foolfillment: the blog

A lecture on some features of the Scottish system of education. It may seem odd that we’d get a lecture about this 3 years in, but it was more to do with how things are done in other countries in comparison.
Did you knwo by the way that in the 19th Century it was discouraged to use the word ‘Scotland’ and instead it should be referred to North Britain?

An overview of the upper school subjects in tech departments and a form to fill in for our next placement, it seems too far away at the moment. These forms seem never to make any impact on where we actually get placed though so I’m not too worried about it.

Then Understanding Energy where we were asked if anyone would confess to being comfortable with the maths involved. Well, I confessed, shameful as it is.

Tomorrow Cardonald, only three more weeks left. Ever.

When I was at school last I got a copy of a presentation on classroom assessment, it was relevant to an assignment I have to hand in in a few weeks, I looked at it today to see what was on it and it’s actually really good, it’s footage and slides of a presentation by Dylan Wiliam - Inside the Black Box. You can download the slides for this presentation freely from KCL anyway but they don’t make much sense on their own.

A couple of points stood out:

• Making the difference between Assessment for Learning and Formative Assessment
• Giving marks is useless, much better to give comments. Don’t give both. If you give a child a mark and a comment the first thing he looks at is the mark, the second thing he looks at is his pal’s mark.
• The comments have to be understood by the learner and be of some use. It’s no good telling the comedian that he isn’t making people laugh because he isn’t funny.

Now, to write that assignment.

The first day back at uni after the Easter break and it kicked off with a lecture from Al McPhee on the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc, with the emphasis being on the etc part. Did you know that corporal punishment was only fully abolished in June 2000?
Then a look at where ACE is going and how it might affect Technology teachers. One point made was the idea that science teachers may abolish the discrete sciences and teach a general science course, this seemed unlikely to me and apparently it was over-ruled. Then later in the day I watched the Back to the 60s programme on C4 which said that exactly that happens in England already.
Understanding Energy in the afternoon with the usual amoun of faff, there isn’t much point going anymore as she is just going over sample papers which are already available online, I suppose I’d better though.

The best of the board is a feed I subscribe to but it’s not often it has something that makes me laugh as much as this one did : I love you Sun!