NCEA – A Catalyst for Change
Historically Mt Roskill Grammar has a very succesful Electronics programme, particularly in Years 10, 11 and 12. Until 2004, there had been no programme in Electronics at Year 13 level.
The Department adapted to NCEA Level 1 in 2002, but in 2003, the school opted to stay with sixth form certificate instead of NCEA Level 2. In 2004 Electronics was taught at NCEA Level 2 and Level 3 for the first time, so the Level 3 students had not done Level 2 achievement standards. This coincided with a leadership change within the Department and outcomes suffered.
"Our 2002 and 2003 results were OK," said Head of Electronics Bill Collis, "but our 2004 results took a real dive. Out of all the Achievement Standards in Technology, we only got one excellence and in previous years we had numbers of them."
The new HOD Michele Heywood took maternity leave over the first half of 2005, and Bill was acting HOD for that period. With such disappointing year for the Mt Roskill Grammar Technology Department in terms of student outcomes, it was clear that extensive change was required. "The 2004 results really asked questions of where we were at with technology at Mt Roskill Grammar. I set myself a project to turn around our NCEA results for the department."
"At the beginning of 2005 I sat down with department and we agreed that now that NCEA had been rolled out, we had to be getting it right," said Bill. "It seemed to me that we'd been missing things like: properly understanding the clients' needs; missing the situation analysis; not figuring out how to identify key factors; prioritisation; being unclear what a brief was all about."
Bill drew up a series of templates for students to fill in when teachers saw something missing in a student's work. The templates aimed to help ensure that students knew the expectations for a particular activity/technological practice area. They were available department-wide, thereby establishing consistency of approach in all classes.
This initiative had immediate benefits. "It turned our results around," says Bill, "and we started to get some really good results across the whole department. The Hard Materials guys work with a completely different students to the ones I work with, and their results were also very favourable. And one of my students picked up a Scholarship in 2005."
Later that year, Bill was back in his role as Head of Electronics. He was determined to consolidate these improvement through to 2006 and beyond and, together with Michele and Jasveer, and with great support from the senior management, successfully applied for the second round of Beacon Practice funding.
The three teachers consulted extensively. Teacher understanding of technological practice had developed individually over a period of several years. Units of work for Year 11 and Year 12 students were there as a collection of documents and templates. It was felt that these needed review, to identify the important aspects of each programme and make sure that these were covered well. Also, there were a number of students from enhanced band classes who took the programme, and they needed scope to go beyond core requirements of the class.
It was clear that 2006 was an opportunity to draw their experiences and initiatives together into a comprehensive programme with consistent format and clear pathways from Year 10 through to Year 13.
