nzhta’s weblog

Already one can detect considerable unease being expresed about where we are
heading.
The concerns as we see them at TGC are:

* decontextualised teaching and learning is not good educational
practice, yet it would appear the Ministry is reluctant to allow 
specified contexts(topics) for external examination.  This then may mean
we can only avoid decontextualised  teaching and learning if there is
school-based internal assessment, directly related to the contexts
taught.  What a predicament we have got ourselves in!

* any notion of having an external exam of less than 2 hrs will probably
be treated with some indifference by numerous students, not something
that would prove to be positive for the subject

* everything seems to have to be discussed within the parameters of some
rather narrow AO’s devised in the curriculum statement- it  appears
there was an  interest group shaping the curriculum statement who have
determined that  5 of the 6 AO’s for Levels 6, 7, and 8 have to be “of
significance to New Zealanders’ .  This is going to result in some
rather limiting outcomes, unless this is challenged.

Goodness knows where all this is going to take the study of History in
the senior secondary school, but the framework does seem flawed, -yet we
have the uneasy feeling that the horse has probably bolted!

We do have some practical questions from the viewpoint of those students
who opt for History as a subject  because they like and are excited
about topics/contexts we currently teach. eg In Year11 topics such as
Origins of WW2, and Black Civil Rights, USA.
It is stated that while “this does not preclude existing topics being
taught, they must be tweaked to fit the AO’s”, which therefore means in
terms of  “significance to New Zealanders”.  How is it envisaged such
‘tweaking’ of these topics would be done??

Murray Armstrong
HOD Social Sciences
Tauranga Girls’ College

NZHTA Proposed Matrices: A Personal Response

So many of the contributions I am reading on the NZHTA site are talking only in abstractions and unsupported generalizations based upon what seems a partial reading / understanding of the material provided. After some reflection I decided to respond to those general concerns with a specific, personal statement setting out my view of the situation we, as history teachers and historians face and outlining my opinions and preferences and detailing the thinking behind them. This seems to be an unusual approach in “debates” on curriculum issues from what I can see: Paul O’Connor is, for example, the only contributor to personalise reasons and insights in the current crop of blogs on the NZHTA site. I’ve chosen to follow his example in the hopes of encouraging / provoking some real engagement in the debate and moving us much of the current sound and fury signifying bugger all. Whether this in fact is the case, remains to be seen. I admit to scepticism, based on my current analysis of the level of debate that more than the first paragraph will be read

First, my personal statement / disclaimer: I am an HOD and Director of Assessment at a mid-decile state co-ed high school. I teach junior Social Studies, Classical Studies and, of course, History. I enjoy all the subjects I teach, but History is the one I feel passionate about. It dominates my personal and professional reading and I intend very soon (when the NZHTA Exec moves on from Otago), to pick up and pursue one of the PhD topics I’ve been playing about with for the last decade or so.

I am in my twenty-sixth year of teaching and continue to find the classroom an engaging, absorbing and energising place to be. I loathe administration and am deeply frustrated at the way that HOD’s have devolved from professional leaders to “middle management”. Because I have a reasonable facility with language and can dress any vacuity in the edu-speak of the moment I can get away with an awful lot on paper. In face-to-face meetings, however, I neither want to nor try to hide my belief that administration in its myriad forms is just a trough of manure I have to wade through to get to the real business of teaching. 

I began teaching when UE was accredited and have worked with every scheme and variation since then – School Cert, 6FC, Bursary, UGC Scholarship, ABA, unit standards, achievement standards and New Zealand Scholarship. I’ve marked, examined, trained and moderated, written and edited resources and texts, presented and facilitated PD and in-service courses and assisted with the training of beginning teachers over the whole of that period.     

In late March of this year I responded to an email from Ian Stevens to attend an urgent Otago History Teachers Association and found that we’d been requested to take on administration of NZHTA for the next two years to oversee the alignment of the standards to the new curriculum. The most polite of my initial reactions was “What a hospital pass. Just think of all the crap that will come our way!” Fortunately, as it turns out, more reasonable voices than mine prevailed and we took up the challenge.

