ASTI members vote for industrial action over Covid issues

Smacruairi

jrosen wrote: »

Above and beyond/exceeds expectations. You know the usual guides that are used to manage performances in other sectors.
It would need to managed on an individual basis because there are I would think far too man variables to have a one fits all rule and be over seen by the school principal/inpector but if it meant we rewarded the really great teachers its worth exploring imo.

What's above and beyond though. Teaching the subject well in class, having good pedagogy, what's above and beyond? Giving extra grinds for free to kids?

khalessi

Anyoone who has studied the History of Education now that performance related pay does not work in schools for some of the reasons stated, the child's home circumstances and background, their mental ability whether they have a special need, and the fact that teachers then teach to the test, so the child is not the focus of the education system anymore.

The system we have at the moment is child focused and child led. There are drawbacks that need sorting such as the fact each school is only allowed 3 assessments per year with an educaitonal psychologist. I reckon in each class there are at least 3 children in each class who need a NEPS assessment and in some classes could be as many as half for different reasons, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, autism, general or specific learning difficulty, dysgraphia. Not all parents can afford this. This needs to be sorted out at Dept level and they are aware but do nothing.


The children are getting a rounded education at the moment, performance pay affects that. In primary a child may have Mr. Trump who is woeful at Irish but fantastic at maths and then get Ms. Hiden who is fantastic at Irish but woeful at music. All the time they are being exposed to different teaching styles and methodologies.

They experience whole class learning, group learning, peer learning aand one to one. They are assessed in different ways. In primary their social skills are also developed and subtley oserved in case there are issues. Pay related performance afffects all this. ALready the business model has been attempted to be applied to schools, which school self evaluation, it is not a good fit. Pencil pushing.

And Donald, we already have inspections at primary level, they are referred to as the WSE and the odd drive by.

One of the biggest things now is paperwork, 50 pages weely of unneccesary detailed paper work on planning the lesson and then more on what was taught etc. These are pointless time wasting and does not make my teaching any better. It is the bane of my life, I did not get into teaching for paperwork. I got in it to teach and paperwork is my arch nemisis. I am a great teacher, kids I teach make improvements and not all of their improvements can be measured academically.

It is the subtle things, like the 12 year old who never smiled, never made eye contact and would not ask questions about the subject I was teaching despite it being me him and one other student in the room being guided step by step through the topic. I asked him at the end what was going on as he only got 1/20 correct in the work but said nothing all the way through. After sending the other chld back, we chatted and he told me he didnt ask questions because he is not worth helping. We chatted and I explained to him that he is worth it to me, that he is why I am here and other stuff. We went back over the stuff and the 6 sums I did with him, he got right. Then I spoke to his teacher, and my deputy about hims as I am worried. Next day the kid came in and he smile and asked some questions and looked at me. End of last week he was walking down the corridor with his head up and looking ahead. Other people remarked about his change in attitude.

How is that measured in pay performance pay? And should it be? That child now realises he has someone who will fight his corner in school and after. I tell all the kids I teacher no matter how old they get, if there is ever a moment they feel they have no one to turn to, find me as I will always be here. I will listen and help if I can and if I cant I will find someone who can.

Teaching is more than academic.

wirelessdude01

Smacruairi wrote: »

What's above and beyond though. Teaching the subject well in class, having good pedagogy, what's above and beyond? Giving extra grinds for free to kids?

Perhaps having a clean room.

Actually this year they could have extra points if you have zero covid cases in your class.

wirelessdude01

khalessi wrote: »

Anyoone who has studied the History of Education now that performance related pay does not work in schools for some of the reasons stated, the child's home circumstances and background, their mental ability whether they have a special need, and the fact that teachers then teach to the test, so the child is not the focus of the education system anymore.

The system we have at the moment is child focused and child led. There are drawbacks that need sorting such as the fact each school is only allowed 3 assessments per year with an educaitonal psychologist. I reckon in each class there are at least 3 children in each class who need a NEPS assessment and in some classes could be as many as half for different reasons, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, autism, general or specific learning difficulty, dysgraphia. Not all parents can afford this. This needs to be sorted out at Dept level and they are aware but do nothing.


