subject: What Is the Opinion of the Controllers in Regards to Student and Teacher Concerns? [print this page] First, it is necessary to Men's Shoes infer what the opinion of the controllers is in regards to student and teacher concerns. This is best highlighted by a recent report from the controllers to the funding body.
It made reference to resistance occurring to the core curriculum and a need for both students and teachers to adjust. It would seem that the controllers are aware of the feelings of teachers and students but believe that it is the students and teachers who need to change not the uniform and accountable outcomes-based approach.
The reaction of both staff and students has, indeed, not been positive. Every semester, the students complete an evaluation to give feedback. This is both a quantitative and qualitative process. Quantitatively, the Designer Shoes overall scores for all three levels of the curriculum can be said to be low, and some student comments have questioned what has been determined as valuable outcomes by the controller, for example, one student wrote: The English lesson cannot satisfy what we need. This comment was made in direct reference to 'aim/objective' number one.
However, given the controllers' comments to the funding body, it would seem unlikely that the low evaluation scores or students' comments will be; acted upon but rather interpreted as the need for students to adjust. To help students adjust and participate in the outcomes-based approach, the Centre now assigns every student a mark for participation and calculates their grades with ago per cent weighting for their ability to create specific text types.
Some teachers also had similar misgivings. One teacher commented that a new member of staff had remarked in a recent conversation how in places of previous employment the employer had valued their experience and expertise as a teacher, whereas the controller now just asked them to take the materials that had been designed to support the 'aims/objectives' and teach. Furthermore, advice from one teacher to another was: when being observed by the head of department, it was a good idea to follow the materials in their entirety as that resulted in a positive observation report.
It would seem that a side effect of having measurable processes as outcomes may as Littlewood (2008: 8) puts it when referencing Alexander (2004: 29) encourage 'a culture of compliance' in which teachers are merely 'technicians who implement the educational ideas and procedures of others'.
This response is not intended to suggest that an outcomes-based approach is bad per se but rather that it is open to abuse by the controller if they rank uniformity and accountability above student and teacher autonomy, good teaching, and valuable learning experiences.
In this new age of the outcomes-based approach, both students and teachers must unite and resist the controllers to ensure at the very least that the outcomes selected are the 'right' ones and that uniformity does not replace teacher-researchers with teacher technicians.
What Is the Opinion of the Controllers in Regards to Student and Teacher Concerns?
