I just need three more months!

Collage made using polyvore.com

UPDATE 11.03.2010: APPROVED!!!

After working with The Red Room Company last year, Macquarie Fields High School is again working with poet Lachlan Brown.  This time the project goes outside the Toilet Doors and into the Sydney Conservatorium, as students dabble in a bit of history and consider their namesake through the poetic lens.

The students are writing a poem in response to Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s First Speech in the Colony.   This will be read at the unveiling of a new statue of Macquarie, which commemorates 200 years since his governing began.  How exciting!

You can read more about Lachlan’s workshops with the Macquarie Fields ‘Live Poets Society’ at the Red Room Company blog.  It is interesting to see how different students have thought about the themes in the Macquarie Poetry Project, and I think Lachlan’s workshop reflections also provide a great account of poetry pedagogy.

As a poetry teacher, the power of collaboration with working poets in these projects has been a an incredible experience.  One of the most important things I learned from Lachlan was how to get more out of poetry by focussing in, taking it slow, encouraging personal interpretation and wonderment, and giving students time to write (which may sound obvious, but English lessons are so darn short!)

And the students have been awestruck by the experience of engaging in authentic discussion and receiving feedback from a real, live poet.  Projects like these really do increase the sense of connectedness that students have with the curriculum, as they participate in intense thinking about words, about language work, and about the role of creativity in understanding the world around them.  Students in my Year 10 class were also begging to learn more about the technical aspects of language so they could improve their poems (back to basics…I think not).

To read more about Lachlan Macquarie I recommend a brief speech given earlier this year by NSW Governor Marie Bashir.  Macquarie’s endeavours to emancipate convicts and promote their employment and equal and fair treatment are a legacy I believe we should strive to uphold, and his support of education and poetry speak especially to my English-teaching soul!  I can’t wait to see the poem created for the unveiling of the bicentenary statue

Here are the details of consultation and information meetings happening in NSW in the coming month.

Remember, consultation ends in May, so make sure you respond as an individual, as a faculty, as a school, or as part of the profession through these meetings to make sure your voice is heard.

Because come 2011, it’ll be too late to argue.

NSW English Teachers’ Association consultation meetings:
Saturday 20th March 9.30am – 3.30pm

• Sydney: Seminar Rooms, DET Curriculum Directorate.
• Armidale: Armidale High School
• Border: Albury High School
• Orange District: Canobolas High School
• Peel Valley: Quirindi High School
• Wagga: Wagga Wagga High School

http://www.englishteacher.com.au/downloads/FlyerNCK10Consult.pdf

NSW BOS consultation meetings:

• 9 March – Campbelltown Golf Club
• 16 March – Tara Anglican School
• 11 March – UNE Tamworth Centre
• 15 March – Trinity Catholic College Senior Campus Goulburn
• 18 March – [VIDEOCONFERENCE] State Government Offices Wollongong

http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/australian-curriculum/

NSW DET online consultation forums:

Videoconferences held at various locations from 4pm-6pm

• 15 March – English 7-10 (venues)
• 30 March – English K-10 (venues)

ACARA will also be running a Public Information Session for New South Wales on:
Thursday 25 March 6pm – 7:30pm
Venue is TBA, but most likely will be in Sydney.

http://www.acara.edu.au/public_information_sessions.html

Roger and Jan are both advocates of leadership models where participative (loose) practices within the school can mediate the directive (tight) policy environment and accountability systems within which we work.  In a post to her blog Jan describes being filled with confidence for the future of students because of the powerful and passionate debate about national curriculum taking place between education professionals through social networks.  On this point I certainly agree.  In this brave new world of federal curriculum control strong leaders and their PLNs will be key in influencing the spread of new ideas and practices.

But optimism about curriculum enactment is not enough for me.

Tonight I have been re-reading a paper by Colin Lankshear that identifies dominant meanings of literacy and related reform proposals, and I would like to quote him here at some length:

The meanings of literacy in educational reform discourse and their associated modes of “doing and being around texts” are both informed by and intended to inform ideals and practices of literacy much more generally.  They are also intended to permeate larger “social ways of doing and being” – such as being workers, citizens, parents, consumers, and members of organisations – that are mediated by texts.

…Hence, investigating meanings of literacy in educational reform proposals also involves asking what (and whose) perspectives, priorities, and world views prevail within them.

…Reform proposals are like scripts, frames, or “cultural models.”  They encode values intended to change people and social practices – and which will change people and practices to a greater or lesser extent depending on how fully they get implemented in practice.

