GetAhead Educational Software

This month I thought I would explain a little bit about the process of assessment, seeing as we have had a very stressful time trying to fit an extra two weeks’ worth of teaching and assessing into this shortened term. On a similar note, and with tongue in cheek, we teachers receive a lot of ‘jibes’ around holiday time. the assessment process is quite elaborate, even for the junior children. I must stress here that this only applies to the schools that are being properly run. We do hear true horror stories of certain schools where teachers do not know pupil from pupil, where exams are written “communally” and where there is no honest system of genuine assessment, or where standards are so low that results do not hold up in the real world.

One of the demands of OBE is that teaching should be ‘learner-centred’ rather than ‘teacher-/educator-centred’. This is probably one of the main reasons for the failure of OBE. Before elaborating on the particular problem here, let me say that it is part of a bigger problem – the tendency to operate in terms of a simplistic ‘either-or’ mentality. This approach ignores the fact that real truth is most often found in a ‘both-and’ approach (except in the case of universal values) – what I like to call ‘the power of paradox’.