Today was the first day of my second practicum which I shall spend at Ulverstone High School. It was also a pupil free day, whether by coincidence or by design, I am unsure. During the course of the day, the teachers of the Central Coast cluster gathered at Penguin High School to participate in the Quality Assurance and Moderation Process. The day was broken up into three sessions – two of moderating the assessment of work samples, and one of professional development.
During the first moderation session I was part of a group looking at work samples to be assessed for Being Numerate. We assessed a number of work samples from a class activity based on identifying patterns, finding rules and synthesising symbolic expressions of those rules. It was a relatively straightforward process and the group achieved consensus fairly easily in most of the cases.
During the second session, we looked as two work sampled assessed under Being Information Literate. As I experienced doing QMAP during PE1, everyone seems to have their own interpretation of the BIL standards and progression statements. The requirements about the safe, ethical, etc., use of information especially seems to cause much strife - why, some ask, should an other wise excellent piece of work be relegated to standard two just for a lack of referencing? In any case, it took us quite a while and a number of deviations from the QMAP protocol to come to a decision.
In the afternoon, I worked with a group of secondary teachers on “good questions” in numeracy. We used Bloom’s Taxonomy along with the Being Numerate standards to explore questions we might ask of, and explore with, students about the concepts of money and finance. The suggestions and discussions we had were quite interesting.