Senior Cycle Review

happywithlife

Just saw on the Twitter there the last of 3 National consultation cycles is on tomorrow - Nov 12th - in Galway; hosted by the NCCA.
I knew they had started senior cycle review but hadn't realised there were national seminars on it. With November being a busy month in many schools I'm presuming (hoping ☺) I'm not the only one that didn't realise this was happening. Certaintly hadn't seen it advertised.
Does anyone know what the findings of their review so far have been? What's been discussed at these seminars?

rainbowtrout

Hadn't heard about it at all.

TheValeyard

Probably deliberately designed to go under the radar?

rainbowtrout

Ya, if you don’t know about it, you can’t turn up and complain about what a shambles they are making of it

FFred

I’m really looking forward to them wrecking the Leaving Cert next. Can’t wait.

amacca

FFred wrote: »

I’m really looking forward to them wrecking the Leaving Cert next. Can’t wait.

Give them enough rope and don't try and paper over the inevitable cracks/make the best of it etc etc

PureClareGold

rainbowtrout wrote: »

Ya, if you don’t know about it, you can’t turn up and complain about what a shambles they are making of it

Ah give over. Its been well publicised online. Every Principal in the country got a letter inviting them to send someone from their school. Be proactive not giving out over everything please people.

evolving_doors

PureClareGold wrote: »

Ah give over. Its been well publicised online. Every Principal in the country got a letter inviting them to send someone from their school. Be proactive not giving out over everything please people.

How can you be proactive about something you don't know about. Sure, every principal probably got a letter, you were obviously informed, was everyone?

Out of interest, where was it publicised online, I'm not really on twitter?

TheValeyard

FFred wrote: »

I’m really looking forward to them wrecking the Leaving Cert next. Can’t wait.

CBA Part III & IV

happywithlife

PureClareGold wrote: »

Ah give over. Its been well publicised online. Every Principal in the country got a letter inviting them to send someone from their school. Be proactive not giving out over everything please people.

It was NOT "well publicised online" -- I follow NCCA online and hadn't seen it on my feed
My principal may have received a letter but our staff sure wasn't told about it as a whole or invited to go along - maybe he went himself I don't know but general staff certaintly weren't given the opportunity

PureClareGold

happywithlife wrote: »

It was NOT "well publicised online" -- I follow NCCA online and hadn't seen it on my feed
My principal may have received a letter but our staff sure wasn't told about it as a whole or invited to go along - maybe he went himself I don't know but general staff certaintly weren't given the opportunity

All news available here https://www.ncca.ie/en/senior-cycle/senior-cycle-review

SligoBrewer

You're showing your hand a little too much here PCG lol.

evolving_doors

PureClareGold wrote: »

All news available here https://www.ncca.ie/en/senior-cycle/senior-cycle-review

So it's well publicised because it's on a webpage!

Anyhow I actually posted up the survey which the NAPD submitted 2 months so .so we know it's a done deal just by the loaded questions.

I didn't see any teachers survey though did you?

PureClareGold

evolving_doors wrote: »

So it's well publicised because it's on a webpage!

Anyhow I actually posted up the survey which the NAPD submitted 2 months so .so we know it's a done deal just by the loaded questions.

I didn't see any teachers survey though did you?

41 schools are engaged with this from across sectors and society. Let's give those an average of 30 teachers. That's 1200 teachers involved. We can all use our email and send our thoughts directly to the NCCA. They're not going to walk into each school in the country and knock on each individual teacher's classroom door.
We know it's happening. If we care we should be proactive and make our voices heard instead of constantly complaining.

rainbowtrout

PureClareGold wrote: »

41 schools are engaged with this from across sectors and society. Let's give those an average of 30 teachers. That's 1200 teachers involved. We can all use our email and send our thoughts directly to the NCCA. They're not going to walk into each school in the country and knock on each individual teacher's classroom door.
We know it's happening. If we care we should be proactive and make our voices heard instead of constantly complaining.

No, I actually didn't know there was a Senior Cycle Review on. It's not publicised. 41 schools being engaged with the process doesn't mean 1200 teachers are engaged with the process, it could just as easily be 1 teacher from each school.