The children are getting a rounded education at the moment, performance pay affects that. In primary a child may have Mr. Trump who is woeful at Irish but fantastic at maths and then get Ms. Hiden who is fantastic at Irish but woeful at music. All the time they are being exposed to different teaching styles and methodologies.

They experience whole class learning, group learning, peer learning aand one to one. They are assessed in different ways. In primary their social skills are also developed and subtley oserved in case there are issues. Pay related performance afffects all this. ALready the business model has been attempted to be applied to schools, which school self evaluation, it is not a good fit. Pencil pushing.

And Donald, we already have inspections at primary level, they are referred to as the WSE and the odd drive by.

One of the biggest things now is paperwork, 50 pages weely of unneccesary detailed paper work on planning the lesson and then more on what was taught etc. These are pointless time wasting and does not make my teaching any better. It is the bane of my life, I did not get into teaching for paperwork. I got in it to teach and paperwork is my arch nemisis. I am a great teacher, kids I teach make improvements and not all of their improvements can be measured academically.

It is the subtle things, like the 12 year old who never smiled, never made eye contact and would not ask questions about the subject I was teaching despite it being me him and one other student in the room being guided step by step through the topic. I asked him at the end what was going on as he only got 1/20 correct in the work but said nothing all the way through. After sending the other chld back, we chatted and he told me he didnt ask questions because he is not worth helping. We chatted and I explained to him that he is worth it to me, that he is why I am here and other stuff. We went back over the stuff and the 6 sums I did with him, he got right. Then I spoke to his teacher, and my deputy about hims as I am worried. Next day the kid came in and he smile and asked some questions and looked at me. End of last week he was walking down the corridor with his head up and looking ahead. Other people remarked about his change in attitude.

How is that measured in pay performance pay? And should it be? That child now realises he has someone who will fight his corner in school and after. I tell all the kids I teacher no matter how old they get, if there is ever a moment they feel they have no one to turn to, find me as I will always be here. I will listen and help if I can and if I cant I will find someone who can.

Teaching is more than academic.

Education in all its facets is immeasurable, it is unquantifiable. Education in its essence cannot be reduced to a grade on a paper.

It isn't the same as being set a target of getting X amount of sales at work or answering and closing a certain amount of calls per hour in a call centre. These are both metrics I've been managed under in previous jobs. Education is organic A target for one child could be all As whereas for another it could be as simple as getting them to finish the school week still attending. Targets in education change each and every day and sometimes they change within a class.

Easy for people outside of education to say performance related pay will solve all its ills.

Midlife

It won't. I can see the argument but it will create more problems.

There is a problem with some inept underperforming teachers but ****ing up the whole the whole education system is not the way to solve it.

Donald Trump

wirelessdude01 wrote: »

I'm pointing out it isn't there anymore.

That is fair enough. She wasn't going from school to school subbing from what I heard. My understanding is that she was actually teaching a class not being used as a spare. She was in some school for maybe two years. Didn't pass her practical bit (as it was then). Blamed the school and moved to a different school for a year. Didn't pass again. Then moved to another school and passed it finally there. She was a very sporty person so I think she was in demand from that aspect and had no issue getting hired to places.

Donald Trump

wirelessdude01 wrote: »

You are talking about a system where teachers will end up canvassing for specific classes due to them being good academically as it will ensure them a pay rise.

History Queen wrote: »

There are so many variables I can't see this working. A few off the top of my head,;

There are students that will never get an A no matter how hard they work through no fault of their own? How do you propose taking strategic studying in to account where LC students only focus on their best 6 subjects or the subjects they "need "? How does it work where one teacher has a group for 5th year and a different teacher has them for 6th year? How are special education needs accounted for? How is social disadvantage accounted for? How is student laziness accounted for? How is the shoehorning of teachers in to different levels accounted for?

I have already explained it as clearly as I could. And neither of you seemed to grasp the basic idea.


