Setting clear standards

Recently Maxim Institute released a new education policy paper, “National standards for excellent teachers, reporting of student progress and the NCEA.”

The paper recommends setting professional standards for teachers to identify excellent teachers, and setting literacy and numeracy benchmarks to provide a national report of students’ educational progress, currently absent in NZ.

The paper makes the case that setting clear standards in these key areas would benefit teachers and students alike, by providing more information about progress, and setting clear expectations for excellence and achievement.

There is a pressing need for more rigorous professional standards for teachers, as they could help to solve the problems which NZ has experienced at retaining and recruiting high quality teachers.

Standards would set clear expectations for what constitutes high-quality teaching and could help restore a sense of accomplishment. It is vital to concentrate on identifying excellent teachers, as research shows they can have a major impact on students’ learning.

Excellent teachers could also concentrate on developing and mentoring less experienced teachers; with recent dissatisfaction about the quality of associate teachers in some schools this would be a positive step.

Just as standards could help improve the quality of teaching, setting national literacy and numeracy benchmarks could help with monitoring and reporting students’ progress.

Setting benchmarks would establish the expectations for what our children should have learnt by certain stages in their schooling.

They could also show where remedial action needs to be taken by teachers. In NZ a classroom assessment tool called asTTle (Achievement Tools for Teaching and Learning) would allow students to be assessed against benchmarks derived from the national curriculum.

Maxim Institute therefore recommends that professional standards be developed to identify excellent teachers.

These standards would consider not only the value that teachers add to their students’ learning, but also such factors as their involvement in the school community.

Alongside this, rolling out the use of asTTle across all schools would provide better information about student achievement.

Setting standards would help teachers and students to see how well they are doing, as well as helping raise teacher quality and improving students’ achievement.