Jean Walker

Hi Jean Philippe That is very interesting and very similar to what is happening here. Can I ask you, how you do your assessment and reporting on these units of work? Do you have set criteria for them? Do all teachers of the unit contribute to the mark?

Hi Ulrike It's quite hard to explain what's happening here in any brief way, but I'll try. Our new curriculum is called The Essential Learnings and instead of it being divided into learning areas and content, it is expressed as "outcomes". eg Students will become communicators, students will be numerate, students will be information literate, students will be Arts Literate, students will be enquiry thinkers, students will think ethically etc etc. From this comes the proposition that what is needed to achieve these, is not discrete subjects such as English and History, but transdisciplinary topics which take about 6-8 weeks to complete and incorporate literacy, numeracy, science skills, IT, art etc. These "rich tasks" as they are named, may have titles such as "What does it mean to be an Australian?" or "Setting up a Virtual Science and Ethics Conference" or "What is Beauty" or creating a documentary film on a given topic. Schools here are doing it in different ways. Some are doing these topics maybe 2-3 times a year and teaching basic skills in the remaining time, others are doing all the basic subjects via these topics in the morning and going out to optional subjects such as languages, Music, in the afternoon. Others are allowing students to do one of these topics on one line of their timetable while attending regular classes on all the other lines. It seems to fit primary schools much better than secondary. We are told it is NOT like the old "thematic topics" of the 70s, but is much deeper and more focused on outcomes thatn they were. Critical thinking skills, deep analysis skills, "authentic learning tasks" and community invovement are also part of all this. "Powerful pedagogies" is the jargon term given to a range of teaching methodologies/strategies which teachers are being required to take on, some of which ARE new, but some are just old ones repackaged. They have terms like jigsaws, gallery walks, chatterboxes, placemats (don't laugh!!) and rehashed mind maps. Teachers will be compelled to assess and report on these outcomes across the subjects, rather than on subject specific content and skills. So, next year all teachers will have to assess and report on "Arts Literacy". In other words all the teachers who teach subjects such as Art, Music, Dance, Drama etc will have to come up with a combined assessment of whether the student is "Arts Literate". If you put all this together, you are supposed to have come up with the curriculum for the 21st century. Hope this all makes some sense.

Pauline Perhaps I should have added that what we are having thrust upon us here is not the old style American curriculum (heaven forbid), but what a few US states are apparently moving into. My beef is that what they are trying to sell to us, is actually what most Australian teachers have been gradually moving to over the last decade, but hadn't given a specific name to, and our hierarchy will not acknowledge this fact and want us to go much further down the road of "discovery learning" and transdisciplinary generalist teaching, even right up to Yr 12 without any evidence that it will improve outcomes or adequately prepare students for tertiary education. It has been done on the run to such an extent that teachers are compelled to teach, assess and report in a completely different way next year, but we do not yet have any pro-formas, calibration of the "learning markers", or a tested and proved IT system to support it, and it hasn't even been sold to parents yet. The whole thing has grown into a gargantuan chaotic monster which is dividing teachers into camps at a stage in their life when they are stressed enough already. I'm all for innovation, but not this way at the expense of teachers' sanity.

PS Can you explain to me how to get to readers's comments on your site. I am not very computer literate and can't see an obvious link??

Dear IP I'm very interested to read articles such as these. (I've just written a response to the one on Inclusion on your page)because our education gurus here in Tasmania are telling us that what is going on in the US is what we should be doing. However, I believe they have got the whole thing completely wrong, in believing that what we need here is the sort of progressive, discovery oriented, "authentic learning" that they are proposing is successful in the US. We have already over the last decade, adopted parts of that which do work and have grafted them on to our regular curriculum, so that we now have a mixture of traditional, basic curriculum which then extends into problem solving and applied learning where appropriate. But we are now being told that this isn't enough. We must move into the 21st century with deep thinking, "powerful pedagogies" transdisciplinary learning, removal of discrete subjects, "thematic rich tasks", community based learning etc etc. Our older teachers feel devalued, insulted and generally made to feel that what they have been doing for the last 20 years has been wrong, inadequate and not good enough. Specialist teachers are being forced to become generalists and many don't believe there will be enough time for teaching content and skills. The argument is, of course, that these are no longer needed in the brave new world of IT and that all kids will need in the future is the notion of how to learn, how to think, etc. They are also told that they don't need to give up content and knowledge all together, but must find a "balance" between the two methods, but in the same amount of time. It's beginning to drive older teachers out of the profession, but that is to some extent seen by hierarchy as a "good thing" - out with the old guard and in with the new will get things done. I am a little cheered by what appears to be already a backlash to this stuff in the US.

