Assessment for Learning - Workshop 1

Introduction

This year (2019/2020) our school's teaching and learning priorities were to further develop student agency and to ensure we promote challenge for all children. We decided that both of these aims could be enabled through the lens of Assessment for Learning and we chose Shirley Clarke's book 'Outstanding Formative Assessment' as our professional read for the year to help guide us through the process.  This took a hefty chunk out of our CPD budget as we ordered a copy of the book for each teacher but we felt the benefits of the investment in the long term would far out weigh the cost. In fact, I knew from researching into effective CPD that this model of learning, where collaboration and sharing exists and there is both informal and formal talk about pedagogy, would be far superior to sending a staff member or two on a course to later feedback their learnings in a staff meeting. Click here to read my blog on effective CPD. 

It was my responsibility to run the workshops throughout the year and to facilitate discussions where we shared our ideas, debated our beliefs, redesigned our definitions and formulated new understandings as well as make a commitment to putting our new learning into practice. I used the layout of the book to break down the learning into a serious of workshops and asked the staff to read the relevant chapter or chapters before attending each workshop. Workshop One took place in January.

Workshop One

Too often we are told what we need to do and how we should be doing it, but what about why? Why are we embarking on this change or being asked to take on yet another initiative. We need to start with why in order to connect with people's beliefs and passions. This fosters a higher level of trust and motivates us to act with a deeper understanding. This is all explained in much greater detail in Simon Sinek's book 'Start With Why'.

Therefore, I put this into practice at the beginning of the workshop when sharing the aims of our CPD on Assessment for Learning, starting with a quote from Shirley Clarke:

"when I look for successful teachers, I know I always see one linking characteristic: passion – passion about children’s learning, about moving forward, about learning as much about your teaching as you want for your children’s learning”

I then followed this up with some quotes from Helen Timperley who writes extensively on the subject of professional learning in schools:

“Like students, teachers need many opportunities to learn and apply new information in a trusting and challenging environment”

“Teachers working together and focussed on student outcomes can help them integrate new learning into their practice”

Finally, because I like doing things in threes, I shared a snippet of John Hattie's work on what has the greatest impact on pupil progress:

The graph illustrates some of Hattie's research. He suggests that anything above his measurement of 0.4 is significant enough to take notice. Providing formative evaluation and feedback are 2 of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement.

So now we knew why it was important for us to continue learning (thanks Shirley) and why doing this collaboratively is important, because we are more likely to put our learnings into practice (thanks Helen) and we knew why honing our skills in formative assessment is worth looking into (thanks John).

Next, I shared what we were covering in the workshop:

1.   How to develop the learning culture (Growth Mindset, Meta-Cognition, Grouping)?

2.   How to involve children at the planning stage?

3.   How do we get the children talking even more?

How to develop the learning culture?

We had already developed our understanding of a Growth Mindset and how to foster this. This was one of our focusses 2 years ago. Therefore we quickly recapped by listing all the ways we are promoting a Growth Mindset and then we compared these to what we read in Shirley Clarke's book. Here are some of things on the list:

•      Teaching about the brain 

•      Books about the brain 

•      Video clips about the brain

•      Quotes 

•      Displays e.g. YET posters

•      Learning journals

•      Praise language

•      Teacher-student relationships

•      Assemblies

•      Modelling

Then we discussed meta-cognition and different models to teach children how to be effective learners. We briefly looked at Guy Glaxton's Building Learning Power, Art Costa's Habits of Mind and the Early Years Foundation Stage's (EYFS) Characteristics for Learning. The EYFS model is what we are basing our current Reception to Year 2 initiative on so I asked the teachers who have been putting this into practice to share their experience so far. Click here for more details. 

Finally, for this section, we watched a video clip of Jo Boaler discussing grouping children, putting them in sets.

None of these concepts were new to us but it was worth while reminding ourselves the importance of establishing the right culture for effective learning and it was reassuring that this is supported by research. It also provided an opportunity to celebrate what we are doing well and note what we need to strengthen even further.

How to involve the children at the planning stage?

For this section we referenced the book and shared ideas on how we could facilitate this concept using the following headings:

1.   Finding out what they already know or can do

2.   For most subjects, some kind of immersion in the subject matter

3.   Presenting the main skills to be covered

4.   Asking for their ideas about how to learn those skills

5.   Involving parents 

Again, this all seemed rather straight forward but I gleaned from the discussions that it would be worth while coming back to number 1 and number 2 to look at these in more depth. One thing we certainly want to avoid is teaching the children what they already know. Apparently, a researcher discovered 60% of the children in his study already knew what they were being taught.

How do we get the children talking even more?

This section led itself to a discussion about 'talk partners'. This concept is already well established in many of our classrooms with a number of variations. It was important for us to discuss our thoughts on the practicalities around embedding the practice. As we were short of time, we did not have time to agree on any principles related to using talk partners but we did agree the importance of being aware of the balance between teacher talk and children talk. I think this will be another area worth revisiting at some point.


It is worth noting that I ensured the workshop involved as much discussion as possible as opposed to me just talking. I modelled a variety of visible learning strategies to facilitate the discussions and explained each one as I went. I also provided a template for staff to take notes. A few examples of the visible learning strategies are listed below.

• Diamond Ranking
• Headline
• Snowballing
• Three, Two, One, Bridge
• Connect, Extend, Challenge

Click here to see a version of the powerpoint presentation I used for this workshop.