Tag: Jenny Gore

Bookmarked Teachers the fall guys for a failing system by Jenny Gore, Nicole Mockler (The Sydney Morning Herald)

Proposed changes to education policy – like performance pay for teachers – are unlikely to work if systemic problems and societal factors continue to be ignored.

Jenny Gore and Nicole Mockler respond to the current crisis in education. They question such call performance pay and quality teachers, arguing that this overlooks the systemic challenges of inequity in our communities. This is something that they have written in depth about elsewhere. What is needed is investment in teaching and an effort to raise the status across the board.

This is something that Gabbie Stroud also explores:

Why does a teacher shortage occur? Ultimately, it’s because our education system is operating under a business model which treats students and parents as customers and teachers as expendable workers expected to function as told, rather than as autonomous professionals tasked with the unique and complex responsibility of guiding young people’s learning.

Bookmarked COVID coaches: tutoring only works when backed by quality teaching directed at the students who really missed out (aare.edu.au)

The success of the tutoring programs being used by schools to help students recover post-Covid-19 will depend heavily on the quality of the tutoring they provide. Tutors need to be really clear about what they’re trying to achieve and how best to help. For the current programs to succeed, the quality of the teaching of these tutors will be paramount.

Jenny Gore explains that if the tutoring program being implemented by the Victorian and NSW governments is to work then it needs to involve quality teaching. I imagine that this is an interesting challenge for schools in both regards to the metrics used for ascertaining which students require that further support and what that support actually looks like in different contexts. The issue I had in the past with intervention was that support always happens in a context.

Coming at the problem from an American perspective, Ron Berger suggests that recognising student strengths and resilience is more important than remedial classes:

Schools should also recognize their students’ resilience over this past year, support their healing and emotional growth, and honor them with meaningful and challenging academic work, not with remedial classes. That’s how we’ll get our children back on track.

Districts face a hard reality, though: Many children lost a great deal of academic growth last year; some kids didn’t attend school at all. Districts need to know which students need extra support, including tutoring in and outside the classroom. But educators need to assess students’ abilities in a way that motivates them to grow.