As an environmental educator of 20 years and having personally been invited to collaborate and participate from Parks Victoria as an expert in protected areas management, I was blown away by the Kids Teaching Kids program. Especially with the extent to which students immersed themselves in the self discovery and learning, and the passion and creativity they demostrated sharing their learnings with their peers. Coincidentally, my own nephews particapted in several conferences over the years too, which allowed me to see how the skills and messages they learned, carried across into their ongoing behaviours outside of school. Congratulations on an amazing, life changing program :-)

I haven't seen Arron's programme in action, though the idea of children mentoring and teaching other children is decades old and has generally been effective in practice. I don't understand however why this programme cannot and should not exist besides standardised testing. Standardised tests usually measure achievement in literacy and numeracy. Properly used, they provide sound information for teachers, helping them to identify isues with which their students need help.

While I'm sympathetic to the need for leadership skills etc, few people can exercise these skills if they have poor literacy and numeracy skills. I'd also argue that parents have a right to know how their children's progres in these basic skills compares with the progress of other children of the same age. Standardised tests provide that sort of information to parents pretty accurately and enables parents teachers to ask probing questions of teachers about their children's learning needs.

Dear Aaron, I think what makes the “socialization” of education so dangerous is that you actually believe it.

This destructive narrative first achieved public prominence in the 1950’s through the CP Snow “Rede Lectures”.

It would seem they nailed your narrative before you were out of nappies?

More recently in a comprehensive series of essays called “The Corruption of the Curriculum” written during 2007 by authors such as Frank Furedi, Shirley Laws, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, Alex Standish, Robert Whelan and David Perks. The conclusion of these authors, all of whom are experienced teachers, is that the curriculum is being drained of intellectual content in favor of promoting political issues such racism, the environment and gender. Now where have we just heard about this Aaron? Oh yes, here.

Examples of the dumbing down process identified by the above authors include but are not limited to:

• Student centered educational approaches leading to constant attempts to make study more “relevant” to students immediate lives
• An underestimation of the capabilities of students and a desire to protect them from failure, leading to breaking down of subjects into ‘bite sized” chunks of digestible information at the expense of a deeper appreciation of the subjects as a whole
• The decline in practical work and laboratory experiments
• A disregard for the integrity of subject knowledge and an associated attempt to sideline teachers “knowledge intermediaries”
• Misplaced and exaggerated expectation about the role education can play in relation to wider social concerns
• Confusion about what science has to offer society

It must be remembered that these are only scientific study examples. Those of history, geography, literature, math’s and modern languages have also been subjected to equally drastic socialization or dumbing down.

I would love to hear more about your plans for trashing standardization or dumbing down our curriculums Aaron.

Oh dear, our one-size-fits-all system of education is indeed a disaster. I am currently tutoring a student who is a perceived failure. I’m sure he’s not a Rhodes’ scholar, but I’m also damned sure he has just got lost in the system. But, he sees himself as a failure.
Failure takes into account, environment, nurturing (both mental and physical) and academic systems. You see we have not moved along the continuum from the 19th century model of education. Sure we have put bells and whistles on how we do things, but that’s where it stands. We still have the same crappy mother duck and her ducklings in classrooms arrangement, and the current teaching standards demand that we all draw the same rose.
I wonder what would happen if we were to throw out all the photocopiers and the smart boards – for a time at least, open the doors, trust, and let the learning begin? Would behaviour be a problem?
Kids learn at point of need. They learn so well from each other. And…they learn in their own way. Did we all crawl, walk, utter our first words at the same time? That’s what we expect with standardized testing.
I was one of seven children and the teaching was left very much to the older siblings in the family. We all went to university (with hindsight I think that maybe we could have achieved 'greatness' had we not).
A friend of ours, a successful one at that, did not receive formal education in PNG until he was thirteen. And yet here in Australia, we cram them in, sometimes at 'nearly five'! The formal learning must begin so parents can get off to work!
And by the way Arron, I always liked the ‘little buggers’ in my classroom!
Maria

Excellent post, Rattie (Maria)...my sentiments precisely!

Rattie rocks. On ya!

GIRL POWER! :-(

Aaron - you are a bodily kinaesthetic learner?
Just like most other boys... and boys are the ones that are struggling at school now!

Girls are going brialliantly at school, but boys are 'falling through the cracks... because school is taught by women, and most importantly, the teaching techniques and pedegogies and curriculum are developed and controlled by feminist education departments.