How hard would it be to send out a link to every principal in the country and ask them to forward it to teachers asking them to complete a survey or inviting them to attend a senior cycle review seminar? The less teachers know about it, the less input they can have. The Junior Cycle is an absolute shambles, and every inservice or cluster meeting I've been to, it has being largely panned by teachers and we are roundly ignored by those giving the inservice. Teacher input isn't valued or wanted.

evolving_doors

PureClareGold wrote: »

41 schools are engaged with this from across sectors and society. Let's give those an average of 30 teachers. That's 1200 teachers involved. We can all use our email and send our thoughts directly to the NCCA. They're not going to walk into each school in the country and knock on each individual teacher's classroom door.
We know it's happening. If we care we should be proactive and make our voices heard instead of constantly complaining.

Were you selected to full in the survey?

PureClareGold

evolving_doors wrote: »

Were you selected to full in the survey?

No. I sent my thoughts in be email.

rainbowtrout

PureClareGold wrote: »

Ah give over. Its been well publicised online. Every Principal in the country got a letter inviting them to send someone from their school. Be proactive not giving out over everything please people.

What do you mean ah give over? Where was it publicised online? I don't spend my evenings refreshing the NCCA website to see if anything new is on it. I don't know any other teacher that does either. I haven't seen it anywhere else, and as a pretty active member of this forum I didn't see any discussion about it, and most regulars here are fairly on the ball about stuff going on in education.

We were not informed about it in my school and my principal sends on pretty much everything that comes by email. And if such a letter was sent out inviting schools to send a representative, it seems pretty poor if only 41 schools are represented out of approximately 700. That's about 5% of schools. In your previous post you suggested that 41 schools represents potentially 1200 teachers. Well if only 1 teacher could go from each school, it really doesn't represent 1200 teachers, it represents 41 teachers. If we extrapolate from your suggested figures that there are on average 30 teachers in a school. In 700 schools there are 21,000 teachers in the country. Then 41 is piss poor representation.

PureClareGold

rainbowtrout wrote: »

What do you mean ah give over? Where was it publicised online? I don't spend my evenings refreshing the NCCA website to see if anything new is on it. I don't know any other teacher that does either. I haven't seen it anywhere else, and as a pretty active member of this forum I didn't see any discussion about it, and most regulars here are fairly on the ball about stuff going on in education.

We were not informed about it in my school and my principal sends on pretty much everything that comes by email. And if such a letter was sent out inviting schools to send a representative, it seems pretty poor if only 41 schools are represented out of approximately 700. That's about 5% of schools. In your previous post you suggested that 41 schools represents potentially 1200 teachers. Well if only 1 teacher could go from each school, it really doesn't represent 1200 teachers, it represents 41 teachers. If we extrapolate from your suggested figures that there are on average 30 teachers in a school. In 700 schools there are 21,000 teachers in the country. Then 41 is piss poor representation.

9 months ago I started a thread https://touch.boards.ie/thread/2057843714/1/#post106207114
Obviously they can't invite every teacher but if the one teacher from each school spoke to their colleagues and brought that message then it would be representative of a large group of teachers. Can't speak for the practice in your school but that's what happened in mine before our teacher rep went to Galway yesterday. We gave a list of points for her to bring with her, positive and negative.
41 is the number of schools involved from the outset. These latest meetings were open to every school to send representatives. We can't keep jumping to wrong conclusions just because it suits our agenda.
Remember for Junior Cycle English review less than 30 teachers responded to a review that was open for months and well publicised online and at JCT in service days

Education matters

This wasn’t a free for all, you had to be invited and there were reps from the 42 schools in attendance, other than that there were union members, JCT people, members of the NCCA Boards etc and “experts” from education. The format was not to give your views, rather people heard the collated info from the teachers, parents and students who had completed the survey.
The questions were framed in such a way that in my opinion schools had very little chance to show negativity. The information leads us to a LC that might have short courses, CBAs and only 5 subjects?! Sound familiar? Lots of tweets on twitter showing the slides if you weren’t there. They’re moving on to phase 2 now so this train is well and truly moving!
By the way these regional meetings were also held to feed into the JC review of English, I was at one so it isn’t fair to say that only 18 submissions were made as meetings were held in three regions and in schools. The review was flawed because it was a huge questionnaire that took forever to fill out!

