Case Study - The Mushroom Project

Evaluation of the effectiveness of the program

Collect evidence from assessment process for summative assessment

Summative assessments for those students who have taken part in the Mushroom Project are not as yet required as those students have not completed their hours. However the process will be as follows.

The folio of work gathered during the project time will be put together with other work that these students have completed in other aspects of their course. Each student will then discuss with the tutor/s which pieces of work or tasks display that Indicators of Competence have been achieved.

Assessment task cover sheets will provide information about the selected tasks and a Proforma entitled ‘Student Profile within each Aspect of Communication” will be include to summarise the student’s performance. (See Appendix 3 for Student Profile partially completed and comments that refer to one student’s progress so far. This has been filled in for the purposes of this article and would not generally be filled in until the student has completed the course of study. Therefore a comment like ‘Developing’ appears in this profile only to indicate a level which is at present being achieved. In a final Student Profile statement it would not appear because the students highest level of achievement would be entered, not a level that was developing.)

Reporting

At the time of writing, reports for NRS students who have worked on the mushroom farm are not as yet required to be sent since the students have not completed their hours. DEST requires that a report is sent on a standard Proforma that indicates where students have gained increases in whole levels of reading, writing, oral communication, numeracy or learning strategies or in particular indicators of competence within the macro skills.

Reflect on the process

Perhaps the process is best reflected upon as a modified SWOB: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities to Improve and Barriers.

Strengths: The process was able to be adapted to a spontaneous idea ie the birth of a mushroom farm. The activities of the mushroom farm were easily NRSed, which means that those who took part could be credited with many of the Indicators of Competence because they were able to display many of the Features and Performance Strategies. Therefore this is a viable alternative for those students who have difficulty coping with a return to ‘school’ situation.

Weaknesses: As yet the Portfolio System is not fully developed. Not all students had the opportunity to take part in the process.

Opportunities to Improve: The most important improvement will be the full introduction of the Portfolio system where students will have a large input into the designing of tasks and will be able to see this as an opportunity to showcase their abilities. It will, I believe change the thinking from assessment to showcasing which will give final pieces of work a greater legitimacy as these pieces will represent the students’ work for display far beyond the ‘school’ sphere ie out into the ‘real’ world.

Barriers to improvement: Time to fully develop the Portfolio with its adjacent questions about when this consultation can happen ie in class time or in teachers’ time.

Reflect on the program

The project has had its share of gliches and its share of unexpectedly great outcomes for certain individuals. The gliches have been related to the decision to base this particular educational experiences on a crop. The main difficulty was the timing of the crop so that we had at least a few weeks of sales before the end of the program for 1999. Our mushies took longer to appear than expected so there was a down time between mushroom arrival and first cropping that was an initial anticlimax. Then when they did appear, we had a 13 kilo crop that appeared over a weekend which needed to be dealt with very promptly. Our initial tidy sequenced plan had to be drastically modified to deal with our glut and the result was a flurry of activity that was not neat and orderly but produced some great learning nevertheless. The team effort that enabled the successful picking, weighing, bagging, labelling and sale of 30 bags of beautiful mushrooms was fantastic. Several leaders and a core team of workers emerged to own the project and it subsequently ran as a self sufficient enterprise for about four weeks until the end of term with students maintaining, recording and marketing the product in house. The student and staff consensus is that we should continue the enterprise again next year and expand it!

Because of the shorter time frame, only some of the tasks were completed but the potential for effective learning is enormous. For example the question of packaging and labelling was immensely interesting and led to a very simple solution. Several students were sent shopping to bring back some examples of fresh produce packaging of small items such as cherry tomatoes and mushrooms. The ensuing discussion ranged over environmental issues (ie the use of plastic) shelf life, the contents of labels and eventually the choice of wording for our label and our choice of the humble brown paper bag over a free supply of plastic containers. All students during that discussion would easily have been credited with NRS Oral communication 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8

Similarly, on another occasion a small group of the mushroom team took over the blackboard in a spare room and were explaining to one of their members who was having difficulty with grams and kilograms how the numerous 250g bags of mushrooms they had just picked translated into kilos. The learning was very NRSable but more importantly it great learning: it was energetic, spontaneous and incredibly effective!