Outcomes
Jenny says that the standard of the final outcomes was even higher than the previous year. All projects were well received by their intended audiences, and two-thirds of the students met the standards for an Excellent in the external assessment.
Jenny credits much of this success to her use of the Alternative Assessment Schedules that cluster members had developed with Professional Support Facilitator Hugh Derham. The shift to the alternative schedules saw more intuitive, 'natural' technological practice, improved student/teacher interaction, and more insightful and subtle assessment of student work, she says. See BP629 ICT Programming, BP628 Junior ICT Programme and BP630 Multimedia CD-Roms."My aim was to make students' technological practice more intuitive. I wanted them to think 'OK I've got a problem, how am I going to solve it? What's the best tool for the task?', so that they did whatever was natural for them for that particular problem."
The Alternative Assessment Schedules give Jenny's students a clear understanding of what the standards required of them, by making the terminology easier to understand and including clear explanations of the additional requirements for meeting the standards for Merit and Excellent.
They also enable Jenny to unobtrusively collect evidence of achievement during her one-on-one chats with students. During these student meetings, Jenny often had students use a whiteboard to talk through their progress, problems, plans and queries. "I find this a good way of getting evidence from students – you can see the way they're thinking by the way they're explaining and drawing, and I can feed-back and 'feed-forward' and help them in a more effective way.
"But of course, for some students, expressing their ideas in words is perfect, for others it's not. It's important for students to provide evidence in a way that is natural for them, rather than is easy for the assessor."
Delivering the course in a mixed-level classroom was a challenge. Initially Jenny had to work to keep all of the students' practice aligned so they were roughly at the same stage of development. "I found all the mixed levels hard at the beginning of the year, but once I got the hang of it, I had everyone doing the same part of the process simultaneously. Experiments that worked with one group, I would carry on with in another group."
A good example of this is the 'chair' exercise, that Jenny worked through at different levels in her mixed classes. The exercise was designed as part of a research project by Vicki Compton to examine student understanding of the new strands of the Technology curriculum. When the classes were studying the principles of interface design by designing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to meet their client's needs, Jenny gathered a selection of chairs from around the school and had students analyse them in terms of their form, function, materials, production and intended users.
" I had Year 11,12 and 13 students arguing about why a chair was a certain shape, what a particular piece of chair was for, why it was designed that way, and why a certain material had been used. The dynamics in the class were amazing."
Another important factor behind the quality of the final outcomes was the emphasis Jenny placed on students making good use of help from outside experts.
"As problems arose, I encouraged students to research how experts had solved similar problems. I saw that the expert input was helping their solutions become more professional and polished."
One student commented that seeking outside advice had enabled him to think in terms of other people's technological practice and, as a result, to improve his own. "It gets you thinking in terms of past values, and successes, and the reasons why different people have managed to do something similar and how they managed to get it to work. And the difference between their project and your own. You'll build an idea before you've even had your own experience of what you need to be doing."
The students responded well to the authenticity of real-life practitioners grappling with real-life problems. Authenticity appears to be important to the successful use of outside experts. One student commented that although they were branching out and "getting into the more open-world kind of thing" in the classroom, a classroom was still a classroom and the 'classroom mentality' remained.
While a narrow age-gap between student and expert may help, perhaps a more important factor to the success or failure of the interaction is how closely aligned the expert is with the student problem. "An expert should be someone who I want to end up being," says one student. "Because when you're motivated by someone like that, you really want to adopt their practice – you automatically get excited about it."
