3 Assessment practice in your school
Students need to be supported to develop these assessments for learning skills. To do this, school leaders and teachers must:
- understand the principles of assessment for learning
- know how these skills might be developed through classroom activities, and how these activities might provide opportunities for feedback to students and help to plan teaching and learning in a more effective manner.
Before implementing change in assessment in a school, it is always necessary to understand what is currently happening and how teachers view assessment. The next activity aims to help you find out what kind of assessment is happening in your school’s lessons so that you can enable teachers to adopt creative strategies for assessing in class.
Activity 2: Looking at assessment practice in your school
Ask a maximum of five teachers to describe one assessment task that they have used that week. Ask them what they learnt from the assessment about the students and what the students learnt from it.
In finding out the extent to which formative assessment is being used, you may want to probe them for examples of where they have given immediate assessment feedback to students or changed the learning task in order to help students improve their learning. This will help you determine whether your teachers are using formative assessment without being conscious of it.
Once you have had these conversations, answer the following questions, keeping a note of the answers in your Learning Diary:
- What types of assessment seems to be most common?
- Is there evidence of formative assessment happening? If so, give examples.
- Do the teachers express a clear desire for students to learn from assessment feedback? In other words, do they understand the role of assessment for learning as opposed to assessment of learning?
- How could you suggest changing the purpose or use of the assessments they discussed with you to become formative?
Discussion
Depending on the background of the teachers in your school and the way the curriculum has been interpreted by the staff, there may be a greater emphasis on one sort of assessment than the other. You also need to be aware that their answers will reflect to some extent what they think you expect from them.
You may discover that there is some excellent practice already in place in certain parts of the curriculum that you can use as an example of good practice. You might like to follow up this activity with a staff meeting where you emphasise the learning possibilities from assessment and highlight the appropriate use of formative assessment that you have discovered. You may also decide to focus on assessment in your walks around the school to help you identify areas of good practice and support staff who need additional help.
You may want to work closely with small groups of teachers to help them establish regular formative assessment opportunities.
Involve the students
The perspective of the staff and their perspectives on assessment are very important. However, they are only one part of the process. Fundamental to the successful implementation of formative assessment in a school are two questions:
- Are teachers getting the information they need from the assessment opportunities in order to help students learn effectively?
- Are students getting the feedback they need in order to learn effectively and develop their abilities?
It is vital that time is put aside to ask students about their experiences of formative assessment and whether they can suggest how the assessments and the feedback can be improved. Involving students should ideally be embedded in each assessment opportunity, so that teachers can understand what the students have gained from the assessment and jointly identify the next steps needed in their learning. In this way, assessment becomes about the individual, also known as differentiated assessment. You may find Resource 2, ‘Monitoring and giving feedback’, useful to share with your team.
2 Using formative and summative assessment in the classroom