Living Life Twice

I recently conducted a series of after school workshops across Melbourne's Western Region Schools ( Melton Moonee Valley Footscray and Wyndham Werribee) dealing with writing persuasively. In May Australian students in Grades3, 5, 7 and 9 will be asked to write in a persuasive manner as part of the National Assessment Program (Literacy and Numeracy) NAPLAN. To further assist teachers in their important work with young writers I am making the notes from those workshops available. I will spread the posting over three days so the information is less daunting. The Art of Persuasion Our role as teachers of writing is to prepare an environment that stimulates and challenges students to want to learn worthwhile things. Historical efforts to ‘prepare’ students for tests have been based on methods that can be characterized as: Transmittal Isolated De-contextualized (Boyer 1983) Promoted passivity (Goodlad 1984) Rote memorization -drill and ...

NAPLAN has been spreading across the Australian educational landscape with alarming speed. It has begun to devour valuable teaching time in many schools as pressured educators fall under its hideous spell and indulge in highly questionable 'test prep' practices. Practices that do a disservice to what we know about effective teaching. With that in mind, I happened to read this article in the Melbourne Age... Professor Linda Darling Hammond has been visiting Australia and has spoken regarding the inherent dangers of high stakes testing and the effects such assessments can have on curriculum. I thought her words of wisdom and warning were well worth sharing. US education expert blasts 'narrow' national testing Anna Patty            The Age, Newspaper    May 2, 2011 NAPLAN-style testing and reporting have failed in the United States by narrowing the curriculum and corru...

Assisting young writers to stay 'on track' is a major goal for all of us who teach writing. Alerting developing writers to the way in which planning provides a ‘ roadmap ’ for the writing to follow, is part of the essential scaffolding they need to be successful.  This need for planning is equally true for the writing students undertake when participating in the test writing genre section of such high stakes tests such as NAPLAN (National Assessment Project for Literacy and Numeracy). Under such test situations, crucial time elapses while the writer considers what shape the writing will take.  This of course assumes that they actually devote time to planning their response. As concerned educators, we invest teaching time alerting students to the value of planning a writing piece. We naturally assume (and hope) that they will execute that plan. A closer examination of what actually happens to the writer under pressure is that often a disconnect takes place between that pl...