If you canvass for a class that hypothetically has all "A students" that won't give you a rise. Because if each student gets an A then that is what is expected of them. It is the same as if you have a class of all "C" students that get the "C"s that are expected of them.





To the latter point,



Do you understand that you would not be being measured on each single student separately? You look at different distributions. You look at the distribution of grades over the class. You look at the distributions of each student over their different subjects. You look at the distributions over the subject for the country. You can assess correlations or grades between subjects that tend to be correlated. You can adjust for students taking extra subjects or class sizes etc.


When you do that, you find outliers. I already gave the simple example of two teachers who each have 5 students and each class has identical results but that the stats could show that one class underperformed and that another overperformed. Students would not have to get an A to show statistically that the teacher did a good job.



It is not something that is based on a single student or even a single class. A student can get an A in every other class and get a D in your class. That is perfectly fine. That is possible with a reasonably level of probability. It doesn't flag any error. What might flag an error as statistically unlikely is if every student in your class gets two grades below their average grade and that happens to all your classes. Perhaps you are a physics teacher and 5 kids failed pass physics under you who got A's in honours maths that year. That would probably be a fairly obvious statistical anomaly! No?





Surely you both notice correlations between the students you teach? If you teach both Honors and pass English and History, then you might see correlations across the classes? You have to try to understand I am talking statistically here. I am not saying it is impossible to have a student who gets an A in honours history and fails pass English or vice-versa. What I am simply saying is that it is likely that your top 5 students in your history class are probably high enough up the ranking in your English class. And your bottom 5 students in your English class are probably in the bottom half of your History class. Do you kind of get the idea? These correlations exist.



You simply build up the distributions, calculate the likelihood of certain events occurring and then you look for outliers say at the 1% level. That means that, even though whatever sequence of events are possible, that there is only a 1 in 100 probability of them having happened by chance. If a single student gets A's in all other classes and gets B's in your class, well then that is maybe 30% probability for example. It is nowhere near an outlier. Given that the student got all A's elsewhere there might be a 50% chance they get an "A" here. a 30% chance they got a "B", 15% chance they got a "C" etc etc. It is a conditional probability. The probability of students overall getting a "B" might be 20%. What might be an outlier is if you have 5 otherwise straight-A students who get D's in your subject.


You don't need to do the calculations yourself btw. I'm not saying that.

History Queen

Donald Trump wrote: »

I have already explained it as clearly as I could. And neither of you seemed to grasp the basic idea.


If you canvass for a class that hypothetically has all "A students" that won't give you a rise. Because if each student gets an A then that is what is expected of them. It is the same as if you have a class of all "C" students that get the "C"s that are expected of them.





To the latter point,



Do you understand that you would not be being measured on each single student separately? You look at different distributions. You look at the distribution of grades over the class. You look at the distributions of each student over their different subjects. You look at the distributions over the subject for the country. You can assess correlations or grades between subjects that tend to be correlated. You can adjust for students taking extra subjects or class sizes etc.


When you do that, you find outliers. I already gave the simple example of two teachers who each have 5 students and each class has identical results but that the stats could show that one class underperformed and that another overperformed. Students would not have to get an A to show statistically that the teacher did a good job.



It is not something that is based on a single student or even a single class. A student can get an A in every other class and get a D in your class. That is perfectly fine. That is possible with a reasonably level of probability. It doesn't flag any error. What might flag an error as statistically unlikely is if every student in your class gets two grades below their average grade and that happens to all your classes. Perhaps you are a physics teacher and 5 kids failed pass physics under you who got A's in honours maths that year. That would probably be a fairly obvious statistical anomaly! No?





Surely you both notice correlations between the students you teach? If you teach both Honors and pass English and History, then you might see correlations across the classes? You have to try to understand I am talking statistically here. I am not saying it is impossible to have a student who gets an A in honours history and fails pass English or vice-versa. What I am simply saying is that it is likely that your top 5 students in your history class are probably high enough up the ranking in your English class. And your bottom 5 students in your English class are probably in the bottom half of your History class. Do you kind of get the idea? These correlations exist.



