Contemporary Issues in Education

I started this blog post/week thinking about what it meant to be a contemporary issue, and then like most people I know decided to head to google to see what they suggested. I typed into Google "Contemporary Issues facing education NZ" and not a lot came up to be honest, except for the 2012 ERO report. As I read through it again (after it being on our weekly task) I thought about how it was still quite current to our teaching practice even though this report was released 4 years ago. Then I started thinking if we were being made aware of these factors 4 years ago how then is it the same contemporary issue? Why have educators seemingly not made much progress through this issues? So seeings as I was now a little off topic worrying about why education has not made much of a charge in fixing these issues I have decided to pick two of these issues to reflect upon through this post.

Issue 1 - Student centred learning

Before I started on my Mindlab journey I was pretty oblivious to what it meant for student centred learning. I knew a little about what it meant but no one in my short(ish) career had never really been that passionate about it. Long Term plans looked a bit like this..
What are we going to do next year/term? What is something that is happening this year? Oh yeah that sounds good.. How do we fit it in to our curriculum coverage?
While that might be brief and a little straight to the point to save on word counts, I hope you get the point.. WHERE WAS THE STUDENT? It seems that there is no flexibility we are so worried about what we are doing and the context we are forgetting who in fact we are planning for. No mention of authentic tasks or what our students are interested in, and what confuses me more is that that I am sure while going through uni during our curriculum we were taught that this new curriculum was going to be an amazing thing for our schools and students. We were told about how flexible teaching could become, cross curricular links would be second nature, schools could adapt their practices to suit their learners. Yet five years after this (and even in 2016) ERO still see this as an issue.

The question is how would I address this? I think to start with we as educators need to start thinking of our students. What are the amazing things they are capable of doing? What do they enjoy? How do we encourage them to develop into life-long learners? Once we have an idea of our whole student and our goals for them, then we can start changing the way we plan and teach so that it isn't just ticking boxes or highlighting that achievement objective. It is only then that we can create the authentic tasks and real life problem solving that we have learnt about recently. I also believe that we need to start asking these questions when we sit down to look at the term/year ahead. Who are our learners? What are they interested in? How do we put them at the centre of their learning?

Issue 2 - Assessment to Inform Teacher Practice/Student Learning

I am sure I am not alone when I look at summative assessment timelines and shudder slightly. 31 Gloss/Ikan/Probes all due Week 2 Term 2. How am I going to get that done? Rush, rush, rush through each student enter onto (enter educational site here) and file away. Phew glad that was done now I have current data to enter into Term 2 reports. Now that may be a slight exaggeration but it's being honest. Teachers are notorious for complaining that assessments get in the way of teaching (and I would be one of them). However recently through conversations with colleagues I have been quite reflective on the fact that this is what I have been doing and how can I better test in order to actually know more about my students. Again without really thinking about this task I was quite responsive to how I could adapt testing in my classroom in order for myself and my students to get more out of it. I believe that we need to firstly have courage to trust our formative assessments and be prepared to back up why and how we have used it in our classrooms to inform our practice and also to encourage ourselves to think about when we summatively assess our students. If one student you think has made a huge amount of progress test them in Term 1 week 5. If you can't work out why another is not improving test Term 3 week 1. It is time to think wisely about assessment and really work out how we can use it for the betterment of our programmes rather than without purpose. It is then I feel that we will stop making such a fuss and complaining and will be better educators for it.