PS Didn't answer bit about extra duties. They will be expected to take on such things as mentoring student teachers and beginning teachers, running small depts, providing PD, etc. We have set hours of contact (44 per fortnight for primary and 40 for secondary) so if such a role is undertaken, it would be either on a reduced load or extra pay. We also have set hours on campus (70 a fortnight) so no one can be made to stay more than that.

Australian salaries: They vary a little from state to state, but here in Tasmania, due to an arrangement we have with our state governement, we get the average salary of all the states and territories, so you will get a fairly good idea of the range. Beginning teachers after 4 yrs training get $39,000. We are state employed and receive yearly increments of about $1000 up until $57000. After that, you must apply for promotion for AST3 (Head of Dept) APrincipal and Principal. These salaries range from $61000 to $90000 depending on size of school, but Principals also get a 11% bonus if they meet criteria set by the DoE. This "bonus" is reachable by all of them as it only requires them to do what is expected of them. There's a whole history behind this to do with contracts which I won't go into. We are now in discussion with the employer about Advanced Skills teachers receiving a "reward" in the form of extra pay or time off, if they meet set criteria which are created and accepted by teachers. We are also trying to fend off the Federal minister's push for performance related pay and league tables. (Yes, they are a right wing government) To get a feel for how these salaries relate to England, I think it is more accurate to halve them than to use the actual current currency rate which is 40c to the pound at the moment. We acknowledge that Principal salaries are fairly low compared with other countries, but our govt is not willing to do more at the moment. So, in reality, the majority of classroom salaries here seem to be much like the UK

That's a very good question and one which worries many of our secondary teachers. There will not be a separate pathway for our students until Yr11/12. Then what happens will be interesting to see. One of our local high schools has no compulsory subjects and if students don't like what they've chosen, they can choose again. That should help prepare them for the realities of life!! Another problem with it, is that here the emphasis in our new curriculum is on high level thinking skills applied to cross-curricular "rich task" or "big questions". Wonderful for average and above kids, but will those without the skills required for such a task, fit in? We are being told that it will by its very nature "engage" disengaged students but teachers are already saying that it doesn't, yet we are to go blithely on with it. Many older teachers (of which we have many) feel they are being treated as if everything they did in the past was wrong and of no value, and the hierarchy are talking openly of the "problems" and difficulties of dealing with what they perceive as dinosaurs and anti-change. It is causing a great deal of angst and stress amongst our teachers at a time in their career when they need it least. I have to admit that I am more than happy to be out of it myself.

I was hoping someone would answer the question I posted on the Special Needs thread about inspections, but perhaps it was in the wrong place.

I have heard UK teachers say that inspection does improve teaching, but many countries don't have it and don't appear to be any the worse as a result. We don't have any kind of inspection process in Australia, yet our international education scores are in the highest group. We don't have exams in my state until Yr 11/12 and then they are only a part of the overall assessment, yet I would hazard a guess that our kids are not much differently educated from yours. In fact, I think there is much more freedom of professional judgement here as well as breadth of curriculum. So, what makes the British govt so sure that it is worth all the money and stress?

To be enrolled in a special school here, a child must be almost bedridden and have below 50IQ. Out of a population of 400,000 we have fewer than 200 in special schools. The rest, we are constantly told, are better off in mainstream classrooms. It is an ideology that brooks no criticism and parents have been brainwashed accordingly to believe the same, regardless of the fact that specialist services may be reduced in the mainstream school. Our legislation mandates for provision of access to kids, even if it is only one child in a school who needs a ramp or a lift installing. Huge amounts are spent on that even though the child could be bussed elsewhere. Our biggest problem, however, is lack of teacher and aide support in the classroom. I am about to go on TV this week on this very subject. Last week a little boy with a very rare syndrome (Floating Harbour it's called) who is epileptic, autistic, low IQ, non-verbal, behavioural problem, had aide time cut from 6 hours a week to 3 because he wasn't considered sufficiently disabled. Mum had to go to media before Minister "found" some extra funding - something like 30 pounds a week!! One has to ask what sort of society we live in that does this, when politicians are just about to get a pay rise and today's paper says they are adding $500,000 a year to their bill for extra "minders" for MPs. It makes me incredibly angry. I have just read a very interesting piece in an American Sp Ed journal which suggests that having them in mainstream school causes focus to be on normal/modified academic curriculum with consequent lack of life-skills and training which in fact may disadvantage them for reaching potential in later life. I don't believe that you can claim to have successfully included unless you can demonstrate that each and every child is receiving more of everything than when they were in a special school. We have an obsession here for believing that "place" is the important issue not access to opportunity. Grrrr!