You simply build up the distributions, calculate the likelihood of certain events occurring and then you look for outliers say at the 1% level. That means that, even though whatever sequence of events are possible, that there is only a 1 in 100 probability of them having happened by chance. If a single student gets A's in all other classes and gets B's in your class, well then that is maybe 30% probability for example. It is nowhere near an outlier. Given that the student got all A's elsewhere there might be a 50% chance they get an "A" here. a 30% chance they got a "B", 15% chance they got a "C" etc etc. It is a conditional probability. The probability of students overall getting a "B" might be 20%. What might be an outlier is if you have 5 otherwise straight-A students who get D's in your subject.


You don't need to do the calculations yourself btw. I'm not saying that.

I understand what you are saying but disagree that it will work. You misunderstand the nuances and role of schools not just interms of academic performance but also in terms of pastoral care. Your proposition in my eyes would make schools miserable places for both staff and students to no reasonable end.

I'm also confused by the fact that if students perform as expected in your model that the ,teacher still doesn't get a raise, only exceptional results ensure progression? It's a few years since I worked in a role with performance review but meeting targets was usually rewarded as well as exceeding them. Also not sure how your model accounts for mixed ability.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

I have already explained it as clearly as I could. And neither of you seemed to grasp the basic idea.


If you canvass for a class that hypothetically has all "A students" that won't give you a rise. Because if each student gets an A then that is what is expected of them. It is the same as if you have a class of all "C" students that get the "C"s that are expected of them.





To the latter point,



Do you understand that you would not be being measured on each single student separately? You look at different distributions. You look at the distribution of grades over the class. You look at the distributions of each student over their different subjects. You look at the distributions over the subject for the country. You can assess correlations or grades between subjects that tend to be correlated. You can adjust for students taking extra subjects or class sizes etc.


When you do that, you find outliers. I already gave the simple example of two teachers who each have 5 students and each class has identical results but that the stats could show that one class underperformed and that another overperformed. Students would not have to get an A to show statistically that the teacher did a good job.



It is not something that is based on a single student or even a single class. A student can get an A in every other class and get a D in your class. That is perfectly fine. That is possible with a reasonably level of probability. It doesn't flag any error. What might flag an error as statistically unlikely is if every student in your class gets two grades below their average grade and that happens to all your classes. Perhaps you are a physics teacher and 5 kids failed pass physics under you who got A's in honours maths that year. That would probably be a fairly obvious statistical anomaly! No?





Surely you both notice correlations between the students you teach? If you teach both Honors and pass English and History, then you might see correlations across the classes? You have to try to understand I am talking statistically here. I am not saying it is impossible to have a student who gets an A in honours history and fails pass English or vice-versa. What I am simply saying is that it is likely that your top 5 students in your history class are probably high enough up the ranking in your English class. And your bottom 5 students in your English class are probably in the bottom half of your History class. Do you kind of get the idea? These correlations exist.



You simply build up the distributions, calculate the likelihood of certain events occurring and then you look for outliers say at the 1% level. That means that, even though whatever sequence of events are possible, that there is only a 1 in 100 probability of them having happened by chance. If a single student gets A's in all other classes and gets B's in your class, well then that is maybe 30% probability for example. It is nowhere near an outlier. Given that the student got all A's elsewhere there might be a 50% chance they get an "A" here. a 30% chance they got a "B", 15% chance they got a "C" etc etc. It is a conditional probability. The probability of students overall getting a "B" might be 20%. What might be an outlier is if you have 5 otherwise straight-A students who get D's in your subject.


You don't need to do the calculations yourself btw. I'm not saying that.

I appreciate the time taken to think it out, but again you're trying to apply stats to aptitudes of children and basing everything on their performance in terminal exams. You are adding even more pressure now to the leaving cert as not only students are under pressure, but teachers too.

Also you're talking about a **** ton of data analysis, how many people would be employed to do this? Why would hiring more people to do this save money?