Boys school results (averge year 12 result) was equal to girls through the 1960's 1970's and ionto the 1980's. Then the feminist generation started influencing outcomes... Boys average mark dropped. Between 1984 and 1996 from being equal to girls to being 7% below!

The alarm bells were ringing! What did they do? Start inquiries and programs to help boys? NO! They stopped recording school results by sex after that... I have tried by FOI to get more recent resuilts - no! It's secret! Aparently it's now 20%!

Boys are now averaging 20% b34low girls!

You can’t use carrots to train dogs

Boys like doing, girls like talking. Boys and girls have different passions, energies, focus and drives.

The depth of anti-male bias is so deep that every level of education needs explicit “boys education units”. These need to be separately funded and protected from administrative interference by the current educational elite.

Each subject area in teacher training needs boys education sections
Programs to encourage males into teaching.

A national body to impose educational frameworks and curricula based on research.

A voucher system so parents are not financially burdened if they choose a single-sex school.

Partial segregation of classes by gende

As we approach the end of a term, I, like many other teachers, tend to get a little jaded. While I didn't find the article particularly enlightening (and was alarmed by its tendency towards advertisement), I think it is underpinned by one very important and valid sentiment: that education and assessment are drifting away from what is relevant.

I'm not opposed to standardised testing of literacy and numeracy - far from it. I think the information provided by that testing can be very useful in informing future teaching and learning. As the years roll on and more NAPLAN data emerges, we should be able to track individual students' (and whole cohorts') improvement in those areas. We should also be able to do something about it, through reflective analysis and proactive responses. For this reason, the hours dedicated in many schools to 'practising' NAPLAN is wasted and, to an extent, detrimental. If we drill kids with 'NAPLAN skills' in the leadup to the test, they will overperform on the test and then promptly discard all that they had stored in their short-term memories.

More importantly, though, I think the Australian Curriculum is heading in the wrong direction. Despite apparent stages of consultation in its development, the skills, knowledge and processes emphasised are relevant to a world that WAS rather than a world that IS or WILL BE. A tokenistic approach to the integration of IT, for example, allows for glossy and colourful versions of the same old handwritten/typed essays, reports and oral presentations with PowerPoints added on. Where is the innovation? Where is the pushing of the boundaries? Even where 'new modes' of assessment are mandated (by state authorities - ACARA carefully avoided dealing with assessment), there is no sense of innovation. We will be looking to tell students to record and edit oral presentations, rather than challenging students to develop 'better' ways of presenting information.

(Continued ...)

(... Continued)

It is my opinion that an essay is an essay and a speech is a speech. A maths exam and a science report ... you get the picture. You can dress them up however you want, but not one of them is particularly relevant to the world encountered by most students once they venture outside the classroom. While essays are a great way of showcasing literacy and maths exams are great for showing off numeracy, how well do they indicate the application of these skills in non-educational settings? In my opinion, the time is rapidly approaching when we must throw out the bathwater, baby and all, and start thinking about assessment again. If essays come back as part of the new approach, so be it. We will then be writing essays because we have identified them as relevant and legitimate forms of assessment, not because we have always written essays. The same goes for exams.

Don't take this as an argument for purely utilitarian learning and assessment, either. It's more an argument for the inclusion of innovation in both processes. There's still a place for Shakespeare and Coleridge, if for no reason other than their aesthetic value. But perhaps the time has come to rethink the way we approach them, rather than simply standardising it to ensure that everybody across Australia is looking at rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter at the same pace.

Arron - You have raised some extremely important points here, and this is a great reminder of the unique and wonderful role that organisations such as Kids Teaching Kids play in adding a rich and unique dimension to teaching and learning. The real challenge for our systems of school education is to see approaches such as you're advocating as authentic learning, and need to develop genuine assessment around this. It's the old adage of do we value what we measure or measure what we value? Interestingly, internationally (in some of the hightest performing countries when it comes to education) there is a major shift away from standardised testing. Have a look at this report into what is happening in school systems across East Asia - http://www.grattan.edu.au/pub_page/129_report_learning_from_the_best.html - and in addition to this, there is great work happening here in Melbourne as part of the 'assessment & teaching of 21st century skills' initiative which also calls for a focus on the type of shift in teaching, learning and assessment that you're advocating for. Check out their latest white paper- http://atc21s.org/index.php/resources/white-papers/