May 03 2009
Finding a way through Curriculum for Excellence
My school will be implementing something along the road towards the new CfE outcomes for Science for S1 after the summer holidays. I don’t know how far down the road we will go in our first year of implementation, it’s unclear if anyone has the answer to that yet at this stage.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, assessment seems to be an issue already. It’s disappointing as I thought perhaps there would have been sufficient flexibility in our approach to allow the classroom teacher to assess pupils against the 4 capacities when it came to report card time.
There may be some consensus in the need to get away from the treadmill of racing through a course to meet the requirements of an exam, but so far all I can see is the potential for a “core” science curriculum to be taught in same way by all members of the department and “extension” topics where creativity and opinions of pupils may have some input into what and how a specific outcome progresses.
The “core” science would be assessed as it always has been, with formative assessment of the additional outcomes. This assessment policy by committee does not live up to my hopes for CfE. How are other schools planning to implement CfE in Science?
This is just my opinion – feel free to comment or critisise…
I wouldn’t attempt to assess within the 4 capacities. These capacities reflect exposure to ways to strengthen a character – in other words, we cannot or shouldn’t assess sonmeone for their personality.
Instead, assessment needs to reflect the responsibilites for all, although again, necessarily all 3 for every subject area. Schools will be developing their own reports, perhaps a space for each subject, space to mention interdisciplinary.
There has been a lot of discussion on whether the level should be broken up – otherwise pupils will appear to be at the same level for a long time – however, I don’t really agree with this, as we should instead be concentrating on depth, progression etc.
Also I feel there still should be something summative on there, as it wouldn’t be as if we are going to stop tests althogether..
What do others think?