Formative Assessment...some reflections

Yesterday, I spent the day facilitating two sessions on formative assessment and some implications for its use were raised.

The range of strategies used as part of formative assessment seem to have multiplied extensively and these provide teachers with the chance to offer students a wide variety of activities, all of which have the capacity to measure students' learning. Long gone are the days where students would RAG their learning in either a chart, through a fan or through pieces of coloured card attached to a key ring.

But, do all these strategies detract from what formative assessment should really be? It should be 'Assessment for Learning' - and by this term I do not mean the acronym AFL that is banded around schools. I mean it in the truest sense - 'assessment FOR learning'. It made me wonder: how many times have teachers believed they have covered AFL by using one of the strategies above and how many times have teachers adapted or revised their teaching and planning based on the results? And, I have certainly made this mistake in the past!

When using these strategies the word 'for' must be of prime importance as if the strategy has no impact on what goes on in the classroom and the teacher does not adapt their teaching, then it just becomes another form of 'assessment of learning'. For example, a learning pass becomes futile if at the end of the lesson a student hands it to the teacher and it is then placed in a pile or box somewhere to collect dust. If the teacher does not read the learning pass and act on the answers received then it becomes a meaningless activity.

Formative assessment should not be about gimmicks...it must be underpinned by an understanding of what it means in its purist form.

So for this week, I will be reflecting on my own use of AFL using the following:

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Time to try something new...

I have been teaching for a number of years and have followed many blogs on education and teaching, but feel that it is now time to try something new and blog myself.

Like many teachers, I feel my biggest barrier to my own personal professional development is time. Yet just like visiting the gym or baking my own bread, I guess the only answer is to make time for it and I hope that by forcing myself to blog once a week that this will make me a better teacher.

Earlier in the year, I went to the Sunday Times' Education Festival and Dylan Wiliam's (@dylanwiliam) words haunt me. He explained that many teachers make rapid improvements in the first few years of teaching but soon plateau and simply repeat the same things year in, year out. Furthermore, just because you have done it time and again, does not mean it is the best way or indeed correct. And, quite frankly, I do not want to become one of these teachers who plateau.

So here goes...

This week, I want to focus on getting my students to be engaged and begin learning before even entering the classroom. I have devised a simple (probably embarrassingly simple) poster which will be displayed on my classroom window which challenges students to replicate a sentence structure (with many thanks to Alan Peat for his brilliant book on exciting sentences) and to use some new vocabulary.

I often find that students struggle to create a wide variety of sentences and I hope that this will allow students to practise the structure and then be able to replicate it in their own work. I am forever indebted to Alan Peat (@alanpeat) and Geoff Barton (@RealGeoffBarton) for their expertise in teaching sentence structure and grammar.

Additionally, I am currently working to develop my Y8 students' vocabulary. Last week, I tried something which I termed 'vocabubuddies'. Every student had a partner, who was in another lesson with them that day, and they each had an ambitious word which they had not known before the lesson. They were given ten minutes in lesson to find out what the word meant and practise using it. I checked that they could all pronounce it accurately and were using it accurately in a sentence. The students then had to demonstrate they could use the word in another lesson and their partner checked they had done it. The following lesson they fed back and the class seemed to relish the opportunity. Many felt 'despondent' about equations, whilst others felt 'wretched' about doing PE in the cold, although one felt 'jovial' when he completed the cross country course. It was fantastic to hear them using their newly discovered, ambitious words with pride.

If anybody has any fabulous ideas on teaching vocabulary, they would be gratefully received.

Next week, I will be reflecting on how my SSP challenge went and will be trying something new....Again, suggestions are welcome!