Joining the dots

In real life, a lot of your planning happens in your head. Sometimes this is explicit. In other words, you’re aware of what you’re doing as you go about planning how you will teach something.

At other times, your planning process might be much less explicit. Planning is a bit like literacy and numeracy. It’s there, but sometimes it’s just not visible.

Because this is a professional development programme for tutors and teachers, we need you to have a go at making it a bit more explicit and visible for us. Otherwise, we (and you) can’t actually see what’s going on.

This brings us to one final part of the planning process. We’ve dealt with lesson planning, activities and resources. And to finish things off we’d like you to make it clear in your assessment how you’re planning three other aspects of your teaching.

These including how you are planning to:

• Use some of the approaches and concepts we discussed earlier.
• Assess learner progress for literacy and numeracy.
• Evaluate the work that you’ve been doing in this project as a whole.

Let’s take each of these in turn. There’s a worksheet you can download to take notes in as you go. You don’t have to use it. As always, it’s just there if it helps you move things forward.

• Download worksheet: Joining up the dots approaches assessment evaluation

What approaches am I planning to use?

In Collection 2, we looked a range of approaches and concepts from both mainstream education and Te Ao Māori.

What we need you to do next is tell us how you plan on using some of these to help you teach in a way that is more learner-centred. At the moment, it’s just planning. But later, you’ll need to reflect on how it went.

You can pick any approaches that you like. Also, you may want to refer back to what you wrote in your Assessment 2 for this course. It’s normal if your thinking has changed or shifted around.

But if you not sure on what to pick, we can recommend these two for maximum effect:

• Ako
• Tuakana-teina

You need to write about at least two approaches or concepts that you’re planning on using.

How will I assess learner progress for literacy and numeracy?

We think you should tackle this in two different ways. These are

• Planning to measure learner progress after the teaching sessions are finished by reusing the contextualised assessments that you developed earlier to give clear before and after scores.
• Experimenting with a collaborative assessment. In other words, planning to get the group to assess themselves as a group.

Let’s look at each of these as well.

Reusing your contextualised assessments for literacy and numeracy

Unless there has been some major change to your circumstances, you should be able to just re-use your contextualised assessments for literacy and numeracy.

Refer back to the work that you did in Collection 5. It might be a simple as just reusing your pre-tests here as post-tests. If that’s it, then just tell us what you’re doing.

If it’s become a bit more complicated, then you should let us know what’s going on. If you can’t reuse your contextualised assessments we probably need to have a chat and figure out a way to keep moving forward. Just get in touch.

Doing some kind of collaborative assessment with the group

Group collaborative assessment is when two or more learners attempt to assess some aspect or aspects of their own learning together. In other words, the focus in a collaborative assessment is on what the group thinks they have learned.

We have a worksheet you can use or adapt here for trying a collaborative approach if it’s new to you.

Everything that you’re planning here for assessment is going to pop up again in the final assessment. Assessment 7 is where you’ll report on the post-test data.

How are you going to evaluate this project?

Here we’re talking about the whole package deal across the work you did in Collection 5, but also the teaching that you’re planning here.

You should plan to do some kind of short evaluation with your learners when the teaching part is finished. If it’s appropriate, it might be better if you arrange a colleague to come and do this for you. We’ll give you some examples of what this might look like in Collection 7.

You’re going to need three different kinds of evaluation data for the final assessment. This includes from your learners, from your supervisor and your own reflections.

It’s good to plan how you’re going to gather this now learner evaluation data now.