What about non exam subjects like RE and Sphe and PE?

The bell curve says that only 3% of students sitting the English exam get an a1,biology is near 10%. You say you are only looking to punish outliers, but how many outliers exist in the system do you think? Do you go off their DAT scores? What if they are really good at languages and choose all those subjects but scrape a pass in maths, does the maths teacher get punished?

What if a kid hates school, loves art because of his teacher. Teacher is the only reason he goes in really as he enjoys that class. The kid isn't academic but that teacher is giving him motivation to keep attending. How do you measure that?

Seriously, Donald, if we go down your route we might as well just give kids aptitude tests every year and then give r them careers accordingly.

What you are suggesting does not improve teaching and learning one bit to be honest, and definitely doesn't place students at the centre of the process.

wirelessdude01

You make a lot of assumptions. Personally I ranged from HLA1 TO OLD3, I know that the system for the LC has changed now but you cannot make any assumptions that one grade will automatically lend itself to another. Interest, aptitude, attitude all play a part.

Also as was seen in the predicted/calculated grades fiasco, every teacher goes at things in a slightly different way. The only "standardised" result would be the JC and LC. No possible way to standardise the other years unless there are standard tests with centralised blind marking.

The whole approach over the past 10 years since I became a teacher has been a move away from a purely results driven approach. The holistic model allows for growth in other non measured ways.

Donald Trump

History Queen wrote: »

I understand what you are saying but disagree that it will work. You misunderstand the nuances and role of schools not just interms of academic performance but also in terms of pastoral care. Your proposition in my eyes would make schools miserable places for both staff and students to no reasonable end.

I'm also confused by the fact that if students perform as expected in your model that the ,teacher still doesn't get a raise, only exceptional results ensure progression? It's a few years since I worked in a role with performance review but meeting targets was usually rewarded as well as exceeding them. Also not sure how your model accounts for mixed ability.

The thing about not getting a raise didn't mean exactly that. It was in response to the other poster saying that teachers would be fighting for A-students in order to get raises. They could of course still get an increment for normal performance. I was trying to explain the point in simpler terms.





The stats will point out the outliers. I've mentioned outliers and figures like 1% a few times. Surely, in your lifetime, if you have worked with 100 teachers, you have come across one that didn't give a shite. You don't want that one in your profession. That is the one that has consistently relatively bad results, consistently across all classes the teach, consistently every year.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

That is the one that has consistently relatively bad results, consistently across all classes the teach, consistently every year.

You see that actually rarely happens. The bad teachers you are describing normally slip through because the kids do the work themselves, get grinds, paper over cracks, or abuse sick days, are never available for extra curricular etc.

They intentionally don't stand out in the system and that's how they get away with it. I'm sure you have experience of the same in your office. They do just enough to get by and are very good at it.

If you have a teacher that kept having failing classes etc they would be taken out of exam classes, given a load of computer or ty classes that aren't high stakes and thus you can't apply your statistical model.

We aren't disputing you just because, we actually know what we are talking about. If it was as easy to do as you said it was it would have been done by now!

History Queen

Donald Trump wrote: »

The thing about not getting a raise didn't mean exactly that. It was in response to the other poster saying that teachers would be fighting for A-students in order to get raises. They could of course still get an increment for normal performance. I was trying to explain the point in simpler terms.





The stats will point out the outliers. I've mentioned outliers and figures like 1% a few times. Surely, in your lifetime, if you have worked with 100 teachers, you have come across one that didn't give a shite. You don't want that one in your profession. That is the one that has consistently relatively bad results, consistently across all classes the teach, consistently every year.

****e teachers often don't get crap results as their students get grinds. A teacher's worth cannot be acurately measured by the academic performance of students.

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

I appreciate the time taken to think it out, but again you're trying to apply stats to aptitudes of children and basing everything on their performance in terminal exams. You are adding even more pressure now to the leaving cert as not only students are under pressure, but teachers too.

No. Only looking for outliers. I'm not talking about normal fluctuations or deviations.

