foolfillment: the blog

I’ve said this before, but in introducing 2 year Highers at Ross High there is scope to move from teaching the course as a ‘two term dash’ to having time to further explore the parts of the courses that otherwise get glossed over or missed altogether. In the Product Design course the pupils spend their 4th year working through whole projects and then making the product.

We are getting towards the end of the first project now and my thoughts are turning to how it is to be assessed. In a normal Higher you teach some content then assess with a NAB, a centrally set test. In this project though the aim wasn’t to pass an Outcome, but what was it? Sure, there are some aims like gain an understanding of vacuum forming, develop a better understanding of the design process, but looking back I wonder how well as a department we have shared these intentions with the classes - I know I haven’t done this particularly well. And what about specific Learning Outcomes?

Then thinking about how to assess the projects I’m pretty keen to get the pupils involved. A big part of the Product Design course (and design generally) is to analyse and evaluate existing stuff, so to me it makes absolute sense that the pupils should evaluate each other’s designs and folios. It would also steer them away from wanting a grade.

I had the great opportunity to observe an SQA markers’ meeting in Glasgow today.

It’s all very hush-hush, and I can’t say what was covered, but it was a really worthwhile thing to go to. There are of course lots of underlying issues about whether these assessment methods are appropriate, but for me as a teacher who is just about to start teaching courses that do get assessed like this, then being able to see how different questions get marked was incredibly useful.

I believe it was a very private process until quite recently which seems pretty funny, I don’t know what the reasons for it were but I think it is much better to make it open and accessible. One thing I wonder though is if being open about how different types of questions are marked might lead to teaching more to the exam than actually teaching the subject.

Another point that came up was that most Graphic Communication classes spend, perhaps, about 70% of their time on drawing boards, when only about one third of the marks comes from it, and more importantly after school the chances of the pupils seeing or using a board again are very slim. This is something I’ll come back to in another post. The spin-off from this point is the relevance and worth of the Graphic Communication courses in the first place.