Topical Teaching

It sickens me to see the Government so smug about the upcoming round of National Testing.  In Australia it’s called the NAPLAN (I refer to it as “NAPALM”), and like other National tests around the world it compares student data against the average.  The Government uses the National tests as an easy way out of doing something constructive about Education.

Before I slam these pathetic tests, in the spirit of goodwill, I will acknowledge some advantages of National Testing:

• It uses these tests as a vehicle for pressurising schools and teachers to lift their game and secure good results for their students.
• It forces teachers not strictly following the curriculum to adhere to the syllabus
• It gives parents some real data to consider, rather than the deliberately vague school reporting, which essentially tells parents nothing.
• It gives parents an opportunity to become more involved in their child’s education.

Now for the disadvantages:

• It forces teachers to stop what they are doing, and spend weeks if not months practicing for the test.  Everything gets put on hold while the sample test papers get wheeled out.
• It fills students as young as 8 years-old with anxiety, pressure and insecurity.
• It causes schools to “encourage” the parents of special needs students to keep their kids at home during the testing week.  This is to ensure that their child doesn’t affect the school’s results.  It also achieves in further marginalising these children who, in many cases, already feel disconnected from their peers.
• It puts enormous stress on teachers.  This stress has an effect on their quality of teaching.
• It turns education into an extreme negative at a time when kids still show an interest in learning.

I am currently teaching Grade 5 for the first time.  I am preparing my students for the rigours of NAPLAN (they sat for them 2 year ago).  It means that my emphasis has had to change.  Instead of teaching in an engaging and creative way, I’ve been forced to teach to the tests.  The result has been a succession of comparatively boring and turgid lessons on strategies for answering multiple choice questions, “debugging” sample tests and revising basic skills.  My students are not enjoying these lessons at all!  I fear that when they sit these tests they will sabotage the process by rushing through it as revenge for what its done to their enjoyment of school.

What makes these tests even worse is that they are testing the children at Grade 5 level even though they have just started Grade 5.  Because of that, my students haven’t covered some of the concepts being tested.  Surely, if they wanted to test a Grade 5 class against the Grade 5 benchmarks they should have done it at the end of the school year, not at the beginning!

When are Governments going to stop being so lazy and start taking on a fresh and innovative approach to learning?  Why must my students be subjected to sample tests and other turgid preparatorylessons, instead of conventional, authentic lessons?

Parents have the right to know how  their child is progressing.  At the same time though, their children deserve the right to have a pressure reduced primary education, where the teachers are able to harness their natural curiosities, instead of burden them with weeks of test prepa
ration!

Tags: Education, Government, kids, National Testing, News, Parenting, Special Needs, Stress, Teachers, Teaching, Testing, Tests

This entry was posted on March 29, 2011 at 1:25 am and is filed under Naplan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.