small steps

I read an interesting article today on Australia’s push towards league tables for schools.

It seems a little odd to me that Australian politicians want to follow America’s lead in the push towards league tables and increased mandatory testing to try and improve educational outcomes for students. The fact that America is one of the poorest performing countries in a recent OECD study involving 26 countries should ring alarm bells. It would seem logical to me to try and analyse the countries performing better than Australia (we actually perform quite well overall) to look at what they do. Finland who have topped the OECD comparisons in most areas over the last 6 years have one of the least prescriptive curriculums, minimal testing and some of the best trained teachers in the world.

Leading countries have a strong focus on the quality of their teachers and the McKinsey report provides lots of information on what has been happening around the world to improve educational outcomes. The findings overall are quite simply put. Quality school systems have the following thins in common.
1. Getting the right people to become teachers
2. Developing them into effective instructors
3. Ensuring the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child

The report is broken into a number of sections whose headings really say it all.

“The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”.

“The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction”.

“High performance requires every child to succeed”.

Some ramblings about how much time we get with our students:

Time spent in PE lessons per fortnight = 1 hr 40mins

Time in PDH classes each fortnight = 2hrs 30 mins

Time watching t.v/using computer each fortnight = 28+ hours

This convinces me of a few things.

1. We really do need more time to be effective and cover the vast amount of important content prescribed in the syllabus. Also, the little time we have with students has to be used productively.

2. Students must learn to be critical consumers of information from television, the internet and the mainstream media. If we don’t want our kids to learn the ways of the world by Paris Hilton and co. then we need to equip them with the tools to deconstruct the messages they get and interpret them for themselves.

3. We need to be realistic about how much we can cover in our classes and the depth which we can cover this in. The times listed above are without interuptions and we certainly have plenty of those which cut down further on how much time we have with our students.

To make sense of this I find that figuring out what the messages I want them to leave my class with for each lesson (and year) helps to make sure I use the time I have to get across the key messages intended by the subject. Could sure use some more time though!!Technorati Tags: PDHPE