Subj : Teachers slam call for cursive handwriting lessons
To   : All
From : News
Date : Mon Jun 17 2024 12:59 pm

By Bill Hickman, of RNZ
9:32am

Educators are worried about a recently released Ministerial Advisory Group
report on English, maths and statistics.

They say the report - which is likely to inform the content of the revised
English and maths curricula due later this year - is politically motivated
and misses the real drivers behind poor performance in the country's
classrooms.

The advisory group recommended grammar and handwriting lessons, including
cursive handwriting, in primary schools and called for every child to have
their own desk and chair.

It also recommended annual "checkpoint" literacy and numeracy tests for all
children at the beginning of each year.

New Zealand Educational Institute president Mark Potter said he had "no
confidence" in the recommendations.

The report's conclusions were written "without any broad consultation with
the sector", he said.

'Another failed intervention' - NZEI
"The risk is we're going to get a curriculum that's been written by people
who actually aren't in the field and that the practitioners in the classroom
just won't be able to use it. What that'll mean is that we're going to have
yet another failed intervention in classrooms and New Zealand has had too
many of those."

Potter said falling standards of numeracy and literacy reflected societal
pressures on children rather than poor teaching, and the proposed changes
were politically motivated.

"We hear phrasing and framing of things that don't ever get close examination
- such as our falling standards of literacy. People seem to think that every
child in the country's literacy standards are falling - they're not, in fact
our best students are still the best in the world. What we have is a falling
tail and that is coming about for other reasons than just teaching practice.

"The fact that we keep asking teachers to change practice on a five- to
10-year rotation - and the statistics keep going in the wrong direction -
shows we are absolutely looking in the wrong place."

Potter said a return to "high stakes assessment" in the form of annual tests
would have a negative impact on children and was not backed up by evidence.

"It just makes them more stressed and is counter-productive. An annual check
at the beginning of each year presupposes that every child at that point of
the year is at the same measurable point but because children enter school at
different ages and different stages one single point of assessment won't work
for all children," he said.

"That one-size-fits-all doesn't work - evidence shows it doesn't work - so
we're just concerned about what will be the impact on children be if we go
back into this kind of environment."

New Zealand Association of Teachers of English president Pip Tinning said the
recommendations were out of touch and failed to embrace the diversity in the
country's classrooms.

She said the report went too far in dictating how teachers should teach,
instead of making useful recommendations for areas that need attention.

'That's not how we learn' - English teachers' association
"I would hate to see units of work where it's like going through ticking a
box. 'This lesson is on this and here's how you'll line up in your seats and
here's how you'll what you'll write off the whiteboard and make sure you
learn it'. That's not entirely how we learn now," Tinning said.

The proposed changes ignored many developments on how best to engage students
from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, she said.

"It's outdated, it's not forward-thinking and it's not fit for purpose in our
day and age."

The initial report from the Ministerial Advisory Group on English and maths
and statistics went to Education Minister Erica Stanford in March.

It said the updates could cause a "step-change" for New Zealand education but
warned they would fail without good teacher training and buy-in from schools.

The report said change was needed because children's educational achievement
had been falling.

"In education, our national curriculum has been weak in specifying the
knowledge that students are entitled to have taught to them. Teaching
practices have not kept pace with research from cognitive psychology and
other disciplines - the science of learning," it said.

rnz.co.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A44 2020/02/04 (Windows/64)
 * Origin: S.W.A.T.S BBS Telnet swatsbbs.ddns.net:2323 (63:10/102)

.