Tag Archive for aifl

Second thoughts

27/03/2011 active learning, assessment, cfe, change, Featured, MEd, reflection No comments

In a recent post I outlined my proposal for the final part of my MEd. In it I provided a rationale for my intention to involve pupils in planning learning in order to increase their engagement and described the steps I intended to carry out to achieve this. However, as I’ve mentioned – I’ll be going to a new school pretty soon. So, should I continue with my plans?

My initial thought was that I would…and the school was very supportive of this, but that Cramlington visit has really begun to change my mind. The school is really going for implementing the accelerated learning cycle and learn2learn and I’ve become concerned that whilst my proposal is complimentary to these developments, it is coming from a different angle and could well become a bit of a ‘bolt-on’ for anyone I managed to convince to become involved.

So, what am I going to do? I’ve decided that I need to shift the emphasis of the intervention to be much more aligned to the direction of the school and the needs (and workload) of the staff. So I’m considering instead coming from the perspective of evaluating the impact of the learning cycle on learning. This could be in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills development, but also in terms of pupil involvement and engagement.

I’m even finding some really useful literature on this, such as Geoff Petty, Black et. al. and Paul Rose. Through this reading I’m becoming increasingly convinced that my intervention could end up becoming much enhanced by this change by adding a much greater depth to the learning process, and therefore the enquiry.

Having said all that, it is pretty daunting to make such a fundamental change after writing and submitting a 5000 word proposal…but I have to respond to the needs of my new school…

Boxing us in?

06/02/2011 assessment, cfe, change 3 comments

I love a good spreadsheet. I think my addiction began when I worked briefly at Victoria Quay after I graduated on the Scottish Environment Statistics Online database. It was then that I began to discover some of the powerful features of excel…such as VLOOKUP…amazing!

Once I was teaching I made every possible use of the features available in excel, and I’ll even admit to enjoying spending more time than I should’ve getting my spreadsheets all set up at the start of each session for my new classes. But now I’m beginning to think the unthinkable…

The reason for this is all the work I’m doing at the minute on Assessment in Curriculum for Excellence. Some of the definitions supplied in Building the Curriculum 5 surrounding Developing, Consolidating and Secure and how these relate to Breadth, Challenge and Application are challenging and require a change in mindset.

If, once I’m back in the classroom, I am going to record how much and how well my students are learning against these sorts of criteria…how on earth am I going to achieve this in excel? The conclusion I’m coming to is, I won’t.

To get this sort of information into excel I’m going to have to convert this rich and complex language into very crude numbers, letters or colours. This will not even serve much purpose when it comes to writing reports as the records will be so crude that they will not provide much information to assist me in reaching a judgement. And worse, there’s a chance that this approach to recording assessment could actually limit my approaches to learning and teaching!

So then, if excel is not appropriate for the task, why would I use it? I don’t know – because I always have perhaps? That’s not a good enough reason.

I believe that learning, and therefore assessment, is rich and complex and so I want to try to capture this complexity and free myself from the constraints of excel. I think what I’m going to try to do is have a hard-backed A4 notebook with a few pages for each class and a page for each student and use this to record progress.

For someone like me, this seems a bit like a backwards step – but perhaps it’s necessary…

Some thoughts on formative assessment

30/01/2011 active learning, assessment, cfe, change, Featured, learning communities, reflection 2 comments

Are your traffic lights doing anything? What happens after your two stars and a wish? Do your pupils listen to their peers?

For some time now I’ve been concerned by the frequent utterance of the phrase “AifL is embedded”. There is often a perception that schools and teachers did all that work sharing formative assessment techniques as part of the AifL programme, and now we’re onto CfE so all is fine. I’ve often struggled to articulate my concerns with this point of view…but I’m clear that I have not fully embedded all aspects of the AifL triangle into my practice and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I’ve also demonstrated in the past that BtC5 raises the bar in terms of expectations of pupil involvement in assessment.

A couple of things recently have really helped clarify my thoughts on this. Firstly, I’m very lucky to be working with Myra Young to develop some Assessment & Moderation Circles with Secondary Teachers in East Lothian. She has a great way of describing the difference between formative assessment and formative assessment techniques. For example, if your pupils peer assess each others work with traffic lights then while this has the potential to be formative it only becomes formative if the recipient of the feedback does something with it. They need to make a change and learn from it. Otherwise you have a multicoloured piece of peer summative assessment. Likewise, if you give the pupils a prelim examination and then provide an opportunity to reflect on this and improve as a result – then this is formative assessment.

I think perhaps we have too often allowed the techniques to become synonymous with ‘formative assessment’ and we’ve forgotten that doing the techniques isn’t enough – the pupils need to learn from them.

