] VIDEO: John responds - to comments on trades training - Rt Hon John Key
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06 July 2007
VIDEO: John responds - to comments on trades training

Just back from his visits to the US and Canada, John thanks viewers for the many and thoughtful comments on his trades training speech and appeals for even more comments after emphasising how important he believes this policy direction to be.

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#1 - Andrew Atkin 2007-07-15 09:18 - (Reply)

Hello John, One point I want to make with trades-training, is that I think it's very important to not create an assessment regime that is too "intrusive". In America, they are progressively introducing a form of education called *Mastery Learning*. From what I understand, Matery Learning works by reducing the learned material to an explicity specified sequence of broken-down components, that the students must directly conform to (ML is also called Direct-Instructional learning) and to a point where you can say goodbye to natural reflective-thinking in your students [with Mastery Learning, student A's thought process is virtually *identical* to student B's; that's how extreme it specifies learning!]. The students have to demonstrate exact "mastery" in every sub-component before they can move on to the next component. I know that there is a lot of controversy in these learning systems - apparently they produce appalling academic outcomes, yet ML still seems to be being pushed for "questionable" reasons (I'll stop there!). Obviously the government (well, MOE) must specify demonstrated-outcomes for a student to win a qualification, but I do not believe that they should specify the method; or, more to the point, specify outcomes in a way so that the 'outcomes' effectively control the learning method in themselves - that's my concern here (which is what ML systems do). In my opinion, the MOE should operate a traditional exam-type system for the trade-skills (and virtually everything else for that matter), for as much as they practically can. Maybe they already intend on doing this? I'm just making my point in case. I would hate to see students being forced to conform to a monkey-see/monkey-do mode of learning that doesn't allow them to develop a natural comprehensive grip on what they're doing. Food for thought!?


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