I have to say that what this process has involved to this date has been some of the most rewarding, challenging and enlightening professional discourse of my career. I’ve had the opportunity to spend upwards of 80 hours deconstructing and constructing my subject and my approach to teaching it. Every aspect has been examined, criticised, evaluated by my Executive colleagues and the extended group of expert practitioners and enthusiasts on the MoE Teaching and Learning Guidelines initial writing group. We have stripped away, build up and tested to destruction a variety of approaches as we have looked at ways to do the apparently impossible and accommodate every teacher’s demands into the mandated inflexibility of six Achievement Objectives which, we are bluntly told are our curriculum – end of story.

The process is on-going, and none of us on the Executive are deluded enough to think that we have the answer (or, indeed, that there is one answer that can meet all demands). We do believe, however, that we are at a stage when we need to seek clearer indications of what teachers consider positive and practical. That was why we decided to put a variety of matrices to the community along with supporting explanatory material.  

I have to say I expected more informed comment than we have generally received. I acknowledge there are obvious difficulties in attempting to understand the specifics of how a standard may be assessed simply from a title on a matrix.[i] In our notes and accompanying material we’d tried to focus attention on the new environment we’d been compelled to work under and how we all need to start thinking differently as a result. That material seems to have been large unread or ignored, so here is my blunter take on it.

1.       There are no topics. Prescriptions – such as the notes on L1 and 2 currently available on TKI- have, apparently, had no status since the advent of NCEA. To date we’ve got around that by including them in explanatory notes in the standards. That will not happen from 2010. This is not something that we – or any other subject that is affected – have meekly accepted, but the blunt and consistent message from MoE / NZQA is that courses – and achievement standards – must only reflect the Achievement Objectives. There is no capacity to prescribe beyond that. You might think that our Achievement Objectives would have been different had the writers known this at the time they composed them, but that is irrelevant in terms of the current reality.

2.       In itself, this need not be a major concern – except for those who wish to impose their view of what history should be taught. Teachers will be free to continue to teacher their current course with little or no change if they wish. Those of us currently dissatisfied with aspects of (or the entirety of) the currently “prescribed” contexts will be free to introduce changes as gradually or as rapidly as we wish. The potential for local history, current history, controversial history and more, drawing on a range of periods and places, can only be good and exciting for the subject. I am currently working with a teacher in training whose talent and enthusiasm is tangible. She has Politics in her degree, including a paper on terrorism – and is already excited at the prospect of being able to incorporate that knowledge into a course for students. I know I’ll get the standard rejoinder about courses becoming too personalized and difficult to staff when teachers move on – but the next teacher will be equally able to introduce a new element or two to reflect their strengths and interests (and good luck in finding new teachers who are (a) specialists or (b) enthusiasts about the unification of Germany, the origins of the First World War or 19^th Century British politics for example).  We may even find a professional debate and exchange of real significance emerging as people champion their new courses / contexts in PD and subject association publications.

3.       Because there are no topics, external essays and resource standards at all levels will be generic / decontextualized. This is a logical and unavoidable consequence of (1) above. We tried to make this as clear as possible in the notes and documents supporting the matrices on the web site, but there seems to some unwillingness to grasp the reality. We are well aware of teacher dissatisfaction with the generic external essay standards at Level 2 and recognize the anger that any proposal to extend the approach generates. Here I believe teachers need to recognize that the agenda being pursued by the MoE / NZQA pays little or no heed to practitioner views. We have fought hard to retain the essay, a form of historical debate that historians at both secondary and tertiary level see as a central discipline of the subject. Its official description may have been word-smithed to describe it as “an extended piece of writing”, but I believe all practitioners will understand the actual format and mode.

4.       How to minimise the effect of the official obsession with generic assessment? I have to say that I believe any teacher stand on this is compromised from the outset by our apparent support for generic assessment of the resources standards at Levels 1 and 2. Let’s not kid ourselves that asking students to answer questions on a collection of documents when they have no detailed knowledge of the historical context, relevance and resonance of the resources in front ofthem is anything other than sort-of-historical comprehension. Meaningful analysis and critiquing of the sources is always compromised by that format. As we struggled  with ways to reconcile teacher opposition to generic essays and their equally vociferous rejection of internally assessing the essay standard with official intransigence about specifying contexts we hit upon what seemed to some of use a real (if not ideal) solution: set up a standard where the rubric was robust enough for teachers to insert a context specific essay question for their students to write an essay in specified conditions on a taught context. This essay would then be gathered for assessment by national panels. This, I believe, allows a contextualized essay to be used to establish and maintain a national standard. The response of the teacher community to date has been largely negative. Most who reject it see it as a covert extension of internal assessment. I’ll keep my response to that brief and polite. All you are being asked to do is come up with a question related to a context you teach and administer the assessment. You are not being asked to mark it: that remains external. I’d like to believe that teachers currently prepare their students for external assessments by teaching, setting,  assessing and marking a number of essays in the course of the year – so where are the “workload issues’?

