During these latest school holidays, I was honoured to be invited to present at the PACT symposium in Wellington. I flew down to Wellington where I then met up with our school Principal before giving a presentation in the fabulous Ministry of Education building.
I presented alongside our principal at the conference with over 200 attendees.
Our presentation was on making writing judgements using the PACT tool. While I felt very nervous initially, I was super proud of myself for undertaking such an important task. I received a lot of wonderful feedback from numerous lead teachers and school principals from all over the country. I even had some principals ask if I would be willing to come and help their schools with using the PACT tool.
The view from the Ministry of Education building with the Beehive in the background.
PACT Symposium - July 2016
COLS and PaCT
- All schools using PaCT so that data can be measured equally.
- Can be used to identify the strengths and areas of development. Schools doing well in a particular aspect could then become the leadership in PLD for that particular aspect.
- Comparing the same data allows schools to also filter the results so they identify the genders/ethnicities etc to see what students are doing well or need to be targeted.
- Ability to group students who transit on to other schools - intermediate - high school. The new school then gets all the PaCT data and can group students according to their PaCT results.
- Set a base framework ie: all schools using COLS and reporting on maths,
- Set a framework for the next year ie: maths continues across all schools and everyone start reading as well…
- The MOE can come and run workshops for the COLS
Pact and the curriculum
Reporting: should be about the arts, science, values etc - things that make the whole learner. Shouldn’t be so tunnel vision on literacy and numeracy.
Why is literacy and numeracy so heavily weighted???
The curriculum document is one document for a reason. The curriculum doesn’t place more emphasis on literacy and numeracy. All areas are compulsory. All areas are equally important. (teachers have to trip over other curriculum areas in order to reach their area- proving that the curriculum is intertwined and should be taught like that).
Literacy
- Being able to engage with the text independently and flexibly is getting more, not less, imperative.
- Information-rich societies are putting a greater emphasis on the literacy skill people need in order to:
- Locate and process information
- Create their own texts
Locating information in digital texts: the content in multi-modal informational texts is fragmented so that it can be more easily discovered through different searches.
- Although searching for information is easier, readers now need to navigate vast amounts of unfiltered information at various levels of complexity.
Students need to continue developing their literacy skills throughout their schooling
- More emphasis on students’ ability to:
- Synthesise information across different sources
- Evaluate arguments on a variety of dimensions
- Understand varying perspectives on an issue
- Assess the credibility of sources of information
- Growing needs to be able to:
- Identify key words for searching
- Frame up questions
- Review and edit those questions
- Manage filtered searches far more than strategically than before
- Writing: Purpose first - form next ie: essays, reports, blogs, narratives, short answers…
Research found that Year 9 and 10 students who were researched for PACT were found to be at the standard of what a good Year 8 student should be in literacy- The literacy aspect was no harder than Year 8, however they task was broader and with a richer range of contexts.
Use reading and writing in a meaningful context!!!!!!!
Do we need separate writing books and topic books???
National Standards are about students having the level of reading and writing they need to support their learning in the NZ curriculum. Are about how students use their reading and writing to engage with the NZ curriculum.
RICH LEARNING TASKS!!! Future focused classroom.