Smacruairi wrote: »

Also you're talking about a **** ton of data analysis, how many people would be employed to do this? Why would hiring more people to do this save money?

What about non exam subjects like RE and Sphe and PE?

The data is there. It's all on systems. You give a statistician access to thatr DB and they have the outliers to you in a few minutes once their model is defined.

Smacruairi wrote: »

The bell curve says that only 3% of students sitting the English exam get an a1,biology is near 10%. You say you are only looking to punish outliers, but how many outliers exist in the system do you think? Do you go off their DAT scores? What if they are really good at languages and choose all those subjects but scrape a pass in maths, does the maths teacher get punished?

No, that is fine. As I said that is statistically probable. And I explicitly mentioned correlations across subjects. What you said is not necessarily an outlier.

What might be an outlier is if all otherwise top students barely scrape a pass in pass maths. One of the academically smartest fellas I knew in college got the guts of 600 points. He went over to do a PhD in a difficult area in one of the Oxbridges. I think he had 590 and this was before any of this bonus stuff. However he got a D is pass Irish. I think that's not that unbelievable. Now, if he had A's in honours Physics, Chemistry and Applied maths and scraped a D in pass maths then you'd think something was up.

Smacruairi wrote: »

What if a kid hates school, loves art because of his teacher. Teacher is the only reason he goes in really as he enjoys that class. The kid isn't academic but that teacher is giving him motivation to keep attending. How do you measure that?

Seriously, Donald, if we go down your route we might as well just give kids aptitude tests every year and then give r them careers accordingly.

What you are suggesting does not improve teaching and learning one bit to be honest, and definitely doesn't place students at the centre of the process.

Again. that is one student. One student on their own would not affect the stats to any significant degree one way or the other.





Simple example that everyone should know already. If you flip a coin then you will get heads with 50% probability. If you flip 10 coins, then the probability of getting all heads is less than 1 in 1000.



Maybe that otherwise-A kid getting a D in their pass maths class is a 50% probability (deliberatly high for this example but just to match the coin). Not an outlier. If there are 10 kids in the class all getting identically bad results, relative to their other classes, then you are looking at 0.1% probability and you definitely are in outlier territory.

(again, correlations with other subjects can easily be controlled for too)

khalessi

Donald the business model cannot be applied to children.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

.

What might be an outlier is if all otherwise top students barely scrape a pass in pass maths. One of the academically smartest fellas I knew in college got the guts of 600 points. He went over to do a PhD in a difficult area in one of the Oxbridges. I think he had 590 and this was before any of this bonus stuff. However he got a D is pass Irish. I think that's not that unbelievable. Now, if he had A's in honours Physics, Chemistry and Applied maths and scraped a D in pass maths then you'd think something was up.

Again. that is one student. One student on their own would not affect the stats to any significant degree one way or the other.
)

Your system puts far too much emphasis on the impact of the teacher though. In my old school some kids did 8 subjects. Thus they took it handy in Irish and English. Their results would be well before the others.now you said your system would just spit out data in a few minutes, but then you gave an anecdote about your friend, showing that every student has a story, and thus every teacher would have multiple stories as to why the kids they were teaching under or over achieved.

Donald Trump

History Queen wrote: »

****e teachers often don't get crap results as their students get grinds. A teacher's worth cannot be acurately measured by the academic performance of students.

That is a fair point. The tests might miss some shite teachers. So you will have false negatives.


But the stats won't have any corresponding hypothetical reason for "false positives". If you are shown that your students are statistically underperforming consistently year after year then that is the case. It just means it won't catch them all


What I suggested won't catch all the bad ones anyway by definition. I am talking about outliers. The ones that are so far out that there they couldn't have happened by chance.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

That is a fair point. The tests might miss some sh[/size=2]i[/size]te teachers. So you will have false negatives.


But the stats won't have any corresponding hypothetical reason for "false positives". If you are shown that your students are statistically underperforming consistently year after year then that is the case. It just means it won't catch them all


What I suggested won't catch all the bad ones anyway by definition. I am talking about outliers. The ones that are so far out that there they couldn't have happened by chance.

