Professional Judgement

There was a time when teachers were trusted to give an accurate description of the level of a student’s ability.  I don’t think this time has gone, except in the eyes of the Ministry of Education and NZQA perhaps.

Assessment is a game that we play.  Usually it has little parallel to reality.  Pass the test so that you qualify to prepare for a more important test, repeat a number of times, get a (hopefully) high paying job that you will perform poorly where it counts because of your lack of “real-world” knowledge and wisdom.  Any good workers learn their useful skills along the way, totally incidentally.

Some assessment systems are better than others, but that is another story.  What makes a good assessment is a good teacher.  And I don’t mean that the good teacher will help the student pass well.  I mean that the good teacher talks with and observes the student until an accurate judgment can be made.  That judgement includes all of those “incidentals” that are only observed by the teacher.

I feel that an element of deeper professional judgement is coming back.  This is shown in some of the achievement standard wordings, particularly for internal assessments.

Professional judgement is scary for some teachers, those in positions of management more so, because it is open for abuse by teachers who have a reputation they feel they need to protect.  Pass a few more borderline students because it will make me look better?  That’s the temptation.  legislation should never cripple the majority though, so to remove professional judgement we need to have strong evidence that the majority is likely to abuse their professional judgement.

If we throw performance pay into the mix, the temptation to abuse professional judgement is amplified.  Not only reputation, but livelihood on the line.

There are two opposing paradigms here.  They will bring each other down if we try to do both at the same time.  Professional Judgement, pay enough for everyone to feel secure, scrap moderation and have supportive personal and professional development.  On the other hand lies performance pay (taxpayer funded – makes teachers accountable to taxpayers), accountability structures to stop the inevitable abuses of professional judgement, or remove professional judgement altogether and have an empty and useless assessment system.

More to be said indeed.  Talk about your views and fill in the gaps I haven’t addressed below in the comments!