Teacher Leadership Pt.1: M4_FA 6-Teacher Moderations

As per discussion,

"My experience has been very abundant in teacher moderation. My first experience in regards to teacher moderation goes back to my experience teaching in Northern China (2014-2015), the offshore school was a BC Curriculum abiding institution. At that time there was a strong presence of the standardised provincial testing that was uniformly mandatory to all BC schools.

In preparation, our department head at that time made a point of developing the idea of "cross-grading" or "teacher moderation" very early on (especially in regards to my career). I am thankful for such experience because since then, I have hosted and participated in numerous moderation experiences. I had never met a teacher unwilling to participate until last year. 

The colleague and I were teaching the same course and it was a high stakes course. The course being delivered was split into an online section (as the teacher was online) and the other sections were mine (in class). There was a "discrepancy in marks" and the administration was taking a lot of heat from parents as students in the online section who were "seemingly not as strong" as the other students in my sections, were receiving lower grades for (what I thought was the same work). Well, the first easy fix of that situation was to have the principal meet with both myself and the online teacher to discuss what we thought about the situation in which "stronger and less capable students" were being described, which segues into the potential reasons that cause a "discrepancy".  Before this meeting, my colleague and I met together online to discuss what might have happened and it came up (nonchalantly) that there was a different assignment and rubric used for the first unit's project, and likewise for the second unit. Long story short, we realigned our understandings of the tasks and expectations of the assignment's difficulty levels. Thus in this meeting, we assured the principal that we were sorted out and that this would not create any further issues.

Nearly a month later, students approached me inquiring on assignments as one section was given a  "seemingly" more difficult task than my own. At this point, I became irritated to say the least, but again patiently participated in a moderation meeting between my colleague and I. The moderation led to a reveal in changes made to a few of the prior assignments and assessment tools to accommodate learners who were struggling with the content. Again, we worked it out and got organized, with some dissatisfaction on both ends as it was seeming that the only alignment that could be arranged were essay based assessments. For obvious reasons this is not an ideal situation for students or teachers but it was the only area we could seem to make work for both online and in class sections without arbitrary changes to different aspects of the course.

The moderation was successful as it eliminated the warrant for a microscopic dissection of our markbooks, but realistically there were still some aspects of the arrangement that discontent was met, but it was mutually understood at the purpose and functionality at that time.

Since then, the course has been offered only onsite. The courses have since been scheduled for all cases as either online only or onsite only. The struggle to have one section onsite and one online complicates the expectations of the students and parents far too greatly (with great amount of pressure on both teachers in different sections to align)."