Curios of the week #93

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Summer has arrived on Ajax Street where I live. Leaves are green, skies are blue and we have already had one-or-two warm days. As I write, however, temperatures are in the pleasant mid-20s.

This was the week that our students and teachers finished for the year. The students left us to enjoy their long summer break on Tuesday and we marked the festive season with Christmas music instead of bells, with the head and deputy heads of middle school dressing as elves. Teachers finished on Friday with a Christmas lunch in our grounds. Senior Staff will keep going until Wednesday.

On Thursday, our Year 12 students received their VCE results. They have all worked hard and as a staff, we are extremely proud of them.

There has been some press about our school as a result. According to the measure used by the media, we have topped the state for the third year in a row.

This week’s Curios include TIMSS x 2, inattentive students, some ‘pre-thinking’ and much more.

Intervention of the week

Noel Pearson is an influential Aboriginal Australian leader, lawyer, and advocate for First Peoples’ rights. He is also a true hero of Australian education, implementing Direct Instruction programs in remote schools through his ‘Good to Great Schools’ initiative.

Speaking to Natasha Bita in The Australian, Pearson laid blame at the feet of the Australian Education Union for blocking reforms aimed at boosting explicit teaching:

“They are oblivious, or completely blind, to the evidence about what’s effective in education, and the teaching of reading particularly… They’re the major reason why we haven’t made much progress in Australia and we’ve been sliding down the international rankings for 30 years straight.”

This follows reports that the Australian Education Union would block attempts by the Labor—i.e. left-of-centre—education minister in Victoria to refocus on explicit early literacy teaching.

The Australian Education Union and its various state affiliates represent government school teachers in Australia and so are highly influential, even if there is now competition in the form of the Teachers Professional Association of Australia, an upstart union that takes a very different stance.

I think the Australian Education Union’s position is perverse. I also think there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to supporting teaching practices that don’t work well.

As an aside, I winced when Bita described direct instruction as, “an old-school teaching method,” a description she repeats in a follow-up article on the benefits of the approach. I don’t blame her because, in a sense, she is right, but it points to what we are up against. Group work, project work and other progressivist approaches are also pretty old-school. William Heard Kilpatrick penned The Project Method back in 1918. However, these approaches have always somehow presented themselves as modish and fashionable, suckering people in.

TIMSS analysis of the week I

Over at Bad Mathematics, Marty Ross has taken a look at the TIMSS data that I wrote a little about last week. However, he has completed a deeper investigation than me.

Ross notes the tendency for the Australian results to act as a kind of Rorschach test, with some commentators celebrating gains at Year 4 while others emphasise an overall stagnation. To Ross, the key issue is the difference between what Australian students can do compared with those elsewhere.

Ross is complimentary about the quality of questions in TIMSS which are unadulterated when compared to PISA’s supposedly applied questions. After presenting a couple of the harder questions, he notes:

“As always, we can compare to Singapore, which, unlike ACARA, we can do honestly. On the two questions above, for example, Singapore students’ success rates were, in turn, 86% and 46%, dramatically higher than Australia’s. This is consistent throughout the released 2019 questions, and with the other Asian “tigers” not far behind Singapore. This is the real story of TIMSS.”

There is no reason why Australian students cannot perform at the same level as those from East Asia and don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.

TIMSS analysis of the week II

TIMSS results have reverberated around the world, including in the U.S.