framework for developing learning and teaching approaches to Curriculum for Excellence, is a thought-provoking read. For those keen to get on with it, it provides a very comprehensive checklist of dos and don’ts, and it’s generally quite readable.

That’s not to say it would win any prizes from the plain English people. Some parts would have benefited from more ruthless editing, such as this on Principles of Curriculum Design:

The principles of curriculum design apply at all stages of learning with different emphases at different stages. The principles must be taken into account for all children and young people. They apply to the curriculum both at an organisational level and in the classroom and in any setting where children and young people are learners. Further consideration to applying these principles is given in the sections of this paper looking at the different stages of learning.

There’s much less mention of vocational education than I’d expected, but maybe my expectations had been raised by recently reading the OECD report on Quality and Equity in Scotland’s Schools. The OECD’s recommendation for a bolder and broader approach to vocational studies in schools is mentioned, and the entitlement specified. But as it’s almost completely absent from the rest of the paper, the net effect is to tilt the status balance once more towards the academic subjects, which is a pity. Peter Peacock was right.
The biggest concern with it has to be, though, where the resources are going to come from to get the planning done. The paper makes it clear that the responsibility lies with schools and partners to produce these programmes, but this is happening just when schools are under more efficiency pressure than ever.

Perhaps one way to square this circle might be to break with our normal practice of a few expert people doing most of the work, and engage a lot of people in doing a small amount each, using collaborative software such as wikis? That would reduce the barriers to involvement to an absolute minimum. Wikipedia, after all, started out as the expert-written Nupedia. After only 12 articles were published in the first year, the wiki was introduced to help create content more rapidly.

OECD Review: best primer yet on Curriculum for Excellence?

Jobs growthIf you’re interested in understanding Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, take the time to read the recent OECD Review of Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland: it’s available on Google Books.

It’s not a quick read, at 167 pages, but reading it is time well spent. When I changed career to education over 3 years ago, I found it was relatively easy to find out about the individual parts of the Scottish education jigsaw, particularly from web sites, but hard to get the big picture. Even Moray House’s excellent Returning to Teaching Course, although it got me hooked on a new career, just made me realise how little I knew about the way the bigger picture had changed.

I can’t recommend this paper enough to anyone who wants to know the full story, and maybe gets a bit frustrated reading the kind of “bite-sized chunks” typical of web sites and marketing materials. It is an excellent help in making sense of Curriculum for Excellence, particularly by putting it into an international context. It doesn’t pull any punches about the urgency, either.

If you’ve not heard of it, there’s a one-page summary on the OECD site.

A number of challenges remain, however. Notwithstanding the overall success rate of the Scottish educational system, gaps in achievement have opened up, beginning in primary education and widening throughout junior secondary years. Another concern is the increasing number of young people leaving school with minimal qualifications, a tendency found amongst students from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The OECD report, by an international team of examiners from Australia, Belgium, Finland and New Zealand, gives a series of recommendations on how such challenges can be met.

For this to be freely available to everyone working in Scottish education is wonderful, even if it’s not possible to copy text or print it. I hope as many people as possible take the time to read it.

Of course, it’s very unlikely to be read by students in schools. Yet there’s a lot in it that could be of huge value to many. But how do we bridge that gap?

How will schools educate for Science2.0?

Looks like Web2.0 is now impacting science in radical ways. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about recording those experiments on-line, and not just in private jotters? Via Slashdot:

Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. “Under [the] radically transparent ‘open notebook’ approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication… The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.” One project profiled is MIT’s OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year grant to “transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT… the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use.” The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. “It’s so antithetical to the way scientists are trained,” one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.

New OECD tests on adult workforce will focus on ICT skills

OECD, the people who run the PISA tests of international student attainment, are now planning to test the skills of adults in today’s work environment. And look what’s a core objective:

One of PIAAC’s core objectives will be to assess how well participants use ICT to access, manage, integrate and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, and communicate with other people.

Not so long ago, the emphasis would have been on the technology, and whether or not people could drive them. Nerds would have done well. Schools could have concentrated on how to use applications.

Now, we’ve moved up the value chain, and the time of the social geek micro-trend documented by Mark Penn. The recent decision in East Lothian to provide every student with their own on-line learning space looks even more like the right move.

Every child will have an on-line space in which they can keep a record of their experiences and achievements that will track through with them from the age of 3 – 18, – Perhaps even from birth where they reflect upon their learning, their experiences and achievements.

Frank Tindall’s Memoirs: a source of locally relevant contexts?

One of the principles for curriculum design under A Curriculum for Excellence is relevance. From a chance discovery in a local bookshop I’ve found a book that has potential to provide relevant local contexts for a wide range of curricular areas.

Relevance: Young people should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future. link

The book, Memoirs and Confessions of a County Planning Officer by the late Frank Tindall, tells the story of the development of East Lothian from 1950 onwards. With a title like that, it’s not an obvious choice for the school library shelf – but it brings East Lothian’s recent history to life in a way I’ve never encountered before in more than 20 years living here.

Some topics covered include:

  • depopulation and measures taken to address it, including bringing “overspill” from Glasgow
  • flooding of the river Tyne, and work done in response
  • mineral resources, including coal and limestone
  • coastal conservation, including removal of wartime defences
  • the development of the ranger service and tourism

Somehow picking these out doesn’t do full justice to the book, though, because it makes it sound like a geography text and it’s not like that at all. It’s written as a series of stories, and you meet the characters involved. There’s endless East Lothian trivia, of course – where else could you find out where the rock went from the hole in Traprain Law, for example?

Because there are stories about every area of East Lothian, it has unusual potential to provide “hooks” for new curricular developments which are locally relevant and interesting. In many areas it would be possible, for example, to look at what the planners intended and see how things are working out now.

Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce Education Policy Group relaunched

Today the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce relaunched its Education Policy Group which I attended today on behalf of East Lothian Education. The group is now chaired by the Principal of Edinburgh’s Telford College, and includes members from a range of organisations including SQA.

This group was started last year to try to help address a problem perceived by Chamber members of lack of uptake of Science, Maths and Modern Languages subjects.

Our contribution has included sending students from Preston Lodge, with Barry Smith and Elizabeth Douglas, to give their views. Members today pointed out that the sessions attended by school students had been amongst the most useful sessions.

The group are enthusiastic about making a difference, and could potentially help achieve one of the Principles for A Curriculum for Excellence, that of Relevance:

Children should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future.