What next?
Bill Collis: "In 2006 I spent time talking with engineering people at AUT and colleagues in industry, and to a work skills conference to find out what industry people were saying about the sort of skills they need in young people. And the more you look around, the more you realise that our subject, Technology, has got most of the answers – because it teaches students how to think and gives them confidence to jump into the real world without feeling a complete idiot."
Significant areas identified in 2006 for future improvement included:
- pre-testing students with a quick and simple non-threatening exercise early in the year will reveal many of their strengths and weaknesses, not just their skills but their attitude to risk-taking and problem-solving. The benefit of this became increasingly obvious 2006 as it would help teachers and students identify competence and capability before projects progress too far.
- redeveloping the Year 13 course, including more work on high end technological literacy and preparing more students for scholarship.
- looking at how students develop and retain (or not) a generic technological knowledge from one year to the next.
When students struggled with their work, it was clear they did so because they had been allowed to 'overreach' with their projects "they have not been scaffolded through learning processes well enough. While a significant reason for this was the range of student abilities within a class, this area needed remedy."
In 2007 Michele also began restructuring the Year 9 and 10 Technology programmes to establish continuity across the entire Year 9-13 Electronics programme, to capture more students into technology and develop a consistent vision for technological literacy across all technology areas in the school.
"Michele has some great ideas and has thought very carefully about how the whole Year 9/10 programme can best fit in with what we have developed for our senior school," says Bill. "By the end of 2007 her Year 9/10 programme will be pretty much established, and that will then feed into the Year 11, 12 and 13 classes."
Michele is also keen to increase the number and range of students taking Electronics. "We've been taking the very academic students and channelling the others into other slightly 'easier' areas of Technology," she says. "There's a presumption that you have to have a high level understanding of maths and science to do Electronics. At some point we needed to establish an appropriate course for the group just below the very high achievers.
"So in 2007 we began a Unit Standards-based electro-technology course for those students. Students coming through from Year 10 now have two channels they can take. We've always done that in Multi-materials and it seemed appropriate to do it in Electronics as well. Some students can cope much better getting the skills and understandings from a range of smaller projects. That could make them good technicians one day – and there's a good market there."
