12/24/09

CTE Video Production Standards & Competencies Committee...

On December 22, 2009, Steven Hoag and other members of the CSDE unit hosted several committees made up of volunteers from the Tech Ed teacher ranks. The mission of these Committees was simple...review the current Performance Standards & Competencies for several areas within Technology Education, then revise, remove, rewrite, reword the competencies one by one. The list of committees included (but not limited to) Automotive, Construction/Woodworking, Video Production, Engineering, CAD, and a couple others that I cannot recall off the top of my head.

I was part of the Video Production Committee along with three others. Mark H., Simsbury, Jeff G., Cheshire, Mary Ann (?, sorry!). How we came to be there...either volunteer or volunteered. In my case, Scott Shuler and The folks at Ed Connections in Litchfield forwarded my name to Steven Hoag. I have 25 years of professional media experience, much of it in broadcast, cable and corporate media. I've been teaching production four the past four years, and still remain active as a freelancer in the sports and entertainment television industry. We reviewed the list of 70 competencies in this concentration and whittled it down to 30. Many of the items were outdated, some misplaced. The goal was to create competencies that addressed the general knowledge and technical basics that students need to know coming out of a high school program, and avoided the specific and technical items that students will learn if they choose to move on to a post secondary communications program.

We were given a list of competencies compiled from existing materials, and organized by Steven Hoag and his committee, who admitted that they don't have specific knowledge in ANY of the tech ed concentrations. They are relying on the group of volunteers from each concentrator to review and revise, and rewrite where necessary, the PS&C's for all of Technology Education. Steven Hoag's proviso was that "we be able to test what we teach". This year's testing (NOCTE) will be the last year utilizing the 2007 list of competencies. The new lists, based on our work, will be implemented in 2011, with the goal of aligning technology education in a manner similar to other disciplines. It will also help us to make our PS&C's more relevant to what we are teaching today, and in the future. Technology Education has the highest enrollment of any elective, with business running second, in the state of CT. We will remain an elective, and therefore have to work to promote our programs and keep our enrollment. Steven mentioned, to everyone's delight, that the new Tech Ed consultant will be hired to oversee Tech and Vo Ag, and that no longer will this position be based on individual philosophy. His quote was "never again will you have a philosophy jammed down your throats". Testing for technology education will be on line, and allow for diagrams, illustrations, and visual questions.

I believe that what we did is an important step toward making technology education more relevant to the education process, and more understood among the rest of the disciplines. No longer will our areas of concentration be scattered about like buckshot from a 12 gauge. The process will work like this. We handed our revisions to Steven Hoag yesterday. They will send our competencies to the Psychometrics Company to generate test questions. We will review those questions sometime in the early summer, make suggestions, changes, or revisions to the questions as necessary. The questions will be sent back to the company for their revisions. We will then review them one more time to ensure that they are fair and within the scope of the competencies. We WILL NOT BE GETTING THE TEST QUESTIONS AHEAD OF TIME. We are reviewing the types of questions that the company will generate.

Stay tuned while we await the results of our revisions.

Ralph R.

Copied from the CTEA Forums 12/24/09

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12/24/09

Wood Technology DRAFT- PS&Cs Committee...

I scanned my copy of the PS&C Standards that were reviewed on 12/22/09. I had made some rough notes on my copy, but you can get a pretty good idea of what type of competencies were reviewed.

Some notes from the CTE workshop:

We decided as a group to completely separate Wood Tech from Construction Tech. There is no state money for a separate test on Construction.

Although no PS&Cs related to manufacturing (to include CNC operation) were part of the list, we did agree that the standards selected would be included in the curriculum of a wide variety of wood processing/ manufacturing type courses. The "wood" classes here at Manchester High cover a lot more than just these standards- we have a strong manufacturing strand as well as a multi material approach (wood and metal) which explores careers in a wide variety of production related areas. We capitalize on strong student interest in woodworking and their desire to engage in tactile problem solving to introduce students to a variety of conception, design, and execution activities.

The goal of our group was to increase the numbers of students taking the test while also ensuring that the test was actually covering what was being taught in the classes. In the past the test has included questions which seemed completely irrelevant to the courses we teach.

I hope someone out there finds this useful or at least a conversation starter.     Link to forum post 

Chris Casey
Manchester High School

Copied from The CTEA forums 12/24/09
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1/9/10

Common Core of Teaching Revision...

The Common Core of Teaching (CCT) standards are currently under revision.  We need your feedback to help us complete the revision process prior to presenting the new standards to the State Board of Education for adoption in 2010. 

Thank you for responding to the request to participate in our survey.  Your participation will be anonymous.  Please note that survey responses will be aggregated to inform the  CCT revision process and not connected to individual respondents.

The survey should take you approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Survey Link    http://ctlearning.net/cct/

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Gregory C. Kane

Cell 860 989-1426

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Please contact Everett if you find errors or have information to post.