New ALAN program forcing teachers to answer 1000 questions on their students
PRIMARY school teachers are being forced to fill in more than 1000 questions about the progress of their students every five weeks as part of a bizarre new tracking system that includes assessing how a child “expresses feelings and needs” and if they use “appropriate personal greetings”.
NSW
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PRIMARY school teachers are being forced to fill in more than 1000 questions about the progress of their students every five weeks as part of a bizarre new tracking system that includes assessing how a child “expresses feelings and needs” and if they use “appropriate personal greetings”.
NSW Primary Principals Association executive Rob Walker told The Daily Telegraph the new Assessing Literacy and Numeracy (ALAN) program was so “over the top” that at least one school had been forced to hire relief teachers simply for data entry.
The teachers are being asked to grade every K-2 child on 791 literacy and 307 numeracy indicators, and to repeat the process every five weeks to “help track students movement along the literacy and numeracy continuum.”
Under the program, teachers fill in an online questionnaire marking each child on a range of
indicators including listening, speaking phonics, grammar punctuation and interaction. Examples include “makes simple requests”, “uses a small range of familiar words”, “uses simple, appropriate personal greetings” “uses apostrophes for regular singular possessives” and “writes capital letters for some proper nouns”.
The teacher must decide if each student has met each indicator or not, or are “working towards” it.
ALAN is being rolled out in 661 schools across NSW this year and the questionnaire software, called PLAN 2, will be available to every teacher by the end of the year. An Education Department document issued to schools along with the program say: “We need as much data as possible to be entered K-2 in Term 1.”
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Mr Walker said he knew of at least one school that had been forced to hire relief teachers to give staff time to catch up on the program’s data entry.
“Just to do the indicator work, we’re looking at half a day per fortnight,” he said. “If every indicator has to be covered on a five week basis it is completely over the top.”
A spokesman did not directly answer questions about the level of data entry for the program, but said in a statement the program would “help track students movement along the literacy and numeracy continuum.”
A spokesman for Education Minister Stokes said PLAN 2 is just one of the diagnostic tools under development in NSW.
“The Department is always looking at better ways to help students and support teachers,” he said.
Opposition education spokesman Jihad Dib said: “It is important we have data to help inform decisions, but when they’re spending more time collecting data then lesson planning then we’ve gone too far.
Charles Sturt University School of Education Associate Professor Alan Bain said: “Any system that involves teachers having to distance themselves from teaching to chase data is problematic.”