Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
Everyone seems to think their country has fallen behind. I’ve had the same conversation with teachers in Brazil, Hong Kong, Qatar, USA… everywhere. I think it results from a sampling error. The teachers you meet in your own country are probably a representative spectrum, but those from other countries you meet typically through elearning events/websites, and are a strongly self-selected group.
But never mind, here is my favourite counter-example.
Patricia Donaghy has been kind enough to add me to the International Edubloggers Directory. I feel all growed up.
Yesterday we hit a long-awaited milestone; 25,000 teachers are now Yacapaca members. Thanks everyone who has invested time and energy into our project and helped it grow over the last three years. For interest, the 30:1 student:teacher ratio we had when we started has remained remarkably constant; we now have just over 780,000 registered students.
Ebay just announced that they are banning sellers from providing negative feedback on buyers. This solves the problem of ‘revenge feedback’, or the threat of it being used to bully buyers into accepting a bad deal. But it also breaks the symmetry of the system and denies essential protection to sellers. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I would have liked Ebay to introduce feedback escrow. Each party’s feedback is kept hidden until the other has provided theirs, then both are published at once. I suspect Ebay won’t do this because, freed to be honest, users on both sides would start reporting honestly and typical ratings would plummet from 99%+ where they are now, closer to 50%. But for users it would provide much, much better information about the people they are dealing with, thus building confidence in the system itself.
What is this to do with education? Ebay’s users are up in arms because of a change that makes their feedback process slightly less symmetrical. But what about ours? Teacher gives marks to the student… and that’s it. We are starting to introduce occasional student voice surveys, which is great, but it is a long, long, way from Ebay’s (almost) symmetrical feedback mechanism.
Let’s postulate Assessment for Teaching. It’s a mirror image of AfL. Teachers set targets for themselves for each lesson, and measures success against them (happens now, hopefully), but in addition, students provide both summative and formative feedback for every lesson.
Could it work? What would be the pros and cons?
So Schools of the Future has slipped again. Good. Perhaps that will give Gordon time to decide to spend the money on education, instead of buildings that will be outdated before they are even completed.
Yacapaca 