NCEA, Spoonfeeding and Blooms Taxonomy

Yesterday Fairfax published a story by Jo Moir about students using NCEA assessment resource exemplars as a source of much of what they need to know in order to pass school based assessments. The story suggests one of the key problems is that teachers frequently don't modify the exemplar assessments prior to using them with students, so students can access the 'answers' and memorise them.

Image from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If this is the case, it seems to me that we have a massive problem with our entire education system. The issue isn't that students can access the 'answers', it goes much deeper than that. Recently I've ended up chatting with a number of people about Blooms Taxonomy and the categories from it that we tend to expect students to operate within. If students are working, and being assessed, at the lower end - remembering, and maybe understanding - then they can conceivably access an exemplar online, memorise it, and do well in the test. But if we are working with students in the evaluating and creating categories then the online exemplars provide nothing more than a structure to guide a learning experience, and there is no way to cheat because new understandings are being generated, rather than old knowledge being regurgitated.

I've been wondering how a student could cheat at producing work for Passionfruit Magazine (Volume Two of which, by the way, is now available), or any similar project based learning, and I think it would be pretty hard to do. Yes, a student could conceivably find an article about an artist and try and pass it off as theirs, but they'd have to set up a fake interview that appeared to give them source material, and then provide multiple drafts that incrementally developed towards the final piece of writing. And then they'd have to do the same with a DPS design, etc, etc. Why would they bother?!

I guess what I'm saying is that if the system is based on students engaging authentically with the world outside of school, and the motivation driving them is to make connections and learn more about how and why the world works like it does, the issue of them giving answers they've copied from elsewhere tends to be nonexistent.

Most of the predictions I've read about the world we're trying to prepare students for suggests that the skills they need come from the 'top' of Blooms Taxonomy, not the lower regions. If we focus on that, the likelihood is that we won't really need to worry about cheating because we'll be generating something new, rather than repeating the old.

Semi-Permanent Auckland 2013

Wow, it's been a while since I posted anything. That probably gives a good indication of the busyness of school lately, with an Education Review Office visit at the start of term, and the ongoing action packed life that is the development of Passionfruit magazine!

One of our major excitements for the last week has been a trip to design industry conference Semi-Permanent Auckland to carry out some interviews, gather some inspiration, and, most importantly, to give students a chance to see some of the options for making a life in the arts. We ended up taking nine students for the two days, seven of them from Passionfruit Magazine and two others who were keen to join us. This was a really positive improvement on the three who came last year. This was aided by Semi-Permanent giving us two tickets to give away (and an extra free one - thanks heaps SP!), which has helped build the profile of the magazine through social media.

Here's a short video of some of what we got up to over the two days. The three people being interviewed are (in order of appearance): Askew One (Graffiti artist); Matt Boulder (Art Director of Digital Kitchen); and Kelly Thompson (Illustrator).

Students stepping up

One of the student leadership roles we have as part of Passionfruit Magazine is the Social Media Manager. This is a key role in terms of building our audience engagement within the target group. It's interesting to note that although the role might be viewed from the outside as a chance for the student in charge to play on Facebook all day, the task of engaging an audience is actually a really complex challenge. We've had a number of discussions over the past couple of weeks about the type and frequency or posts, and have tried out various approaches.

On the weekend of 2/3 March Ezra, our Social Media Manager, hit a good balance of engaging content and frequency of sharing. It's been impressive to watch how her engagement with the role has increased, and how she's becoming increasingly savvy and analytical about how she goes about the role. This was confirmed this evening by several posts she spontaneously made in our project Facebook group sharing and commenting on data from the 'Insights' section of the project page, and relating the current Facebook audience to our magazine's overall target.

It's so rewarding to see students taking control of and responsibility for their own learning!

Unsolicited positive feedback

Earlier is week I received an email alert that my teacher Facebook profile had been tagged in a student post. What a pleasant surprise it was to find that the post was the lovely affirmation shown above! The student who posted it is one of the Year 12s who have joined the team this year.

2013 begins!

A new year. A new group of students. A new volume of Passionfruit Magazine. A revised approach to making it.

School started back for our seniors on Friday 1 February, so it's been just over a week since we started working with the second group of 'ArtProject' students. We've got four new Year 12 students, three new Year 13's and six Year 13's coming back for a second year of the project. That's a total of 13 students: a beautifully small class and a good number to work with, but not really sustainable in the long (multiple years) term. More about that some other time.

We're trying a few different approaches this year with regard to the structuring of learning. To begin with, rather than last year's 'Hack your learning space' exercise, which gained a lot of interest from parties outside of the project, but was not entirely successful in terms of student buy in and long term working relationships, we're sticking with the physical classroom space pretty much as it was. We'll re-arrange it according to the needs of specific phases of the project, but there will not be a major 'building phase' to begin the project.

