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.

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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/