Pedagogy

Critique and Criticism

08 January 2011 Last Updated on 08 January 2011 Shaun B

Recently I was doing some reading for a paper I completing and had one of those "AHA!" moments. It had to do with the processes of critiquing and criticising. Two concepts which I have probably fused together too many times. However, at this particular time I had just spent two long evenings reading school reports before they were sent home. Most of the reports were fantastic but there were a couple which I felt uneasy about and this paper spelt it out for me, they read as criticisms of the student. I know this was not a deliberate act on behalf of the teachers who wrote the reports, but the focus was sadly wrong.

Criticism should have no place in our classrooms. In Christian Education we are to be holistically concerned with the development of our students. Whether we are writing reports, evaluating work, giving verbal feedback or completing a pair review with another teacher, our focus must be on building up, moving forward, specific and at all times honest.

The...

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A New Spin on Memory Verses

21 September 2009 Last Updated on 22 September 2009 Shaun B

When I first started at Timaru Christian School we, as many Christian Schools, had a weekly memory verse. As teachers we would sit together and do our term planning and brainstorm a list of hopefully 10 verses which could be used as memory verses. Fantastic, over the course of eight years each student would have an arsenal 8 x 40, 320 verses which they had 'hidden in their heart'!

Hmmm...some very diligent students learnt the verse well could not only remember the verse on testing day but some even remembered the verse for longer, weeks, months.

HOWEVER, it became very obvious that the verses simply were not being retained long term AND there was little big picture planning for the verses we thought students really needed to know. Verses about sin and Salvation were rightly or wrongly not covered in many of our unit plans, yet were verses we all wanted the students to know. To cater for this I redeveloped the Scripture Memorisation program with three essential elements of...

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Feedback, Feedforward, FEED ME!

18 September 2009 Last Updated on 18 September 2009 Shaun B

Isn't it so true that we often do not truly appreciate something as a teacher until the tables are turned and we become a learner? Over the past few years we as a school have had quite a focus on the quality of the feedback we give students. We have begun using rubrics, success criteria, WALTs and feedforward. For some of the teachers this has been not been as easy a task as we would have liked, but we are well on our way.

The importance of the whole feedforward debate has become very real to me recently. This year I decided to immerse myself into the world of post graduate studies and am now two thirds of the way through my second paper. The university which I have enrolled in has a handbook outlining all the criteria for which essays are graded on. In total there are five areas of Assessment Criteria including; relevance, coverage, critical thinking, creative thinking and presentation. Within each of the Assessment Criteria there are five levels of achievement; fail, pass...

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