Posted in curriculum, politics on Dec 6th, 2008 No Comments »
Well there wasn’t a lot of actual guns thankfully, but a lot of implied threats, angst, legal wrangling and big money at stake this week in the Federal Parliament as school funding and national curriculum and political ambitions all got tangled up. There were threats, counter-threats, bluffs, bullying and bravado, and while education was front [...]
Posted in assessment & reporting, curriculum on Nov 22nd, 2008 No Comments »
It had to happen of course; that the new spirit of national cooperation and cooperative revolution would get stickier and trickier when it got down to the details. Like the NAPLAN (National Asessment of Literacy and Numeracy) benchmarks and where they might be placed.
Last week the Herald-Sun gave some glimpse of that behind the scenes wrangling [...]
Posted in curriculum on Nov 17th, 2008 No Comments »
With the annual Curriculum Corporation COnference circus in town last week, there was a lot of talk about national curriculum, at briefings I attended, and on the mainstream radio. Including this discussion on the Radio National program Life Matters.
Australia has a ’21st century economy with a 19th century education system’, Rupert Murdoch’s damning assessment in [...]
Posted in curriculum on Oct 29th, 2008 No Comments »
We hold these truths to be self evident: that giving students some choice in their own learning directions is likely to lead to them becoming more actively engaged in their own learning, and likely to help them find that ‘thing’ they love.
So, I was pleased to read in the NY TImes today that some US [...]
Posted in curriculum, politics on Sep 8th, 2008 No Comments »
What if the national curriculum that’s going to revolutionise everything also included HOW to teach certain subjects such as perhaps reading? Would we all think it so benevolent and non-invasive then.
I’ve railed and wailed here about national curriculum before but Caroline Milburn’s article in the AGE today opens a new line; that methodology might also [...]
Posted in assessment & reporting on Jun 19th, 2008 1 Comment »
Barry McGaw’s article Science Good, maths holding, reading declining, published in the latest EQ (Autumn 2008) coming out of the Curriculum Corporation, discussing the latest data from international PISA testing, nicely illustrates some of my concerns with the national curriculum agenda.
McGaw, who has been appointed chair of the new National Curriculum Board, goes data-happy in [...]
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