The development stage
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Prepare assessment resources
The authoring of the assessment resources is basically done by the content expert and the instructional designer. We have a very highly skilled team with experience of developing two or three Toolboxes who work on the development of the resources.
Prepare assessor resources
We also provided a guide for teachers as to how they might interpret some of the different assessment tasks. A Toolbox situation can be really prescriptive, but teachers want flexibility as well. The Toolbox is just a tool and teachers want to be able to adapt it to the requirements of their own situations.
Trial, revise and modify tasks assessment tasks
We basically got the learner group and the lecturers doing the Security course at the college involved in validating some of the assessments. We would release chunks of the Toolbox to them, say try this out with your learners and would actually validate and change and modify as required. It was an ongoing process.
The testing was done mainly in-house in WA, which does mean we weren’t testing in other States where legislation is different. We had the live site available all the time and the ITAB was aware of it.
However, a problem with reference groups and ITABs is that there is an initial commitment to be involved, but when it actually comes to the point, there is very little time that they can afford to do this sort of thing. They rely very much on the developer to make sure everything is working.
Provide PD for teachers
As for the teachers who would be using the Toolbox, there wasn’t any face-to-face PD. This was built into the teacher’s guide. The guide provided a general overview of what the Toolbox was all about and a list of activities and how they related to the training package.
The Toolbox takes a problem-based, not a lockstep, approach. What we try to do is move teachers from being upfront teachers to facilitators. This change of teaching approach is one of the issues that faces us, that we have neglected. So we actually need to build in PD that transforms the culture of teaching to the culture of learning.