They are already on principals radars. Do you think parents don't immediately contact principals when they are unhappy with a teacher? They get moved around, bounce from school to school, or are given the pass clssses etc.

You do boards of management and principals a great disservice if you think they are not aware of the teaching in their school.

khalessi

Smacruairi wrote: »

They are already on principals radars. Do you think parents don't immediately contact principals when they are unhappy with a teacher? They get moved around, bounce from school to school, or are given the pass clssses etc.

You do boards of management and principals a great disservice if you think they are not aware of the teaching in their school.

Its all about the stats not the humanity.

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

Your system puts far too much emphasis on the impact of the teacher though. In my old school some kids did 8 subjects. Thus they took it handy in Irish and English. Their results would be well before the others.now you said your system would just spit out data in a few minutes, but then you gave an anecdote about your friend, showing that every student has a story, and thus every teacher would have multiple stories as to why the kids they were teaching under or over achieved.

But that fella would not be statistically significant. I think that we can assume that, if it was an average Irish class with an average teacher, then there would have been an average distribution of results in the class. One is not going to skew it. Two or three is not going to flag anything.


If every student in that class underachieved and that happened every year, then surely you have to ask questions of the teacher? No? As in why are none of the students taking it seriously? Why do none of them have an appreciation of the subject etc? If it is happening in every school then it will be reflected in the cross-school distribution which I referred to. I mention three distributions (1) within the class itself (2) the distributions of individual classes across their different subjects (controlling for correlated subjects) and (3) distributions nationally across different schools.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

But that fella would not be statistically significant. I think that we can assume that, if it was an average Irish class with an average teacher, then there would have been an average distribution of results in the class. One is not going to skew it. Two or three is not going to flag anything.


If every student in that class underachieved and that happened every year, then surely you have to ask questions of the teacher? No? As in why are none of the students taking it seriously? Why do none of them have an appreciation of the subject etc? If it is happening in every school then it will be reflected in the cross-school distribution which I referred to. I mention three distributions (1) within the class itself (2) the distributions of individual classes across their different subjects (controlling for correlated subjects) and (3) distributions nationally across different schools.

What's an average Irish class? What's an average student? Why are people not taking maths seriously is going to go against the teacher, really? How do you measure appreciation of a subject? Do you compare school in ballymun with a school in Blackrock? If you do, why is that fair, if its local arrangements only, then why didn't the DES do this in the recent leaving cert debacle?

In fact that whole leaving cert nonsense saw a load of kids marked up owing to stats. That would mean all teachers got a raise, the best results ever in the history of the state according to algorithms...

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

They are already on principals radars. Do you think parents don't immediately contact principals when they are unhappy with a teacher? They get moved around, bounce from school to school, or are given the pass clssses etc.

You do boards of management and principals a great disservice if you think they are not aware of the teaching in their school.

Yeah but to be fair, parents probably contact the principal for every little grievance nowadays.




Moving the bad ones around and giving them pass classes isn't fair on the weaker students either. Of course it happens but every child can learn something. That useless teacher coming into the class every day with a hangover might be quite happy to mail it in until retirement. He's going to get paid as much as the teachers off spending their evenings preparing material.

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

Yeah but to be fair, parents probably contact the principal for every little grievance nowadays.




Moving the bad ones around and giving them pass classes isn't fair on the weaker students either. Of course it happens but every child can learn something. That useless teacher coming into the class every day with a hangover might be quite happy to mail it in until retirement. He's going to get paid as much as the teachers off spending their evenings preparing material.

Coming in with a hangover every day is gross unprofessionalism and can be dealt with according to code of conduct etc. Not really relevant to our discussion here imo.

Look i appreciate what you're trying to say, but your examples and experiences are not reflective of modern day teaching,id really wish you would listen to the people on the inside with actual experience as opposed to thinking we know nothing. The HSE is a black hole of money, would you go and tell their management how to do things properly?