I am reading all this with great interest and I know this is not adding anything erudite to the discussion, but couldn't help telling you that my maiden (Huddersfield origin) name was Turpin and had no idea it was from Thor. When I looked it up some years ago it was suggested it was from the Norman French because there was a bishop called de Turpinne, but can now see that it goes back further than that. My parents will be very interested. They are the only people in Tasmania on electoral rolls with that name, but it has disappeared with me.

Very interesting, Andrew. I am an ex-Huddersfielder living in Australia and my parner is an ex-Geordie. I now understand, after living in Sweden for a short time, why my mother still says, "They did a midnight flit" because the Swedish word for movement is flyten. Also the use of bairn/barn for child, and kirk/kyrken for church. I've wondered if the dropping of the definite article in the Yorkshire dialect is a reflection of the lack of it in Swedish/Danish. eg I'm going t'pub??

I cannot help remarking that I do not feel as if I live in "Oceania and Antarctica". I know Tasmania is the last frontier of civilization before Antarctica (hence we have an International Antarctic Education Centre here in Hobart) but it does feel a bit of a watery description of Australia.

All very enlightening about parsing, but to get back to the original topic, I'd like to point out that here in Australia where we have not suffered from the Maggie era and do not have a National Curriculum or literacy/numeracy strategies, as a country we still perform well on the PISA scales. I taught in Britain in 91/92 and have kept in contact with what is going on ever since, and it does seem to me that in Britain teachers are not permitted the same amount of professional judgement as here and the curriculum is overly prescriptive. Our curriculum is much more outcomes based, relying on teacher judgement of content to reach those outcomes, although subjects such as history do still have a set content. I think we tend here to do a reasonably good mixture of the formal and the "creative", in response to student needs within a particular classroom. From what I hear UK teachers saying on the TES website, that is not always possible for them.

We do quite a lot of this kind of thing in Tasmania. It's done in preference to puuting kids into special units. Often they do part time school and part time community work/activities. We have something called The Shed where local people give up their time to work with disengaged students on practical projects. We also have a partnership with local councils in a program to rebuild stolen cars and return them to their owners. There are others too numerous to mention here. There is a major Expo on in Sydney in June called Learning Choices which is going to showcase this kind of education. You might be able to find their site with an Australian search engine such as Yahoo Australia.

I think we need to remember that some of those children who were just called "naughty" were in fact ADHD. In the past they could be punished by being removed, caned, or put in behaviour units etc. After primary school they could be found jobs and exempted from school. If your parents taught in a grammar school or selective school they may never have seen the teachers dealing with these kids in a secondary modern. Now we have them all in one place. We sometimes described them as the workaholics of this world, or the "fidgeters" or the ones who wee "always on the go". Now we diagnose more scientifically. It's a bit like Dslexia. There are many kids who are genuinely dyslexic and many who are genuinely ADHD, but it is also a fairly easy excuse/diagnosis for poor parenting. You have to be able to distinguish betweeen the two and that is sometimes very difficult. Often pediatricians don't have the time to delve deeply into kids' backgrounds and prescribe Ritalin etc as an easy solution. Others try to work more through the families but that is resource hungry and can't always be done. it is a very complex issue. There are lots of good books about it. One by an Australian author whose name I've forgotten, but I'll try to find it for you.

A very interesting question - and an interesting quote. Here in Tasmania I am battling (on behalf of our union members) to make our hierarchy see this point. We have mainstreamed almost every student with special needs. We have closed all but three special schools and have only about .02 of disabled students in these schools whent the OECD accepted % is about 1.5. We have classrooms where the other students cannot hear the teacher because the included child makes constant loud wailing noises. We have classrooms where TAs have to change the nappies of 15 yr old boys in wheelchairs. We have seriously disabled students with only a few hours aide time a week. Yet, when I challenge this, all I get is quotations from the Disability/Discrimination Legislation and a comment that aren't we absolutely marvellous for having a lower ratio in sp schools than other places. Hard to argue that one and not sound anti. I would love to hear more comments on this.

