Reporting (and another new report format)

Mid-year and end-of-year reports are the worst part of my teaching year.  Written reports are all about how we communicate information about each student to their family and whanau. But there are times when I wonder how valuable these written reports are to parents...or are they just more of a mystery? 

Regardless of how I personally feel about them...they still have to be done.  I can’t say my school hasn’t tried to make them more meaningful and less mysterious...  But a miss is as good as a mile. I’m not sure that our parents really understand them. And this is probably due to the fact that teachers are not great at writing them.

I spend a great deal of time agonising over writing my reports.  Trying to succinctly say what I tried to teach a child over six months is no easy task.  Trying to write it in ordinary language without parents requiring a B’Ed to understand can be a mission in and of itself.  So after a number of years of trying to word the student’s learning to match what they learned and how I teach means that I have probably amassed 150 different versions of reports where I finally felt like said what I intended them to say - and it only took 5 years!

And then one day you sit in a meeting to find out that the reporting content will change for the fourth time in ten years.  (It is times like these I have, on occasion, spent an entire staff meeting flicking through the Trade Me wanted positions.)

After several weeks of waiting for some direction, I had to come up with a cunning plan to create a bank of sentences that will form my reports.  The problem that I currently see in the online reporting business is there are not enough choices and the reports all start sounding the same for  some very different kids and their unique learning styles.

So I created a basic outline of the narrative I wanted to communicate with the parents.  Then I went on the hunt for the words to help me capture the essence of what I was trying to accomplish in class.  From there I wrote maybe 10 or 15 different ideas about the topic of learning. And then as I wrote the report of each student I would refer to these notes to help me write.

This year we wrote a values based report on the St Mary’s School values.  A completely different perspective after having to report against national standards. I would prefer a more consistent approach to give the parents at St Mary's a more consistent idea of the learning that is happening in all senior classes.

I am now confronted with having to write another set of reports....using the same approach. I worry that the way I presented and assessed learning in my class means that I haven't given myself or my students a good idea of what the reports will be reflecting. It is like my teaching style and what I am being asked to report on are in two different places.