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

In fact that whole leaving cert nonsense saw a load of kids marked up owing to stats. That would mean all teachers got a raise, the best results ever in the history of the state according to algorithms...

No it wasn't. That was based on grades which were "predicted" by the teachers.


We didn't hear any cases of students who were predicted a "B" by the teacher being granted a "A" by the algorithm!

Smacruairi

Donald Trump wrote: »

No it wasn't. That was based on grades which were "predicted" by the teachers.


We didn't hear any cases of students who were predicted a "B" by the teacher being granted a "A" by the algorithm!

Yes we did. Look at all the DEIS schools who got marked up.. Sigh.

Also there are no As and Bs anymore.

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

Coming in with a hangover every day is gross unprofessionalism and can be dealt with according to code of conduct etc. Not really relevant to our discussion here imo.

In my school, for the LC there were two honours English classes. Let us call them Mr. C and Ms. R.


Nobody wanted to go into Ms. R's class. She gave essays every week or so and pushed through loads of work. She was very strict. As teenagers, we weren't that concerned with the fact that it was well known that her students always did better on the exams. We just wanted the handy class. Mr. C actually always got the (initially) stronger students though!

I was in Mr. C's class. He would come in every Monday, usually a few minutes late, and spend about 10 minutes talking about Manchester United and slagging Liverpool supporting students. Then he would read his paper.



I am not exaggerating here, but for the whole "Senior Cycle" as it is now - ignoring the exam itself, I only wrote one English essay. And it wasn't corrected. I wrote the first one assigned and it was never collected or corrected. I think a few more were assigned but nobody did them.


For the syllabus, there were loads of poems. I think that, at the time, there was a question on a specific Irish poet roughly every second year. But there was a choice of a few questions and one of them was always general. So what did we do - I think we did 6 Irish poets. That was all. If a specific Irish poet didn't come up we were going to have to squeeze an Irish poet into the general question! We read two plays and a novel I think.


The other class did lots of poems and poets and lots of writing and essays.



Actually, in the 2 months before the exam he had an accident and was on leave. A sub came in from outside and really panicked when he learned what we had done so far. It was too late at that stage though. And it was alright - we just didn't have much choice in the exam. Mr. C was just playing the system.

Donald Trump

Smacruairi wrote: »

Yes we did. Look at all the DEIS schools who got marked up.. Sigh.

Also there are no As and Bs anymore.

Fair enough, but it was based on dodgy predicted teacher grades.


As for the As and Bs...that's pedantics. The concept is still the same. You're not sticking a finger in the air and calling one grade a "yellow" and the next one a "spicey". It's based on some numerical scale regardless of how you bucket them.

wirelessdude01

Smacruairi wrote: »

Your system puts far too much emphasis on the impact of the teacher though. In my old school some kids did 8 subjects. Thus they took it handy in Irish and English. Their results would be well before the others.now you said your system would just spit out data in a few minutes, but then you gave an anecdote about your friend, showing that every student has a story, and thus every teacher would have multiple stories as to why the kids they were teaching under or over achieved.

Yeah I did 7 subjects in school because we had to. I didn't try in 2 of them as they had no interest to.me.but I had to do some of the options. I did one subject fully outside of school and I was counting it for points. Wasn't available to.me.in school.

wirelessdude01

Donald Trump wrote: »

No it wasn't. That was based on grades which were "predicted" by the teachers.


We didn't hear any cases of students who were predicted a "B" by the teacher being granted a "A" by the algorithm!

Actually when the results fiasco about grades being lower due to the algorithm came out, it was quietly slipped into the news feed that approximately the same number of students had been granted inflated results due to the same issue.

Midlife

Trump, you need to listen to people who know what they are talking about.

You are advocating turning a teachers approach towards students into a 'what's in it for me' system.

Surely to go you can see how this fails.

Clearly you needed nothing from school bar results. Not everyone has the same experience. Just trust me. Some people really need the focus in school to be on something other than their results.

I would not approach a sales team and pretend that my knowledge of the classroom means I could design a system by which they could improve performance. You should consider likewise - you don't know everything.