5.       The matter of “significance to New Zealand and New Zealanders”. What peculiar hangover of cultural cringe makes so many teachers so uneasy about the prospect of actually presenting students with their own history? While many may have misgivings about  or objections to the current array of topics, you are now free to develop and explore more exciting and relevant contexts – or specific aspects of current topics (N.B. No prescribed contexts = no broad surveys at Y13). I acknowledge part of the problem lies in the phrase used in the Achievement Objectives. I suspect, as many do, that there was a specific intention on the part of the writers to give a clear direction that more New Zealand contexts should be included. Given our limited number of Achievement Objectives this could have led to an almost exclusive focus. Fortunately, in my view, this is not the actual effect of the phrase, and documents on the NZHTA web site set out the definition in use we are expected to apply. For my part, I will include more New Zealand contexts in both internal and external aspects of my redesigned courses because I now have the opportunity to explore more varied, exciting and relevant aspects with the dead hand of prescription removed. I will also use the idea of “significance to New Zealand” as a focus for discussing and evaluating completed contexts. The phrase will also inform my initial context choices. I believe I can and should be able to establish significance to New Zealand – and the young New Zealanders in front of me – in all contexts we study. My examination of the key concept of historical significance will not be limited to its unfortunately restricted use in the Achievement Objectives alone – I want my students to constantly critique the whole notion of significance – and that should / must include everything that I direct our study towards.

6.       My own journey. I started this process keen that we should have prescribed topics and maintain a balance between internal and external assessment to ensure subject credibility and rigour. As a result of the time spent discussing, reading, criticising the current standards and planning alternatives to them as we worked on our realignment proposals, I’ve had the opportunity to select and apply my experience, my “theory in use” and my reading in history education and assessment. I can and will live with any system that we end up with – that’s an easy assumption to make after twenty-six years of almost constant assessment debate and change) and I feel no need at all to look off-shore for alternative systems to import. I’ve come to believe, however, that my interests and the interests of my students would be best served if I was free to pursue the least popular (and hence least likely) option and completely internally assess my courses. Then I could design, deliver, assess and review my courses in a way that lets me combine immediate responses to student interests and needs while developing courses that provide the best history education in the best, most relevant contexts I can determine. The supposed work load doesn’t bother me because it basically means presenting for moderation assessments that I currentlt prepare anyway. The major pay off is that all my assessment will then become contextualized, specific and historical in focus and intent. Like the universities, I’ll be able to directly relate learning to assessment. I will also be able to make much more use of formative assessment to assist and measure learning and progression. Like many teachers, I resent the current intention to use moderation data to produce yet another set of league tables, but the issue here is with the bureaucrats, the politicians and the media, not the moderators. I am confident that the moderation system is more than robust and rigorous enough to ensure that I remain true to the intent of the curriculum and the specifics of the standards. Unlike many respondents I don’t care enough about the prospect of other “teachers” cutting corners with assessments by giving out prepared essays and so on: with appraisal systems, the Teachers Council, ERO, BoTs, moderators, Ombudsmen and so on there should be more than enough watchdogs to detect anyone that intent on cheating their students. I’m more interested in giving the students in front of me the best deal I can. I like the freedom the new curriculum gives me. I believe the internally assessed system would give me the most scope, but am confident that whatever combination we end up with will allow me to spend the remaining years of my teaching career offering more responsive. Exciting, pedagogically sound teaching and assessment than has been possible at any stage of my career before. That is why I will continue to put time and effort into making it work at whatever level I can and why, bluntly, I don’t want to the opportunities to be limited by the timid lack of vision I see in so many of the responses NZHTA has received to date.

Paul Enright