How do I make writing learning outcomes accessible to vocational and trades tutors? FRAME => TARGET => CONTEXTUALISE

This question has been plaguing me for several years. The heart of the NCALNE (Voc) relates to the teaching practice that trades and vocational tutors have to do.

For this assessment, the tutors need to have a go at creating and delivering some embedded literacy and numeracy training.

This assessment has diagnostic and formative assessment wrapped around it. And we usually preface it with a discussion and workshop activity around how to write embedded literacy and numeracy learning outcomes.

And this is where I tend to see people’s eyes glaze over.

So I’ve been working on simplifying the system and trying to come up with a more prescriptive approach to the delivery and evidence collection, but in a way that works for the tutors.

It’s been a great system… but it’s too complicated. Some people just get it. Others never do. So, hopefully, what I’ve been working on here will make it accessible for more tutors as they undertake the professional development work that we do.

Embedded literacy and numeracy learning outcomes are the key to unlocking really great teaching and training possibilities for our tutors and their learners.

So here’s my plan:

1. I’ve simplified the system. Here it is in a nutshell: FRAME ==> TARGET ==> CONTEXTUALISE. This means
   • Frame the teaching and learning with an appropriate action verb, e.g. something from Bloom’s revised taxonomy, for example.
   • Target the specific literacy or numeracy skills for your training intervention. This should be informed by the mapping and diagnostic work that you’ve done.
   • Contextualise the learning in terms of the specific subject or narrowly defined training content. This is the trade or vocation-specific subject matter.
2. I’ve made it more hands on. As you can see in the image above, I’ve designed a set of cards for each of the three areas of Frame, Target, and Contextualise. As a workshop activity, we can spread these out on the table and people can just have a play. It’s basically mix and match. The idea is to have a play with different combinations in different scenarios before they create their own ones. You can download these here: Learning Outcomes – Cutty Uppy Things
3. I’ve got a lot more examples for people to look at and use as a jumping off point.
4. I’ve redesigned the worksheet we’re going to use. You can download it here: Assessment5LearningOutcomes. There’s a screenshot of a couple of pages from this below.

As always, if any of this is useful, please let me know in the comments. Likewise, if it’s not clear… Cheers, G