In my experience of teaching in both streamed and unstreamed situations over 35 years, it is not necessarily the actual streaming that does the harm, but the wrong teacher for the group. I think this is to some extent what you are saying. I have seen "bottom" groups taken by poor teachers who cannot get the best out of them, and by "academic" type teachers who thought it was beneath their dignity to teach them properly. I have also seen them taken by empathetic, well-trained teachers who got more work out of them than could ever have been achieved in a mixed group. It's HOW you do it, and with what mind-set, that matters.

Surely one needs to ask why teachers do not "do a better job" of teaching English grammar. In the 50s I was taught grammar systematicallyand thoroughly. So why did things change so much by the time my sons were being educated in the 60s and 70s? My reasons would include: 1. The advent of TV and consequently less need for the necessity to read and write 2. The broadening of the curriculum with less time for formal subject study 3. The introduction of the whole word/look and say methodology which believed that immersion was all that was needed 4. The Dr Spock/flowerpower era of bringing up children to choose for themselves what they though important and ignore the rest 5. The subsequent deterioration of children's behaviour which turned much teaching into a babysitting exercise 6. Comprehensive high schools with unstreamed classes which make it well nigh impossible to teach something so complex in an effective and systematic way No doubt I will get shot down in flames for this last one, but I still believe it to be true. Also, remember that even in the 50s there were still a great many students who left school with little formal knowledge of grammar. You probably just didn't know them or didn't go to the same school!

Perfect grammar may not always be necessary, but the blunder I came across the other day demonstrates why a good basic understanding of the language does help. In an official DoE (Tasmania) document was this delightful statement: Employers should always provide a suitable area for breastfeeding employees." I am currently enjoying reading "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." It's a wonderful collection of the sort of thing mentioned above. Not long ago, in a novel I was reading, I came across another wonderful example of why a spell checker is of little use if you don't know the context: "He sighed deeply as he slowly entered the French widows." Half their luck, say I!!!

Thank you for that link. This is almost exactly the same as we are doing here. However, my worry is that we are not doing it as a trial in a limited number of schools, and with evaluation. It is mandated for every government school here and will remain in force regardless of its success or otherwise. The other thing i worry about, is that even when these new methods are evaluated, there is almost a built in expectation that it WILL succeed. I noticed the comment in this document that although it is "early days", teachers and students are already excited and keen. They may be, but how do we know that the eventual long-term outcomes will be better? These trial schools in England are now coming to the end of the trial. I would like to talk to all the teachers who took part, not just the initiators of the project.

I was really referring to the new curriculum we have here. I have some reservationas about the way we are doing it. Time is being cut from basic subjects and in fact discrete subjects may disappear altogether, in order to do a series of units of transdisciplinary topics which are based on a "big question" or "big issue". The idea is to develop high level, critical thinking skills and "transferrable skills", rather than teach information/facts. This is going to be done right through from K-12 While this has some merit, I have some reservations about how it will fit with college and uni subjects - will students have sufficient knowledge or will they be forming opinions and coming to conclusions based on insufficient knowledge? Where will special needs students fit in when high level thinking skills are impossible for them? Will teachers lose their specialist knowledge and become generalists? How can we be sure it will have better outcomes as it hasn't been tried before? Perhaps your new curriculum in the Netherlands is not quite the same as this?

Is anything similar to the above happening in Britain or are you still completely hemmed by the National Curriculum? Are there any other European countries doing it?

I've been reading posts on the TES staffroom chatline for the past 5-6 years and it is absolutely clear that more and more teachers in the UK are wanting to get out of the profession and are willing to "stack shelves at Tesco's" or go on welfare, rather than teach. Who would have dreamt of that a few decades ago, when teaching was a highly respected profession to which many people aspired and many parents proudly encouraged their offspring in to? I totally agree with you about what drives them out - not the long hours, not the preparation or marking, but the combination of bureaucratic cr@p, modern style management and under resourcing for challenging behaviour. Many want out almost as soon as they get in, while older teachers see their energy and enthusiasm sapped by the system. It's a very sad state of affairs, but I see no answer in the near future.