The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
- Google Apps (Education Edition) vs. Microsoft Live@Edu
- Things I Learned This Week – #30
- Weeknote #11
- One week until #GTAUK
- 3 things I need to maintain my productivity.
- Motivation comes from within.
- Intention vs. Effect
- You are what you habitually do.
- Is it time to get rid of secondary schools?
- Productivity: value your time
-
On the anachronistic nature of reports
73 CommentsIt’s getting towards the home stretch of the academic year (at least in the UK) so it’s report-writing time. I can’t help but think every time I do this that it’s a case of using the wrong tools for an outdated purpose. Allow me to explain… :s
Reports have been around since pretty much the beginning of the educational process. Schools take children off parents’ hands to educate them, and in return parents are supposed to be kept up-to-date with their child’s progress. This has traditionally been done through a yearly report on each subject area, along with an overall report about their general progress, attitude towards learning, etc.
As technology has developed, the report-writing process has become a lot easier. For example, the departments in my current school use the freeware Teachers Report Assistant program that has a bank of comments upon which you simply click to create the report. This is then copied-and-pasted into a spreadsheet ready for mail-merging and sending out.
So what’s my problem with this? Well it’s a twofold problem, actually:
- Parents should be kept in touch a lot more often than simply yearly reports. Yes, we get in touch with parents if a child isn’t doing what we expect of them, but there really needs to be more of a three-way process (child, parent and school) going on.
- Technology is being used here in a School 1.5 way: i.e. to do more efficiently something which has been done for decades, instead of re-imagining how communications can take place between home and school.
The reason for this anachronism, to my mind, is the lack of communication internally within schools. If schools send out yearly reports as a fait accompli then they present a united front to parents. If more informal and regular communications take place then parents will expect teachers to know more about their child than simply what goes on when in their class. They will want to know, for example, how skills such as ‘digital literacy’ (although I hate that term!) are progressing across subject domains.
Of course, some would say that this is the role of the tutor. And to a great extent, it is. However, I cannot help but feel that a less formal approach when it comes to home-school relationships could prove dividends. We are not, after all, living in the Victorian era in the early days of compulsory schooling. We’re living in a time when most parents value the education provided for their offspring. Why can’t we work with that and include them a bit more in the loop? :)
Photo credit: Don’t mess with me… @ Flickr
Published on April 21, 2007 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
73 Responses to “On the anachronistic nature of reports”
-
I agree 100%! I’ve put a lot of time into creating software to ease the burden of report writing for teachers, but I’d much rather see teachers and parents communicating on a more regular, less formal basis throughout the year. Formal reports to parents belong to an age of grade obsession and endless summative assessments.
-
I agree Doug. At my school we are developing a system where parents and students will be able to login and get an up to date working level, target and way to achieve that target. We've looked around for a secure, accessible and usable solution and haven't found one. Thus we're using some of our Specialist College funding to develop our own solution.
Didn't want a SIMS-based logging and and out hassle thing, instead wanted a really simple and usable solution. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Really a parent should be able to contact the school at the touch of a button, get an up to date overview of their child's progress and then contact the school for further information if required.
There is still a role for a formal, end of year report but not in the way they currently work. Instead it should be more of a record of achievement, charting a student's progress to formally record what they've done. -
@Robert: thanks for that – the FreeMIS system looks interesting (and it's Open Source!)
@Andrew: great idea. How about writing a custom module for Moodle? :)
-
Speaking as a parent, I find those lego brick observations insulting. And they are so transparently unoriginal. One major clue is the use of the pronoun "their" instead of "his" in my sons' reports. I'm inclined to dismiss such off the peg feedback as being valueless. The occasional teacher is roused out of the cookie cutter approach for good or ill and I place far more credence on what he/she has to say. When the science teacher, for example, says "I am constantly amazed by the depth of his knowledge in science, he obviously spends time on this outside of lessons" I pay attention.
-
Karyn, I'd love to be able to tell each and every parent just how exactly their child is doing. But expecting me to do that all at the end of the year for the c.390 pupils I teach is madness. So, we have the tokenistic system currently in vogue. Hopefully all this will change with the mooted VLEs.
I'm not holding my breath though… :s
-
Ah, I fully understand, Doug, and I don't mean to seem unsympathetic. As you say – why wait until the end of the year, when you have 390 kids to report on? I prefer to operate on a much more ad hoc basis. I tell every teacher every year: any time, for good or ill, there is something I should know, please tell me, and I will do likewise. Some do, some don't.
I resent being the last to know that there has been an ongoing problem with my son's attitude in IHE, or that he's being switched into a different group for science because his teacher feels inadequate to the task of teaching him. As far as I am concerned, I am his primary educator – the school is one of the resources I employ to this end. This seems an uncommon attitude in the UK, and I often get the impression that I am seen to be interfering. In this, I continue to cling to my cultural mores, and refuse to budge. Interfering? Sorry, but I hold the school and the teachers accountable to me, not the other way around. -
When I was working in a private school, with of course far fewer than 390 pupils, I was expected to write narrative reports three to four times a year. I was allowed a generic paragraph at the beginning, but the rest of the report was supposed to be individualized. Once we started doing the reports on the computer, some of the reports actually got quite long – several paragraphs in some cases! I liked to think that the reports were providing some useful feedback to parents, until one of my kids said that her parents only ever looked at the grades :-(
At the last school I was at we used PowerSchool. Every week teachers were supposed to enter a grade for each kid (no need to though if you used the gradebook part of the program as the numbers were copied over automatically into the reports) and write one or two sentences about each kid. At a specific time the weekly reports were made available for parents to log in and read. I think this is much more useful than having to wait until 'report time' to find out how your kid's doing. The parents of the younger kids (11-14 year olds) logged in pretty regularly, not so much for the older kids. Parents can see thier kid's schedule, see attendance records (absences/latenesses), see who the teachers are and email them directly if they have questions. I know both private and non-private schools in the US use PowerSchool. Don't know if any schools in the UK use it, but it's a pretty cool SIMS that is quite customizable.
-
teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk is very informative. The article is very professionally written. I enjoy reading teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk every day.
-
RIUv9K kplfkdheaiud, [url=http://hztvandabzos.com/]hztvandabzos[/url], [link=http://llwpfvqrxxsw.com/]llwpfvqrxxsw[/link], http://zwomafxcmrje.com/
-
g4Ghn1 efopbnbqszrn, [url=http://hevriuweblmz.com/]hevriuweblmz[/url], [link=http://ouogytgodcde.com/]ouogytgodcde[/link], http://jiduhasqhuul.com/
-
bBIOIJ bpekqjwgmyoe, [url=http://hzkniwbrrhpo.com/]hzkniwbrrhpo[/url], [link=http://veakhcfqvbdz.com/]veakhcfqvbdz[/link], http://amracgaidjvd.com/
Leave a Reply
