Senior revision time

Aftert the school exams it was apparent that the L2 Chemistry students are not yet anywhere near ready for their end of year external exams.

In repsonse to this I decided to drop the final internal that was slated, Oxidation and Reduction, in favour of spending the remaining class time on revision of the content of the external standards.

In class time students are allowed to choose their own specific area of the course to concentrate their revision. To aid and focus them at the start of each lesson I circulate in the class and ask them to give me their personal topic or success criteria for the hour they have in the classroom. Making them choose one specific thing to master in the hour seems to improve their focus for their learning and help break down the seemingly impossible task into smaller bits that are possible.

Creating Assessment- Year 9 Astronomy

This morning I was putting together the assessment for the Year 9 Astronomy unit. The unit needed to be redone in order to ensure that we were effectively assessing at curriculum levels.

The new test has been compiled from the Assessment Resource Bank's resources of properly aligned assessment tasks. I started with a standard from Level 3,  many from Level 4, some from Level 5, then I adapted a NCEA Level 1 task for the Level 6 component. This will really make it straightforward to assess the level of thinking that our students are doing.

The Test

The Marking Rubric

Year 10 Geology Assessment

I have been reevaluating the assessment for the Year 10 Geology Unit. Although the assessment task itself is a good one, it needed more scaffolding to help the students to understand what is required.

I have spent some time putting together scaffolding resources to support students in this process.

I decided to give the students an exemplar of what was required to get to excellence standard, and along the way I also made a resource showing how I thought through the requirements, and another on how I recorded my information prior to putting my final document together.

When introducing the assessment task I showed the students all of these things, and talked through them with the students, before giving them access to them on Google Classroom.

The exemplar was also highlighted to identify which parts satisfied Level 4, and which Level 5. The student were informed that the expectation is that at Year 10, they need to be working at Level 5 or "Merit", but many students are aiming for the Level 6 assessment grade.

This is a continuation of the revised assessment task I created in 2016 in response to the absence of a reliable assessment task.

Revising assessment tasks

I was responsible for the research task component of the new Year 9 curriculum in the first term. Now that I am marking the task I am adapting it. As it was the first time that we have used it we have discovered some changes that need to be made to be streamlined.

The students have not been very good at picking out the important parts to achieve at a higher level. On reflection I plan to make it clearer in the instructions what they need to do and when it needs to be done.

The post-assessment evaluation and reflection tool does not lend itself to Google Forms in the current format. In the future I will make two documents. One that is all instructions, including a time break-down, and one that they will use as a log and complete. In addition I would put a mostly blank document onto the Google Classroom assignment in order that all the files are in the same place.

Student Wellbeing and

The Year 10's did a test last period. Through a concerted push I managed to get the test scripts marked and returned the next lesson and took the time to go through each question explaining how to approach that question and what the answer was.

Afterwards each student was asked to write on the paper their immediate thoughts on the test and the unit it assessed, focussing on how they had worked and how they approached the test. This was then extended with guided reflection set for them on Google Classroom.


Think about the topic so far and write a reflection. Include in your reflection
- How well you worked in the unit ( Did you try your best every lesson or were you goofing off, DId you persevere when it was hard, or give up?)
- How seriously you took the test? Did you persevere and try to figure stuff out
- How well did you do compared to how well you felt about the test when you did it.
- What your goal for the next unit is. Your goal should be challenging but achieveable
- What are you going to do to achieve this goal.


The majority of the class took the task seriously and there were some very good responses. At the end of the unit we will refer back to this to see how they got along and I intend to repeat it each unit to guide them through self-review and improvement cycles. Hopefully it will help them to learn skills in planning and reflection which are vital to self-management.

As a consequence of this I had an interesting conversation with a student who had received distressing news on the day of the test. On confiding to me what the upset was, I reassured her and she seemed fine. I am concerned for her longer term though, so I have let the counsellor who the student is, asking her to keep an eye out.

Assessing interest in Science and diagnosing thinking skills.

Given that 9BY have completed the course set for the year, but we still have a couple of lessons to go I am trialling an activity with them.

I have provided them with some links to reputable providers of news and asked them to find a science article that interests them. They then need to post the link to a shared document, summarise it, and explain why they found it interesting.

Once they have found their article of interest, they were instructed to read other's articles and comment on them. I am using this as a diagnostic to see the areas of interest in the class, but also the depth of thinking skills that they are willing to apply.

Once I refine the process, as a spreadsheet is not a tool with finesse, I would like to use this as a homework task, but I still need to figure out how to manage the data that will be produced in a way that I can use. Particularly how to track who has been reading, thinking, and commenting without it taking up so much time as to make it unwieldy.

This will also be a task that can be extended for assessing student abilities at discerning fake news.

Success on resubs

I have been working with some of the chemistry students who failed achievement standards earlier in the year. All those who stayed in the class for the full year have managed to achieve all the credits they were entered into, which means they are entering exams with 10 Chemistry credits under their belt.
They are also all intending to do Chemistry next year. I am quite pleased with that even though I still don't know who is teaching the Level 3 next year.

The last students to get their assessments needed more practice time. For the repeats I gave them lots and lots of practice questions until they felt ready. Part of it has been the maturing of the students.

 This year I have identified the weaknesses that have come through from the Level 1 classes and I am planning how to ameliorate those at the start of the year to make the classes confident in their abilities from the start. Hopefully this will also address the relatively high attrition rate. Some of the attrition was due to bad course selection, but a few I think were because they felt discouraged when they didn't pass the first Achievement Standard.

Priority Learners

The list for Priority learners has gone round again. It seems to be a blunt tool. Of the 8 or 9 students I teach on the list most of them are on there because they are doing so many externals that they haven't built up a lot of credits internally and so their counts are low.

Of the others I'm going to work two on one with the two who have not accrued any credits yet. It is difficult as they both have high absence rates compared to the rest of the class. I can work with that. What is really hard is neither of them will ask questions nor admit to not understanding when I ask them individually. If they cannot tell me what or where they are having trouble I struggle to effectively rectify their lack of understanding. Both students arrived into the class after the year started, so perhaps they have not integrated into the class culture as well as I would have hoped.

E-tools in the classroom.

I have been using EdPuzzle in the classroom this year and sharing the use of it with others in the department, and the StileApp website is full of great resources for students especially those who are in need of extension.

The goformative.com site has been especially useful for senior assessments. it allows me to upload assessments and format them for students to complete the questions. I can track what they are doing and give them feedback in real time. I have used it with L1 SCE and L2Chem so far and although it would be best used with a touchscreen, especially for Organic chemistry where there is a lot of drawing of molecules, it has been great from my perspective. Due to the fiddly nature of some of the response mechanisms, students have not embraced it as enthusiastically as i have, but they do enjoy the real-time feedback.

When talking about this to others in the department they have shown interest, so it has been put on departmental meeting agendas. I have showed them what can be done with it, and we plan a proper session on how to use it later.

The PTC's for reference

PTC’s

1. … establish and maintain effective professional relationships focused on the learning and well-being of all akonga

2. … demonstrate commitment to promoting the well-being of all akonga

3. … demonstrate commitment to bicultural partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand

4. … demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice

5. … show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning

6. … conceptualise, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme

7. … promote a collaborative, inclusive and supportive learning environment

8. … demonstrate in practice their knowledge and understanding of how akonga learn

9. … respond effectively to the diverse language and cultural experiences, and the varied strengths, interests and needs of individuals and groups of akonga

10. … work effectively within the bicultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand

11. … analyse and appropriately use assessment information, which has been gathered formally and informally

12. … use critical inquiry and problem solving effectively in their professional practice