PureClareGold

Education matters wrote: »

This wasn’t a free for all, you had to be invited and there were reps from the 42 schools in attendance, other than that there were union members, JCT people, members of the NCCA Boards etc and “experts” from education. The format was not to give your views, rather people heard the collated info from the teachers, parents and students who had completed the survey.
The questions were framed in such a way that in my opinion schools had very little chance to show negativity. The information leads us to a LC that might have short courses, CBAs and only 5 subjects?! Sound familiar? Lots of tweets on twitter showing the slides if you weren’t there. They’re moving on to phase 2 now so this train is well and truly moving!
By the way these regional meetings were also held to feed into the JC review of English, I was at one so it isn’t fair to say that only 18 submissions were made as meetings were held in three regions and in schools. The review was flawed because it was a huge questionnaire that took forever to fill out!

Every school could send a rep if they wished.
So in one instance we're saying the questionnaire was too focused and in another it was too broad and would take too long. I give up. We are professionals and should behave as such.

Education matters

PureClareGold wrote: »

Every school could send a rep if they wished.
So in one instance we're saying the questionnaire was too focused and in another it was too broad and would take too long. I give up. We are professionals and should behave as such.

Every school could not send a rep. Schools were not invited, the meetings were small events. Maybe schools that sent submissions were invited. I attended the meeting and found it informative. I do behave as a professional and that’s clearly what I was doing representing my profession at this meeting. The questionnaire for SC review was clearly asking people to comment on JC however the JC English review was too long and the unions brought this to the NCCA and further reviews are being cognizant of the feedback, received by the professionals who managed to complete the submission.
There were three regional meetings for SC reform, numbers were limited and all stakeholders were allocated a small number of representatives.

rainbowtrout

PureClareGold wrote: »

Remember for Junior Cycle English review less than 30 teachers responded to a review that was open for months and well publicised online and at JCT in service days

Just because something was available to do online doesn't mean it's the only way it should be reviewed. If only 30 English teachers in the country responded, then perhaps..... just perhaps, the NCCA should have sat back for a second and thought, 'hey you know this method of review isn't really working, we're not getting enough feedback from a wide representation of teachers, maybe we should try something else'

E.g. inservice evenings are held at teacher centres around the country. They could have been used to discuss current English course (as it was then) and potential structure of new English course.

Again well publicised online in your world means that it's on the NCCA website, a website that most people aren't looking at daily.

Plenty of inspectors going into schools doing drive bys. Perhaps part of JC reform could have been where they spent an hour of that day meeting with the English department in each school and surveying them on their feelings about old course and new course.

Perhaps a survey could have been sent to each principal and asking them to get their English department to fill it in.

Perhaps teachers who work with the SEC correcting over the summer could be asked their thoughts on JC English.


There are loads of ways of getting teachers views, but stick it on a website that few look at regularly seems to be the default and tough luck after that.

amacca

rainbowtrout wrote: »

Just because something was available to do online doesn't mean it's the only way it should be reviewed. If only 30 English teachers in the country responded, then perhaps..... just perhaps, the NCCA should have sat back for a second and thought, 'hey you know this method of review isn't really working, we're not getting enough feedback from a wide representation of teachers, maybe we should try something else'

E.g. inservice evenings are held at teacher centres around the country. They could have been used to discuss current English course (as it was then) and potential structure of new English course.

Again well publicised online in your world means that it's on the NCCA website, a website that most people aren't looking at daily.

Plenty of inspectors going into schools doing drive bys. Perhaps part of JC reform could have been where they spent an hour of that day meeting with the English department in each school and surveying them on their feelings about old course and new course.

Perhaps a survey could have been sent to each principal and asking them to get their English department to fill it in.

Perhaps teachers who work with the SEC correcting over the summer could be asked their thoughts on JC English.


There are loads of ways of getting teachers views, but stick it on a website that few look at regularly seems to be the default and tough luck after that.

very very good points imho....you could almost call them sensible, logical...not driven by an agenda etc...I can see why they wouldn't be welcomed by the driving forces behind the new JC (yellow packing)

In relation to the above I've highlighted in bold...as I'm sure you have already suspected its as if they don't really want feedback........at least any feedback that might challenge their agenda.

