Thank you, thank you.
This months SEJ contains some interesting stuff, in particular because the articles relate to topics which I am interested in. Firstly let me send a big hurrah and thank you to Larry Flanagan (new EIS Education convenor) for his article on assessment. A few weeks ago I wrote about the ridiculous situation we found ourselves in with regard to our STACS results and how pointless I find the whole exercise...entirely my opinion by the way. Larry says he found it depressing faced with
...a set of decontextualised statistics [that] had been manipulated into various tables which, in many cases bordered on being meaningless
He goes on to say that it's not the stats in themselves that are not worthwhile just the purpose(s) for which these figures are sometimes used. In some cases they seem to become the be all and end all of a school's success.
I agree wholeheartedly with Larry's assertion that it is not our appearance on a list which motivates teachers but our relationship with our students. When it comes down to it each August we look at the individual results of our students and reflect on how they did basing our decisions on our relationship with and knowledge of said pupil.
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