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Creative writing tests limit creativity, Sats review finds | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tive-writing-tests-sats-review

creative writing writing tests creativity England

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • A writing test taken by 11-year-olds in England should be scrapped because it stops children being creative, a government review has found.Ministers asked Lord Bew, a crossbench peer, to review Sats – tests in maths and English taken by 600,000 pupils every May – after a quarter of primary schools boycotted the exams last year.Bew's team of headteachers found that the writing test does not allow children to demonstrate their imagination because it looks for formulaic answers.
  • The Bew review recommends that teachers assess creative writing throughout the school year, instead of in a single test.
  • The review team also urged the government to ensure that schools are judged over three years of results rather than one and given a rolling average in league tables.
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  • The National Association of Head Teachers "cautiously welcomed" Bew's report.Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, said teacher assessment for writing would "reduce drilling and give both parents and secondary schools a far more accurate picture of pupils' achievement".
Teachers Without Borders

Canadian education awaits a hard lesson, watchdog warns - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article2197017

Canada teachers education report

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “Canada is the only country in the developed world that has no stated national goals for education,” he said.
  • Canada is a top-performer, and a fair one. For more than a decade, Canadian students have outperformed their international peers on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s assessments of reading, math and science. They placed in the top 10 in every subject in the most recent results.What has made other countries take notice is that household income and immigrant status matter less to a student’s results here than they do elsewhere.
  • The report also raises concerns about the desirability of the teaching profession, and whether limited employment opportunities and constant reforms are scaring away the best candidates for teachers college.This raises alarm bells because research has shown that teachers are the single biggest in-school influence on learning.“Teachers are a fundamental question for Canadian education – how we train, assess and pay them,” said Peter Cowley, an education policy researcher at the Fraser Institute.
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  • Canada also has the weakest record on teaching national history that the council could find it its review of school curricula in other countries. Most Canadian provinces require only one high school course in Canadian history, and they tend to put a very regional lens on the material.Canadian schools are doing an especially poor job of history education when compared to American ones, said Jeremy Diamond, a director for the Historica-Dominion Institute.“We don’t start young enough, we don’t make it a priority, and we have a generation of young people who don’t know the essential things we as Canadians should know about our history,” he said.
  • The Canadian Council on Learning says there needs to be more school-industry partnerships, like those in part of Central Europe where there are a number of apprenticeship options available to high school students. In Canada, however, a bottleneck occurs as students struggle to find placements in their area of training.
  • It also recommends that Canada set up a national French-language teacher training college, “in order to preserve and enhance bilingual education.” Canada is facing a shortage of French-language teachers, both in the French school boards outside Quebec and for French immersion programs.
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