If you have any questions, please "comment" below the post and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
August 5th 2008
The old assessment tasks are in the process of being updated although new ones need to be written. If you design a task please send or give it to PD. To save you time (and you are not in Freo) I have put a folder on L:\Business Units\AMES\Teaching Staff\ for you to Save as" them in. You will also find Teacher Records (both 2003 and 2006), translations of the new LOs and a range of CSWE reference materials on this drive.
Old resource tasks have not been updated yet. However, teachers could use them to practise an equivalent LO from the new CSWE as long as any changes in criteria are observed.
Remember that there is also a range of tasks on the AMEP Research Centre Task Bank (http://www.ameprc.mq.edu.au/resources/assessment_taskbank).
If you want to use the online taskbank, you will need the UserName and Password. The UserName is ameswc but please ask your Program Manager for the password as this is an open site.
August 1st 2008
1) As a rule, all teachers should be teaching and assessing from the new CSWE inTerm 3. However, there are certain cases when a student only needs a few LOs to complete their old certificate and in these cases it is possible to teach and assess that particular student in the old Certificate. You should discuss these students with PD or your Program Manager.
2) We have also just been informed that there could be restrictions on ARMS (the database) with entering LOs for the old CSWE, which means that that old CSWE LOs will possibly not be recorded on ARMS. At the end of term teachers need to be aware that they will have to use the CSWE Transition document (on the L:/ drive) to enable those old LOs to be credited in the new Certificate. More information will be made available nearer to the end of this term.
3) Although teachers have been given free choice in deciding which new modules to teach in different phases until the end of the year, they should try and include modules from all four macroskills.
Oh frabjous day – the new CSWE is here
(July 4th 2008 from the AMES Circular Term 2 2008).
Term 3 not only marks a transition for many of the staff and students from the City to the South West but also heralds the change over to the new CSWE. From July 2008 all new students enrolled at AMES have to be taught and assessed following the new CSWE. This means, except possibly for continuing individual students in Distance Learning and the ILCs, that all classes will adopt the new CSWE for their course design in Term 3. We outlined the new curriculum to you in fair detail during the January and April PD sessions and for further reference there is a copy of the curriculum documents in each Centre to assist you with planning your courses. Please have a read through it.
The main queries are going to concern assessment tasks. Assessment procedures are more flexible for the new Certificates and allow a variety of methods of gathering evidence, including verbal questioning, teacher observation and ongoing assessment (see page 46 of the Certificate documents). However, in order to improve reliability, students should be assessed more than once on the same learning outcome – a single example of competence is not sufficient. This brings us in line with AQTF requirements (as you know from your Cert IV TAA).
Which raises the question of assessment tasks: “Is there going to be a set of tasks available for us in Term 3?” The short answer is “No”. AMES-NSW will be providing a set of two tasks per LO and some of our old WA tasks have been converted but these are to be regarded as samples only in order to indicate the broad format of the tasks. The Assessment Task Bank of the AMEP RC (formerly NCELTR) is also working to update their online tasks.
However, assessment flexibility also implies that teachers themselves should be more involved in developing and producing tasks that are aimed at assessing what has been covered in the lessons, not necessarily teaching the class to some particular assessment task. PD ran sessions on task development last October to give you ideas and inspiration how you could go about this.
Obviously, this could involve more work for some LOs but the informality of assessment can mean that assessment could be merged with everyday classroom activities. For example, in a CSWE 1 class, students who perform according to the criteria of 1E2 during the round-the-class warm up conversation on two separate occasions could be assessed as competent. (Keep your checklists close to hand.) In Certificate 2, one assessment for 2D1 (spoken information text) could be your preparation for an excursion. In Certificate 3 “Demonstrate understanding of a news article” (3i2), articles from recent papers could be used – there is no need to recycle the old ones about “crocodile encounter” or “a true hero”. The individual LOs within modules are closely related so that one task could cover the whole module and even include LOs from a different module or Certificate level. In the new Certificates, however, you will note that there are a lot of “demonstrate understanding” LOs (ie Listening) and if you want assistance in producing sound tracks, please contact PD.
Which brings us onto the question of moderation. Tasks that are going on public display like our WA tasks and those in the online assessment task bank should be piloted and moderated because others are going to use them. However, AMES-NSW believes there is no need to have every task that you develop moderated. If it complies with the assessment criteria, then it is a valid task, although you can of course discuss it with a colleague or PD. In any case, informal or observed tasks are difficult to moderate without other assessors present.
Which does not mean that moderation will be abandoned completely – we still need to clarify issues and establish common levels among our teachers. In the October PD week we will be repeating what we did with the 2003 Certificate – looking at student performance in relation to the new LOs and also looking at some teacher-developed tasks.
Assessment grids have been distributed to each Centre and will be available on a shared drive for access by all teachers as will the new Teacher’s Records and conversion charts.
Some time was spent during the PD session in April to determine which modules are recommended for the split into Phases. There was such a vast diversity of opinion in this matter, that we think it best in Terms 3 and 4 for teachers to select those modules most relevant to their classes and after this experimental phase to discuss the matter again in the February 2009 PD session.
Once you get accustomed to it, I believe that the new CSWE will be a much more enjoyable and less restrictive document to teach from. Apart from flexibility with assessment, other positives are that learning outcomes within modules are grouped, the nominal hours have been increased so there should be more time to teach horizontally, themes are developed across the Certificates and there is a broader range of modules to choose from. There are quite a few new concepts in the new CSWE so if you do have any queries, please contact us at Thornlie.
Stop Press
Andrew has reminded me of a few points that I failed to include.
CD overviews of the CSWE in 21 different languages have been ordered and will be (if not already are) available in your Centre for print-out and distribution to the students.
The tasks should be here at the start of Term 3 but the CSWE workbooks, including a CPSWE version, are still being written. Publication due sometime this year.
The writers have attempted to reduce the gap between the different Certificates so that there is not such a jump when a student moves up to a new Certificate.
Philip Nichols
0 comments:
Post a Comment