The next step if forced to seek feedback from a truly representative sample imo is to load the questions to lead a majority of responses down the required route or not ask questions that risk an unpalatable responses or simply ignore/or downplay any negattive/realistic responses + a myriad of other tricks .....its amusing really.... they are not really modelling the kind of behaviour the new JC purportedly aspires to engender in our students described with such verbosity in the new guidelines


sorry about the last couple of sentences...the new bull**** must be rubbing off on me!

PureClareGold

rainbowtrout wrote: »

Just because something was available to do online doesn't mean it's the only way it should be reviewed. If only 30 English teachers in the country responded, then perhaps..... just perhaps, the NCCA should have sat back for a second and thought, 'hey you know this method of review isn't really working, we're not getting enough feedback from a wide representation of teachers, maybe we should try something else'

E.g. inservice evenings are held at teacher centres around the country. They could have been used to discuss current English course (as it was then) and potential structure of new English course.

Again well publicised online in your world means that it's on the NCCA website, a website that most people aren't looking at daily.

Plenty of inspectors going into schools doing drive bys. Perhaps part of JC reform could have been where they spent an hour of that day meeting with the English department in each school and surveying them on their feelings about old course and new course.

Perhaps a survey could have been sent to each principal and asking them to get their English department to fill it in.

Perhaps teachers who work with the SEC correcting over the summer could be asked their thoughts on JC English.


There are loads of ways of getting teachers views, but stick it on a website that few look at regularly seems to be the default and tough luck after that.

Have a look at page 11 of the report https://www.ncca.ie/en/resources/report-of-the-review-of-the-early-enactment-of-junior-cycle-english

Also on that page you'll see you can sign up to be kept informed. All sorted for you.

amacca

What happens to the feedback taken at JC cluster days or online surveys?

I distinctly remember filling out less than positive feelings years ago on some of the new developments .... never a word or evidence of acknowledgement since..

My OH has made her feelings known when asked for feedback on cluster days as have many of her colleagues..............no acknowledgement..no sign of anything being taken on board or modified .its all happy clappy everything is A OK...similar stories. Personally I think teachers have known for a long time their voices are not valued or heard if they don't go along with the programme.

What black hole do all the inconvenient dissenting voices go into?

happywithlife

on a slightly different note can I ask maths teachers now that project maths is in a while what's the consenus? good move/bad move?

aunt aggie

happywithlife wrote:

on a slightly different note can I ask maths teachers now that project maths is in a while what's the consenus? good move/bad move?

Same old really. We dont have time for much active learning as the course is so big. I've seen teachers with 30 years experience giving extra after school classes for junior cert higher level maths. The amount of reading seriously disadvantages SEN and EAL students.

From an examiners POV students are definitely favouring trial and error and other methods that show they understand concepts, over algebra. Across the board algebra skills are poor. Cos teachers don't have the time to reinforce key skills before barrelling ahead.

Don't know what it's going to be like when we lose more time to CBAs.

rainbowtrout

PureClareGold wrote: »

Have a look at page 11 of the report https://www.ncca.ie/en/resources/report-of-the-review-of-the-early-enactment-of-junior-cycle-english

Also on that page you'll see you can sign up to be kept informed. All sorted for you.

Again, all revolving around the NCCA page which I pointed out most teachers are not keeping an eye on from day to day. This information and feedback needs to come at ground level through channels that teachers are accessing on a day to day basis.

rainbowtrout

amacca wrote: »

What happens to the feedback taken at JC cluster days or online surveys?

I distinctly remember filling out less than positive feelings years ago on some of the new developments .... never a word or evidence of acknowledgement since..

My OH has made her feelings known when asked for feedback on cluster days as have many of her colleagues..............no acknowledgement..no sign of anything being taken on board or modified .its all happy clappy everything is A OK...similar stories. Personally I think teachers have known for a long time their voices are not valued or heard if they don't go along with the programme.

What black hole do all the inconvenient dissenting voices go into?

Teachers are just ignored. I was at a cluster meeting for science about 2 years ago and they did a presentation with lots of lovely quotes about how nice the new syllabus was and how 95% of teachers gave positive feedback. We had been working in groups and no one in any group had anything positive to say. I pointed this out that no one in the room (16 science teachers) were happy and it was just ignored.

chocoholic999

Only 5 subjects? So that’s English, Irish, Maths, foreign language for most and one other subject! Disaster in my opinion