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Malcolm Knox makes many excellent points about NAPLAN (“ Our kids aren’t failing NAPLAN. NAPLAN is failing our AutoCorrected kids ”, 16/8). One point that particularly stands out to me is the linking of the lack of relevance students place on NAPLAN to the disappearance of teacher-librarians.
As a secondary English teacher with over 20 years’ experience, I know well that for many of my students over the years, when I read the current novel aloud to them in class, for many of them it was one of the few times they had been read to outside of primary school. The relaxed and engaged effects of reading aloud on the students were consistently palpable. It was a frustration of my teaching career that there were no teacher-librarians in the school to extend this enjoyment and engagement, and that an ever-crowded curriculum demanded a pace that meant such reading aloud in class became a luxury.
My point is threefold; students treat NAPLAN with a grain of salt as it (and invariably the texts it includes) lacks tangible relevance to them; it does not capture any connection to enjoyment of literacy they may have experienced nor allow them to display this in an assessment; and, that systemic change is required to find a new junction between where .