…The key question here is: what kids of “visions” for life, people, and practices more generally, are encoded in these scripts?

Lankshear is discussing literacy here, which for me is apt as it is the English curriculum that is of most concern to me.  But his observations about educational reform apply to all curriculum areas.

Just a few days on from the release of the draft Australian Curriculum for English, my biggest problem with its “vision” for English is the constraint of new literacies.  Even if we were to accept the (100 year old) notion of Language, Literature and Literacy being divorced as separate ’strands’, the lack of reference to explicit spoken and visual ’skills’ in the Language strand is a gross neglect in this curriculum reform. This is without doubt a reaction to conservative media hype about ‘dumbed down’ curriculum, and a pandering to parent-voters who will feel reassured by a ‘back to basics’, ‘3Rs’ approach to teaching English.

While I too am hopeful that schools will be able to implement this curriculum in meaningful, ‘loose’ ways, it simply isn’t good enough to stand back and let through a script that, as Lankshear insists, will change people and practices, in such a retrograde way.  English teachers have fought long and hard for rich and generative definitions of literacy, and of what it means to understand and create meaning in a wide range of texts.

*sigh*

What are we going to do?

The curriculum takes a more traditional view of literature than has been apparent in some states in the past decade or so. - Justine Ferrari in The Australian 27 Feb

Senior educationists believe the new curriculum for students in kindergarten to Year 10, due to come into force next year, has been infiltrated by fringe lobby groups seeking to include issues such as multiculturalism, indigenous rights, ethical behaviour and sustainable living. – Joe Hildebrand & Bruce McDougall in Daily Tele 27 Feb

GRAMMAR will be front and centre of the federal government’s new national English curriculum. – Stephanie Pealting in SMH 28 Feb

AUSTRALIA’s new national school curriculum is to be unveiled today in a long overdue recognition of the need to return the three Rs to the classroom. - Editorial in The Herald Sun 28 Feb

Though, we already knew all this earlier in the week from Julia Gillard’s address to the National Press Club.

ALL states and territories will be forced to follow a set program for teaching reading under the first national English curriculum, which stipulates the letters, sounds and words students must learn in each year of school. – Justine Ferrari in The Australian 25 Feb

Education Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club yesterday that, for the first time, grammar would be taught at all levels of school and parents would have a chance to comment directly on what their children would learn. – Scott Hannaford in The Canberra Times 25 Feb

Actually, we have known that this was coming ever since the release of the National Curriculum Shaping Paper [PDF link] back in May 2009.  The Shape of the Australian Curriculum: English paper proposed that K-10 curriculum in English be organised around three interrelated strands:

The separation of these strands sure is nice and neat.  Cute even…the alliteration could appeal to some English teachers.

But while these separate strands might be neat, they have resulted in precisely what English teachers feared: a regression to a 100 year old teaching approach that divorces the learning of the mechanics of ‘language’ from the learning of the feelings, values and ideas it represents.  We’re trying to teach communicators, not copy-typists!  But, predictably, here are some of the content descriptors for what students must learn from the Language strand of the 7-10 curriculum for English:

• Resources for creating cohesive texts including identifying reference items, the use of substitution and ellipsis, relationships between vocabulary items, and the role of text connectives (Year 7)
• Understanding spelling rules including origins, word endings, Greek and Latin roots, base words, suffixes, prefixes, spelling patterns and generalisations (Year 7)
• Sentences can consist of a number of independent and dependent clauses combined in a variety of ways (Year 8 )
• Purpose of  devices used by authors  including symbolism, analogy and allusion (Year 8 )
• Language can be multi-layered, resulting in varying interpretations (Year 9) (…a bit late to learn this?)
• Information can be condensed by collapsing a clause into a noun phrase (nominalisation) (Year 9)
• Different perspectives can be introduced by citing the words and views of others
• Construction of multimodal and digital texts involves knowledge of visual grammar (Year 10) (visual literacy…finally!)

Developing skills in reading and writing is something that I value, that English teachers universally value.  But skills such as spelling, grammar and syntax should be taught as means of building a student’s own representational world, rather than as ends in themselves.

Without a clear pedagogical direction that guides teachers to embed language learning within quality literacy and literature teaching, as well as differentiate language learning for students reading at different levels, the Australian English Curriculum will doom countless future students to exercises in disconnected rote learning and grammar drills. Will your child be one of them?

Visit the ACARA website for information on how to submit your views. Have your say about the experience you want your children and students to have by responding during the consultation period from 1 March 2010 to the end of May 2010.

