With the recent disappointing results demonstrating Australia’s flailing international education standards, there is likely to be much enraged debate from everyone.
Test scores, international and national, often feel like they exist for the sole purpose of keeping up appearances. We all need to appear to perform well and score highly, often regardless of whether these results reflect the consistent and overall performances of school.
So much focus is placed on the results of tests conducted out of a tiny portion of a teaching school year. Further, in order to ‘juke the stats’, teachers are required to ‘teach to the test’ which means returning to superficial rote learning of the ‘right phrases’ and ‘key words’. At the end of ‘test boot camp’, we return to ‘real teaching’, whatever everyone has decided that that is. Why the testing and real teaching are not aligned is the first major red flag.
Yes testing is important. Yes teaching test skills is important.
But to place such importance and base our educational debates on the results of tests is itself superficial.
Our education debate needs the voices of graduate teachers, of teachers who leave for another career, of leading teachers, of experienced teachers, of parents and experts.
Ask them what they think. Ask them what kind of education system they dream of.
Let’s be open to more than one way of educating our primary school kids. To assume that there is only one right way is to ignore the uniqueness of children and learning styles and pretend that we can address every child equally well. We can’t. With only one way, only a few types of children can succeed.
Let’s direct funding to smaller classes so that the ‘fad’ of Independent learning plans, can actually be sincere.
Parents, get involved, support discipline efforts, otherwise our jobs become a clumsy attempt to communicate shreds of information amongst the battle to crowd control and protect our own self respect. Disruptive behavior issues and attitudes are absolutely disruptive to learning and teaching.Teaching and controlling are not synonyms.
There is a too much talk about money and funding and tests.
Ask a student on any day of the week what they are learning and how they are learning it to find out about our education system. Inform reform with student and teacher dialogue.
I am a primary school teacher. I want to see true education reform that is varied and honest. I want sincere debate that goes beyond money and sensationalized blame. I want to teach children a curriculum that is simple and powerful. I want the time and space to monitor and individually help them. I don’t want to be squeezed by the system and pulled every which way until I can’t remember what my job was to start with. I want to do my job better.
We can do better.
mjmwonders 