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NZCER Blogs
A number of NZCER staff contribute to our blogs and we link to and draw on external expertise. We hope it is a useful source of information, ideas and support about NZCER's work and wider educational and assessment issues. We welcome your questions and comments.
Please refer to the NZCER community guidelines for participation on NZCER blog posts.
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Are our school students learning what they need to know and be able to do? Are they being taught in ways that motivate them to learn and do the hard yards when things are challenging? What support do teachers and school leaders need so that we can answer yes to these questions?
We’ve experienced significant disruptions to schools, businesses, and everyday life as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve seen people and systems adapt quickly to a highly unusual situation. Schools, whānau, and education sector organisations across Aotearoa have mobilised resources, thought creatively, worked collaboratively, and responded compassionately to make things work.
“I wish I’d known that when I was teaching" is something I said to myself several times while I was working on the latest Insights for Teachers report.
This article started life as a literature review I completed as the final paper in the Postgraduate Diploma in Social Science Evaluation Research at Massey University. As a busy researcher and evaluator, “doing” evaluation doesn’t leave much time for “thinking” about evaluation, and even less time for “writing” about evaluation.
This week at the NZ Association for Educational Researchers (NZARE) annual conference I spoke about the Educational Leadership Capability Framework that provides a backbone for the Leadership Strategy launched last year by the then Education, now Teaching Council. [See the presentation to download below]
Dr. Linda Bonne reflects on 30 years of the NZCER National Survey of schools, as the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce’s review report is soon to be released.
At this time of year I’m remembering the questions we used to have in our school about the PATs - ‘Term 4 is coming up - what week shall we do the PATs in?’ ‘Have we got enough Test 3s for the Year 5s?’ ‘When’s the BOT report due - we need to have it sorted by then?’. You know those conversations I’m sure.
By Cathie Johnson
Focussed school-wide inquiry is a powerful way for school leaders to engage staff and make a difference for students’ learning outcomes.