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardian newspaper asked authors for their personal rules for writing.  The rules often apply not just to writing long novels, but also to writing short stories…some of the rules are hilarious, and some are applicable to life in general, not just to writing!  (Make sure you click through to the second part of the article as well – loads more ‘rules’)

I would love to do an activity with these – perhaps a jigsaw group activity, or something where students were given a random selection to read and discuss.  They could make a poster of their favourite rule/s for the classroom wall.  They could form their own sets of rules…

Here are some of the rules that I like best:

• Forget the boring old dictum “write about what you know”. Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that. - Rose Tremain
• Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”. - Roddy Doyle
• Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. - Margaret Atwood
• Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. - Anne Enright
• Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea. - Richard Ford
• The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. – Jonathan Franzen
• Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to. - David Hare
• The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying “Faire et se taire” (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.” - Helen Simpson
• Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on. - Al Kennedy

Love it   Good writing IS hard work, and students need to understand this if they want to refine their abilities.  It can also be a lonely task, solitary and isolating, and remembering that there is a whole community of writers out there, bunkered down at their desks and struggling to keep themselves in check, is a comfort.

An interesting chat I had with @joe_bower and @monk51295 was about the use of grades in assessing student learning, and how they work to kill student passion.  Joe makes an excellent argument on his blog for abolishing grading – a form of assessment he believes is obsolete and archaic.  I couldn’t agree more.

Grading student work using reductive labels such as an A-E scale, or a mark out of 10 or 20, just doesn’t do the job that anyone wants it to.  Parents (well, most of them) seem to think they want this kind of measure, and yet when it comes to parent-teacher conference evening the first question I am usually asked is along the lines of “so, what does a ‘C’ mean?”

In NSW Australia it is now mandatory for schools to report to parents using an ‘easy to understand’, ‘jargon free’ A-E scale.  The purpose?  To allow teachers to report student academic achievements at any point in time using clear standards.  So, what does a ‘C’ mean?  Well, it means that the student’s achievement is sound; that they “have a sound knowledge and understanding of the main areas of content and has achieved an adequate level of competence in the processes and skills.”  (Parent: “so, what does ‘achieved an adequate level of competence’ mean??”…and here we are, back at square one…)

NSW schools have the option of using the grade labels (A-E), or they can use the corresponding descriptors:

• A = ‘Outstanding’
• B = ‘High’
• C = ‘Sound’
• D = ‘Basic’
• E = ‘Limited’

I was absolutely dismayed when I started teaching at my school to find they had wholly and solely adopted the A-E grade system, even though the use of the letter grades wasn’t mandatory.  While I recognise that faux-descriptions like ‘High’ or ‘Basic’ aren’t much better, at least they are somewhat descriptive.  The ideological baggage alone attached to A-E grades is enough to poison parents’ understanding of student reports – using these terms in my experience transports parents right back into their own school experience, and instills an instictive kind of dread.  Parents who were ‘C’ students in school now apologise for their ‘average-ness’ in semester interviews.  And parents who were ‘A’ students seem puzzled that their spawn have not exhibited their genetically inherited excellence.

The problem with this is, as an English teacher, I truly believe that the way in which we engage with texts in todays classrooms is so much more complex than in the past, that comparing a ‘B’ grade from the 1970s to a ‘B’ grade in a NSW English classroom today is like comparing apples to oranges.  Yet it is this historical understanding of grades that we draw on when we offer them to parents as a ‘clear standard’.

In my teaching I have taken a pragmatic approach to grading student work, and I tend to use a combination of grading individual outcomes on a tick-a-box scale, following this with comments.  My faculty insists that I allocate a grade to any common assessment tasks, but for most assessments I can withhold this from students and just record it in my markbook.  Here is an example of the feedback sheet I use in our Year 7 Debating assessment task – syllabus outcomes are rephrased to connect with what students have learned to do, and an overall grade can easily be calculated by looking at which column got the bulk of the ticks:

debating task assessment marking criteria (download PDF – feel free to use!)

One thing I know I don’t do enough of is getting students to explicitly reflect on their progress, and this is something I worked on a lot last year.  In a post on his leadership blog @dan__rockwell explains that a sense of making progress is the greatest motivator of all.  Unlike grades (which act as ‘carrot and stick’ motivators), giving students a sense that they are making progress can really inspire them to learn and move forward.  A practice I would like to start in my classes is to give students the assessment feedback sheet at the start of the unit and get them to fill it in with what they would get before participating in the lessons.  They could then compare this to my eventual feedback (and/or their own self-assessment using the same sheet) to guage their progress.

