Mentoring New Teachers

There has been much discussion around dropping NCEA Level 1 or reducing it to 40 credits in order to focus on bringing students up to the required levels of Literacy and Numeracy in order to be able to succeed in NCEA Level 2. Hobsonville Point secondary school had already dropped NCEA Level 1 before the Ministry review took place. They saw the focus on credits and constant assessment as limiting deeper learning as there was less time to explore topics of interest and less time for learning.   " International studies have confirmed that a credit-focused educational model promotes superficial learning, not the quality stuff that sticks with us" (Stuff June 2018). Fairfield College and  Rototuna Senior High School have also dropped NCEA Level 1 but Rototuna gives the students some experience of sitting an external assessment ie not everything needs to be assessed. Students at all 3 schools will still do Level 1 courses but not assessed for NCEA leaving more time for lear...

In Term 3 Marc (Literacy Leader) and I decided to put in place a Literacy Action Plan for the school. It was obvious from the asTTle and PAT results and the excel spreadsheets on NCEA data/credits that many students were not achieving. An analysis of  NCEA results and NZQA Assessment Reports on each subject that a colleague and I had done in 2008 had proved that literacy - vocabulary, reading, writing, was a factor for students not achieving the NCEA standards across all subjects. I repeated this for 2016 here: NCEA Examiners'comments relating to Literacy Maths 2016 Level 1 some of the technical statistical words relating to interpretation of time series graphs were not fully understood. Candidates also need to ensure that the specific directions in the question are actually addressed, such as: compare, describe, justify, give statistical evidence, comment on showing numerical working. Level 2 The vocabulary of algebra needs to be understood so that candidat...

A colleague & I did some research some years back by analysing examiners' comments on NCEA subjects.  We focussed on why students fail in NCEA? and How students get to Excellence in NCEA. We had a hunch that failure was to do with literacy - subject vocabulary, subject reading materials and subject writing requirements. We also had a hunch that from our experiences with classroom teaching, NCEA marking and working with teachers, that students attain Excellence or Scholarship through demonstrating the quality of their thinking and especially using the Extended Abstract category of the SOLO taxonomy. Analysis of the examiners' reports proved that our hunches were correct. 2016 examiner's reports can be seen here . The examiners descriptively list what students commonly did to be awarded Achieved, Not Achieved, Merit and Excellence. These lists are very helpful, especially for Beginning Teachers and the findings within the lists concur with our hunches of 8 years ago....