We're also taking a more structured approach to the presentation of individual parts of the project - units of work one might call them in a more traditional classroom. While the 'We'll make authentic work for a magazine, and this will provide evidence for assessment' approach was good in theory, in practice many (probably all, to be truthful) of the students found it really challenging to work in this mode. On one hand it could be argued that this is because the school system has trained them to require spoon feeding in terms of 'do this task, then this task, then this task, then hand it in to your teacher and you'll get credits'. On another hand it could be argued that students at secondary level need some degree of breaking down of a big task into smaller, more achievable components if they are to experience success. On yet another hand, moderation requirements currently demand a fair degree of structure in assignments if a school is to retain freedom to offer all achievement standards.

The outcome of all of this is that we are presenting students with a series of open ended assignments that will (hopefully) give them the flexibility to produce the work they want to for the magazine, while at the same time giving them more structure than last year. I (Sam) am still in two minds about this, because I suspect that ultimately we need to produce learners who can break a major task down into parts they can manage, but maybe my expectations are a bit high . . .

We've also changed the teaching team, bringing a different English specialist on board, and replacing one of the Visual Arts specialists with a Music/Technology specialist. So the teaching team is now Sam Cunnane (Visual Arts/Project Leader), Anna Dowthwaite (English) and Jesse Te Weehi (Music/Technology). Jesse's role will be largely in relation to the web-based components of the magazine, but he is also leading a second integrated curriculum project in the school ('MusicPro', but more about that another time).

Cmdr_Hadfield Chris Hadfield

The Earth has problem skin; one popped, the other didn't. pic.twitter.com/2oqTv5p3

Finally, we finished the week on a bit of a high, in the middle of making arrangements to do an interview with an astronaut (Chris Hadfield) who takes photographs from the international space station. He's well worth following on Twitter - @Cmdr_Hadfield

Reflections on Year One

I've been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately - silent in fact, since mid-August. Now that the academic year is slowing down a bit I've got some time and distance for thinking about how the project's gone, and what we'll do differently next year.

Firstly, here's a re-cap of what we've been up to since the launch of the magazine. There were three key tasks for the students during Term Three, and the few weeks of Term Four that they were present for, prior to NCEA exam leave: Visual Arts folio development (for those not familiar with the New Zealand system, the folio is a major external assessment for Visual Arts, worth about half of the credits available for a year); preparing for external exams in English; and completion of internal assessments for Art History, English, Media Studies and Visual Arts.

The third task in this list - completion of internal assessments - was not an initial part of our plan for the year, but it became clear as we marked work that although the theory of producing authentic work for a magazine and marking it against a range of standards was good, in practice there was some 'shoehorning' required to make sure all the requirements of a standard were met so that the student could be awarded the credits. As a result of this, in 2013 students will be working according to more conventional type assessment tasks that are designed to ensure all requirements of a standard are met, while at the same time giving students the freedom to produce authentic work for Passionfruit Magazine.

Polaroid transfer onto bandage. Jasmine Wiltshier, 2012

Some of the feedback that we received from students during the first half of the year was that they wanted to be able to spend much more time making art works, and the development of their folios gave them the opportunity to do this. They embraced this fully, to the extent that it was sometimes hard to get them to attend to other work! The amount and flexibility of time available to students enabled them to explore a range of processes that we would not usually cover, and the photographers developed a particular interest in Polaroid transfers.

Our Painting majors were invited to join the conventional NCEA class for the second half of the year, and this assisted greatly with their skill development and ability to craft work to meet the requirements of the external standard. While the project based learning approach of this project is great for the development of a range of skills and aptitudes, the development of specific technical skills is variable, depending on the context each student works in. Attending a series of formal lessons proved to be a great way for the Painting students to develop some of their skills, and we are in the process of working out how best to integrate this into the project for next year.

Preparation for external exams in English provided quite a challenge. Enough time was available for the teaching and study necessary to prepare students for the exams, but students found it hard to adapt to the set requirements of preparing for a test when they had become used to working in a much more self-direct manner. In reflecting on the difficulties that arose from this, we are considering running an English 'line' of the timetable for the project students in 2013, or adding them to a conventional class at the appropriate level for some periods of the week so they are given the structure needed to help them have success in the exam.

I'll be back with some more reflections on the project in the coming week, along with some of the other ideas we have for 2013.

The Magazine!

It's been a while since I made a posting here, thanks largely to a madly busy month or so of completing the magazine for the print deadline, followed by a launch event, filming some video snapshots with Merryn and Michael from CORE, and distribution of the magazine to schools, cafes and other locations around the city.