It seems obvious to me that this is more valuable than knowing you got a ‘C’.

Joe suggests in his blog that when an organization has some policy or rule that simply desn’t allow you to always to the right thing, then professional acts of subversion are called upon.  Refusing to grade student work is one way of subverting the archaic A-E grade system in NSW.  Refusing to conduct NAPLAN exams this year in light of their use in the MySchool website would be another example (but I wonder how many of us will put our money where our mouths are on that one?)

“Miss, has being an English teacher, like, killed every book for you?”

“Do you end up analysing every scene in a movie all the time?”

“Honey, can’t you just enjoy the story?”

Re-reading through Jack Thompson’s first chapter in Reconstructing Literature Teaching I have just found the best answer ever to these questions!  Thompson quotes Selden (1985, p.3):

Readers may believe that theories and concepts will only deaden the spontaneity of their response to literary works.  They may forget that ’spontaneous’ discourse about literature is unconsciously dependent on the theorising of older generations.  Their talk of ‘feeling’, ‘imagination’, ‘genius’, ’sincerity’ and ‘reality’ is full of dead theory which is sanctified by time and has become part of the language of common sense.

Wonderful, huh?  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  ‘Dead theory’…I’m gonna use that one!

On face value I could see why: the potential to alienate teachers by only elevating a select few (an eventual total of 100 across the state) to the ranks of HAT is huge.  And the salary for these teachers – $98,000 – is higher than the salary for a KLA Head Teacher, and just under that of a Deputy Principal.  Weird.

However, as my school was once of the first to gain one of these positions, I am here to testify.

It’s easy to be upset and feel unappreciated because someone who used to sit next to you in the faculty staffroom is all of a sudden getting paid up to an extra 50% (and for a smaller teaching load at that!)  But you have to remember that these positions are different to that of an rank-and-file teacher.  Curriculum Head Teachers get paid more for doing less teaching too, but we are used to that – we understand that their role is different to ours.  And they sure do earn their crust; on days when HSC, School Certificate and NAPLAN data are released there is no way I would trade my job for theirs.  And as for sitting around in boring Executive meetings planning school targets and discussion policy issues…well, most teachers would rather not do that too.

Is the position of HAT any different?

Why shouldn’t someone get paid more for doing a harder job?

I suspect the issue is that many teachers currently don’t believe that the HAT role is very difficult.  But let’s consider what the HAT in my school is taking on as we blog:

• Classroom observation and team teaching with beginning teachers, and later with each faculty in turn
• Developing the resources and in-school PD for refining the literacy and numeracy focus across all KLAs
• Establishing research partnerships with local universities (and later co-ordinating and leading the school side of the action research)
• Liasing with university education faculties to build formal mentoring structures for the influx of pre-service teachers that our school will now enjoy
• Leading the school in its new role as Centre for Excellence by building relationships with surrounding public schools to ensure the quality teaching practices that our school is refining are spread far and wide to benefit the wider community
• And still teaching!  Albeit a much smaller load.

Sounds like schools just got someone in who can do the cool stuff that we teachers never get time to do. Aren’t you excited about having fellow teachers, rather than admintrators and bureacrats, helping you to develop your teaching quality?

Of course, the success of someone in this role will depend on whether they are the right person for the job.  But this is true of all promotions.  In my school the teacher who got the HAT role was an English teacher already in the school.  She was my mentor in my second year of teaching, and she is one of the warmest, most patient, most hard working, professional and reflective teachers could ever hope to meet.  You can read Luisa’s statement on why she teaches on our school leadership blog.

Personally, I am excited by the idea that there is a career in schools now that I can look forward to.  I have always wanted to be a teacher AND a researcher, but other than working crazy part-time roles in both, there was nothing on the horizon.

The other benefit of the HAT scheme is that teachers who love teaching in public schools and who are really, really good at it don’t have to end up lost to administration roles if they want to earn a higher salary.  I love teaching, and I am commited to teaching in public schools.  I don’t want to be a Principal.  Or a Deputy Principal.  I’m not even sure I want to be a Head Teacher.

But I sure would like to be a HAT

What a great way for NSW teachers to find each other, network and share expertise.  I love the way that you can search the wiki for the tool you are trying to use (e.g. edublogs, ning, twitter) and find like-minded professionals who have used it before.  Networks like these are becoming increasingly important as we learn new pedagogies required to bring on the Digital Education Revolution in our classrooms.

Thanks for bringing us together Stu!

PLN Wordle (used on the staff wiki) by Cobannon – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobannon/2983755525/