HSIE learning project

Stage 5 needs a complete review in terms of;

• the number of common assessment tasks
• the number of learning tasks
• timing

The assessment booklets are with the faculty now for review. Teacher pairs once again to break up and using the suggestions from staff and students found in the Wiki renegotiate the Stage 5 assessment framework.

We also need to review and rewrite the existing programmes within the faculty. These were last done in 2006 as part of the faculty inspection. They need to be reworked to take into account the review of tasks but also to take into account the use of Janison online classrooms.

If you are still in need of inspiration then try this presentation. A Vision of Students Today

The final draft is handed in. You can read it here. HSIE Learning Project

The faculty meeting became an opportunity to use assessment tasks that were a part of our existing programmes. In our teacher pairs, staff selected tasks and then applied the codecs from the DET paper;  Quality Teaching in NSW Schools: An Assessment Practice Guide. Look at pages 7 to 25 to get a detailed introduction to “Intellectual Quality” and the coding criteria. Also pages 49 to 51 for the coding sheets we used.

27th October is the deadline for submission of drafts. The writing up is difficult considering how much time has past since any serious writing of any kind had been done let alone having research published.

The UbD activity was presented to the faculty. This exercise was organised on a word document in simplified form. Staff and student voice were presented. The details can be seen in the wiki.

As a follow up to the staff initiative, some Year 10 and 9 classes were selected and asked for their own ideas. In pairs or groups of 3, the students were asked to come up with learning tasks and assessment tasks (their choice), to fulfill the course requirements. They were given the relevant syllabus documents. They were happy with the parameters they had to work with. That is, the syllabus focus area or question and then be as creative as possible.

Once the staff and student voices are tabulated, tallied, processed, mulled over etc then the faculty and a student focus group of hand picked students, will deliberate on the final selections.

At the faculty meeting on the 28th of July, the ideas of Understanding by Design (UbD), Wiggins and McTighe, were introduced. There were some sections from the text for staff to read and the following links provided for greater detail.

Understanding by Design: An Introduction

Understanding by Design: The Six Facets of Understanding

Understanding by Design: The Backward Design Process

It was pointed out that the Quality Teaching Framework uses this kind of jargonese as well. Some of the staff have already read this paper (The Quality Teaching Model in NSW Schools ) or at least seen it. 

The May 2003 discussion paper. link takes you there and in  particular review pages 9 to 11. The discussion concerns intellectual quality and links with the chapter handed out at the faculty meeting about Facets of Understandings. This is where all of the educational research is pointing. Staff were asked to find some time between now and next faculty meeting working in pairs, to develop learning/assessment tasks based on a selection of topics taken from the syllabus documents. The UbD scaffold provides the framework.  Staff were reminded that because we are reviewing the Stage 5 assessment programmes we should look at what the students were saying at the Wiki or visit the blog for more links.

41 responses made from 2 classes. Very pleased with this turn out. Initial sweep gives the impression that a review of stage 5 HSIE will be a valuable exercise. Nothing awful, just an ambiguity that suggests that constant tweaking and revising of the assessments will be worthwhile.

50 or so stage 5 students were e mailed the survey and only 13 responses so far. Will put the request out there again. Results are a little unexpected. There seems to be support for some tasks and not as much support for the ones I thought they enjoyed. Open ended questions are also interesting with students giving realistic and informed responses. Here are a few;

“I think that it is good to have a balance between both class assessment and ranked examinations. This provides a range of learning and can accommodate everyone.”

“I think that assessments are fairly balanced, as there are both examinations and assignments, however, perhaps a small percentage of our mark could go towards class responses/work.”

“I think assignments where we have to write explanations etc. help us learn because we have to translate the information so we understand it and in turn work out why these events happened. The information is remembered more.”

So overall I feel as if the research project is gaining a little more momentum with these results trickling in. Once complete the results will be posted on the Wiki site and then the final journal/article/text research to complete before taking it back to a staff forum for analysis and decisions.

Survey sent out to 10S and 10Y Geographers. Survey Monkey has a 14 day time out which I missed so a lot of fiidle to create the new survey and get it out there. Please visit the survey by following the links from a previous post. The year 9 survey will be sent out in the next day or two.