Tag: Nicole Mockler

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 What’s good ‘evidence-based’ practice for classrooms? We asked the teachers, here’s what they said (EduResearch Matters)

We believe teachers should be heard more clearly in the conversations about evidence; policy makers and other decision-makers need to listen to teachers. The type of evidence that teachers want and can use should be basic to any plan around ‘evidence-based’ or ‘evidence-informed’ teaching in Australian schools.

Meghan Stacey and Nicole Mockler share some of their finding associated with what evidence teachers value in the classroom. This is in contrast to external meta research.
Bookmarked It’s time to be honest with parents about NAPLAN: your child’s report is misleading, here’s how by By Nicole Mockler (EduResearch Matters)

At the national level, however, the story is different. What NAPLAN is good for, and indeed what it was originally designed for, is to provide a national snapshot of student ability, and conducting comparisons between different groups (for example, students with a language background other than English and students from English-speaking backgrounds) on a national level.

This is important data to have. It tells us where support and resources are needed in particular. But we could collect the data we need this by using a rigorous sampling method, where a smaller number of children are tested (a sample) rather than having every student in every school sit tests every few years. This a move that would be a lot more cost effective, both financially and in terms of other costs to our education system.

Nicole Mockler summarises Margaret Wu’s work.around the limitations to NAPLAN in regards to statistical testing. Moving forward, Mockler suggests that NAPLAN should become a sample based test (like PISA) and is better suited as a tool for system wide analysis. To me, there is a strange balance where on the one hand many agree that NAPLAN is flawed, yet again and again we return to it as a source of ‘truth’.
Liked TEACHING quality is not TEACHER quality. How we talk about ‘quality’ matters, here’s why by Nicole Mockler (EduResearch Matters)

when it comes to education, if we’re really interested in quality, we need to shift the conversation. We need to make it more about helping teachers to improve the quality of what goes on in their classrooms, and less about casting them as personally or professionally inadequate in the public space. We need to make it more about teachers’ practices and less about teachers as people. We need to make it more about real, collegial professional learning for improvement and less about trying to regulate our way to quality.