January 2020 INSET - Assessment for Learning

(Re)introducing Assessment for Learning (DO)
Certainly a ‘buzz-phrase’ in the early 2000s, Assessment for Learning is still a powerful approach to teaching and learning that underpins a lot of the good practice that is seen around the Schools. A quick (re)introduction followed by some takeaway ideas for how to incorporate this into your classroom teaching.

Link to Materials

April 2018 INSET - Mark. Plan. Teach.

In this session, DO attempted to summarise some of the strategies described in Ross Morrison McGill’s book. There are three things that every teacher must do: mark work, plan lessons and teach students well. This book is packed with practical ideas that will help teachers refine these key elements of their profession.

Access the resources from this session here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U01ryPZL1qsi60Cjs1NZ9E5ViFJeLvm4

Make your marking count

Just a short article in the recent 'Insight' newsletter on marking which makes interesting reading. I've saved just this page from the newsletter and linked to it below.


Make your marking count article

Teaching and Learning Books

A number of books have recently been purchased by the school library which are quite influential in Teaching and Learning at the moment.

Do take a look at these:

Mark. Plan. Teach.

With teachers' workload at record levels and teacher recruitment and retention the number one issue in education, ideas that really work and will help teachers not only survive but thrive in the classroom are in demand. Every idea in Mark. Plan. Teach. can be implemented by all primary and secondary teachers at any stage of their career and will genuinely improve practice. The ideas have been tried and tested and are supported by evidence that explains why they work, including current educational research and psychological insights from Dr Tim O'Brien, leading psychologist and Visiting Fellow at UCL Institute of Education.

Mark. Plan. Teach. will enable all teachers to maximise the impact of their teaching and, in doing so, save time, reduce workload and take back control of the classroom.

Making Good Progress

Making Good Progress? is a research-informed examination of formative assessment practices that analyses the impact Assessment for Learning has had in our classrooms. Making Good Progress? outlines practical recommendations and support that Primary and Secondary teachers can follow in order to achieve the most effective classroom-based approach to ongoing assessment. 

Written by Daisy Christodoulou, Head of Assessment at Ark Academy, Making Good Progress? offers clear, up-to-date advice to help develop and extend best practice for any teacher assessing pupils in the wake of life beyond levels.

The Learning Rainforest

The Learning Rainforest captures different elements of our understanding and experience of the art and science of teaching. It is a celebration of great teaching and the intellectual and personal rewards that it brings. It’s aimed at all teachers; busy people working in complex environments with little time to spare. The core of the book is a guide to making teaching both effective and manageable using a three-part structure: establishing conditions; building knowledge; exploring possibilities. It provides an accessible summary of key contemporary evidence-based ideas about teaching, curriculum and assessment and the debates that all teachers should be engaging in. It’s packed with strategies for making great teaching attainable in the context of real schools.

What does this look like in the classroom?

In this thorough, enlightening and comprehensive book, Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson ask 18 of today's leading educational thinkers to distill the most up-to-date research into effective classroom practice in 10 of the most important areas of teaching. The result is a fascinating manual that will benefit every single teacher in every single school, in all four corners of the globe.

‘What Does This Look Like In The Classroom?’

This is a good book which attempts to bridge the gap between research and practice. In this blog post, some strategies from the book are described and how they went. In particular they focus on questioning, assessment and feedback.

Do take a look if you can:

http://www.teachergratitude.co.uk/2017/11/24/experiments-with-strategies-from-what-does-this-look-like-in-the-classroom/

Principles of Instruction

Often there can be ideas in Teaching and Learning which are not well-researched or evidenced which can be frustrating. I cam across this article from a few years ago which looks at principles of instructions which are evidenced as being effective. The summary is below if you are short on time, but the article is well worth a read.

https://headguruteacher.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/rosenshine-2.pdf

Four Pillars of Assessment : Value (4)

Assessments can have positive and negative effects, something known as the washback effect. The intended effects of assessment, such as pupils studying more, or high-quality feedback for learning, are known as positive washback. The unintended negative effects from assessment – such as unmanageable workload, teaching to the test, decreased time for other activities – are the negative washback effects.

In many ways, effective assessment is learning how to maximise positive washback and minimise negative washback. The main way in which we approach this is to create strong and explicit links between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Ultimately, pupils should be able to “experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information” (On Knowing: Essays forthe Left Hand by J S Bruner 1979); it is information derived from well-designed, purposeful, planned assessments which bridges the gap between teaching and learning.

Better information can inform better decisions, and better decisions can lead to better learning. And if that’s not the most valuable outcome, what is?

Read more at: https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-value/ 

Four Pillars of Assessment: Reliability (3)

Have you ever weighed yourself in the morning, and then again in the afternoon? If you did, you probably got slightly different readings each time. So how much do you weigh? Which is the correct reading (if either of them is indeed ‘correct’)? Most people answer this question with the obvious response (‘the lower one’), but at the heart of the issue is the reliability of the measurement: its accuracy and consistency over time, and context.

Reliability in the assessment of student learning is also about accuracy and consistency and, as a rule, the higher the stakes of the decision we want to make based on assessment information, the more accurate and consistent we want the information to be. High-stakes decisions need highly reliable information. As we saw with validity, a determination of how reliable an assessment needs to be is informed by its intended end uses.

Read more at: https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-reliability/

Four Pillars of Assessment: Validity (2)

Validity is perhaps the most commonly-used word in discussions about the quality of any assessment. While it’s used a lot, it is often misunderstood and can be very misleading.

Validity is a word which, in assessment, refers to two things:

• The ability of the assessment to test what it intends to measure;
• The ability of the assessment to provide information which is both valuable and appropriate for the intended purpose.

A common misconception about validity is that it is a property of an assessment, but in reality, there is no such thing as ‘a valid assessment’. However, there is such a thing as ‘an assessment which is valid for a specific purpose’: validity is all about the inferences you make based on the information generated.

Read more at https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-purpose-validity/

Four Pillars of Assessment: Purpose (1)

The first in a 4-part series of blogs here from Evidence Based Education on Assessment. They argue that to effectively use assessment in school, we need to be sure that the assessment itself fits the purpose that it is going to be used for. i.e., if we want to show progress on a particular topic, are our assessments robust enough to see if this has happened?

"What sorts of assessments do you use in schools? Whether they are external standardised assessments, home-grown tests, or past papers, is everyone clear about what their intended purpose is and how the information from them will be used? Are they fit for their intended purpose, or have they been warped over time – bent out of shape to fit a need in school? Or perhaps they’re done because … well… “we’ve always done them”!

Make sure the most is made of your time on assessment with appropriate, dependable measures to make appropriate, dependable claims and judgements."

https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-purpose/