The response we've received when we show people the finished magazine has been outstanding. Having been so focused on the production of the magazine I think we've almost become blase about what we've achieved. I was reminded of this recently when I dropped in to show it to the team at Ministry of Done. They've been involved in more than their fair share of publications, and I really respect their opinion on educational projects. Hearing how impressed they were with Passionfruit made me step back and think "Yeah, we dun good!"

This added to a message that one of the students had received from painter Grahame Sydney in response to receiving a copy of Passionfruit:

Many thanks for the copy of the "Passionfruit" magazine received late last week. Its a classy little thing, with plenty of page-turning interest and a bold, sharp design element which makes it look very contemporary and professional.
Your own photographs look terrific, by the way. I trust you're pushing that adventurous talent as hard as you can, and being courageous - trusting your private instinct !!!
. . .
My congratulations to you and the team, and I hope working on Vol 1 has inspired further urges to carry on with more in future.

Another really pleasing experience for me as a facilitator of the project has been to hear the NCEA Level 2 students (who will be carrying on with the project next year) starting to talk about what they want to do in terms of leadership roles, and improvements they will make based on their experiences and the outcomes this year. It feels like we're beginning to build some momentum . . .

 

Reflections on the project - June 2012

This is a shorter edit (with a couple of extras) of the video we presented at the VPLD & DA hui back in June.


Curriculum Integration Project Snapshots June 2012 from Passionfruit Magazine on Vimeo.

Printing Passionfruit Volume One

A big thanks to Tony and Jono from Print House Ltd for letting us film them at work, and The Darkroom Project for the music.

Passionfruit Magazine cover artwork time-lapse

Here's a quick video of the first part of the making of our cover artwork. More to come later in the week, hopefully.

And for those who'd like to know, the video is shot on an iPhone, using a great little app called iLapse. Music done one GarageBand by a Fraser Music student. Video editing on iMovie.

Semi-Permanent

Words of advice from Moffitt &Moffitt

It's been a week since the Auckland edition of Semi-Permanent, and if I take much longer to reflect on it the news will be stale!

About a month ago I attended an event at Wintec with ten of the Passionfruit Magazine crew, at which Simon Velvin, director of the Semi-Permanent creative conferences, spoke about his career to date. He also gave away a few tickets to the Auckland conference, two of which I won! This set in motion a trip up to Auckland, with five of us (two staff and three students) attending the conference.

Ron English in conversation with Radar (conference MC)

Semi-Permanent was two pretty intense days (made up of four 90min sessions, each with two different presentations), and by the end we were all pretty exhausted! Stand-out presentations included those from Ron English, Industrial Light Magic, Swifty, Special, and the rather dodgy lads from Stolen Girlfriends Club (I was glad the students I had with me were mature seniors and not Year 10's).

Next time we'll see what we can do to get along to some of the conference side events, for a chance to interact more directly with the various people who are part of Semi-Permanent. I have to admit that sometimes it felt like a lot of sitting and listening and watching (which isn't too bad when the people presenting are the visual effects art director for films like Rango), and a bit more hands on activity would have been great. Events like the three day intensive hand-made zine workshop with Swifty would have been fantastic to be part of.

UK-based designer Swifty showing work from the Yea Nah zine project run prior to Semi-Permanent Auckland 2012

The best part for me (from the Curriculum Integration Project side of things at least) was the chance for out students to be exposed to a whole range of potential futures for themselves in the 'creative industries'. I think it would be unrealistic to expect many of them to go on to have careers in magazine publishing, but I hope that being part of the project will at the very least open their eyes and minds up to a selection of futures that could become theirs. After all, that's a big part of what education is about isn't it?

Passionfruit Magazine website goes live

If we're tracking progress against Doorley and Witthoff's emotional arc for a project, yesterday was a definite 'up' in that we (and by we, I mean web editor Lia Ellis and her team) got the magazine website all live and functional. Articles currently available feature designer Christian Pearce and photographer Mark Hamilton.

As a result of that I'm very proud to be able to let you know that the name of our magazine is Passionfruit, and you can find it online at http://www.passionfruitmagazine.co.nz/. There's also a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PassionfruitMagazine which we'd love you to 'Like'. A Pinterest for the project is also in development.

In reflecting on the progress to getting the website live, I want to acknowledge Lia's outstanding perseverance. She's worked through many obstacles in the site development, and refused to give up until she had a product that functioned the way she wanted it to. Of course there are a number of kinks that need to be ironed out, but I have all confidence that she will work through these too.

In conjunction with the web version of the magazine we'll be setting up a couple of online 3D galleries thanks to sponsorship from the good folks at Exhibbit - http://www.exhibbit.com. You can look forward to a gallery of our students' work, along with one of work by the artists we are writing about in the magazine.