This weekend, I’ve also discovered a fantastic Research Briefing from the TLRP programme which addresses this issue also. In it they state:

Assessment for Learning helps teachers promote learning how to learn in ways which are in line with their own values, and reduces excessive performance orientation. But it is difficult to shift from reliance on specific techniques to practices based on deep principles.

Advice on Assessment for Learning techniques is useful to teachers in the short term. But progressive professional development requires teachers to re-evaluate their beliefs about learning, the way they structure tasks, and the nature of their classroom roles and relationships.

From TLRP RB17: Learning how to learn – in classrooms, schools and networks

That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. AifL provided many of us with the techniques, but CfE is asking us to take the next step to deeper principles. How do we do this? The Research Briefing suggests:

Classroom-focused inquiry by teachers is a key condition for promoting learner autonomy.

Sound familiar?

ePLC

26/09/2010 cfe, change, learning communities, reflection, TeachMeet 6 comments

I’ve had this idea growing since TeachMeet the other night when I facilitated one of the World Cafe discussions around the following question.

How do we genuinely involve pupils in their learning and assessment?

You can see the outcomes of the discussion here.

The reason I asked this question is that I think that developing this aspect of our practice as teachers, particularly in the Secondary context, is a major challenge and the key to successfully implementing Curriculum for Excellence. I was very struck by the animated and rich discussion which occurred at TeachMeet…it would appear that I am not alone in pondering this question. In fact, I know of many others from twitter & blogs who have been not only considering this – but trying out ways to address this issue.

As well as giving some thought to this, I’m also currently doing a lot of reading around the notion of Collaborative Professional Enquiry / Collaborative Professional Learning / Professional Learning Communities / Group Action Research. This is primarily to aid me in my work towards my CTeach MEd which I’ve recently returned to after a year out.

So the idea that has arisen from these thought processes is –

Can we create an ePLC [electronic Professional Learning Community] to work together to develop our knowledge of this key issue?

I’m sure many would argue that many informal professional learning communities of sorts already exist through twitter and the blogosphere. But what I’m talking about here is setting up a much more formal group of 5/6 teachers to carry out a piece of collaborative professional enquiry. This could be around something like the following question?

What impact does involving pupils in planning their learning and assessment have?

I have a bit of a problem at the minute in that I don’t have a class just now, but I would be happy to facilitate the community – i.e. arrange meetings, share readings, administer file sharing, contribute to discussions etc.

What do you think? This may well be happening already elsewhere, but if so I haven’t encountered it. It could take our electronic professional interactions to a new level…? Can you imagine a more exciting form of CPD?

How We Learn

11/06/2010 active learning, assessment, Featured 2 comments

Having the opportunity to witness some fantastic primary teaching practice has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my role this year. Pupils in some primaries are given much more responsibility for their learning than I’ve ever dreamed of relinquishing with my pupils. It scared me to think how I might have been deskilling the young people in my classes.

I wondered how I could share this experience with my Secondary colleagues and asked some primaries if they would mind filming their practice. Primary 3 at Stoneyhill Primary took up the challenge. You can view the outcome below…

Wow.

The CfE Priority…?

10/02/2010 active learning, assessment 2 comments

Sometime ago I was rather confused about what Curriculum for Excellence would mean for me and my pupils. Due to a lack of information around I decided to delve into the documentation myself and try to identify the essence of CfE. I wanted to pin down a priority which I could take on board and apply in my lessons. After much reading I began to realise that involving pupils more so in the learning and assessment process was key to many of the other aspects of CfE. A key quote from BtC3 (page 26) which reflects this is:

“Planning should encourage participation by, as well as being responsive to, the learner, who can and should influence and contribute to the process.”

I summarised my attempts to put this into practice in a blog post and as an essay for the CT programme. I also presented this work at TeachMeet SLF09.

Today I attended a BtC5 launch seminar which involved an excellent workshop task. Within our group of ten we each had a section of the document to read and we had to identify what was different from current practice. I was reading pages 18 to 22 and picked out the following statements:

  • assessment process need to promote learner engagement
  • assessment practices should be seen from the perspective of the learner
  • learners should be engaged in all aspects of assessment processes
  • and be afforded an element of choice and personalisation in showing that they have achieved the intended outcomes
  • learners need…feedback…about how well and how much they have learned
  • approaches to assessment that enable learners to say “I can show that I can…” will fully involve them
  • children and young people can develop their confidence through thinking about and reflecting on their own learning
  • including through personal learning planning
  • developing their skills in self and peer assessment
  • learners will build confidence and take ownership for managing their own learning
  • by focusing on the processes of learning
  • children and young people should agree learning goals and should record them in ways that are meaningful and relevant
  • staff should use assessment information from a wide range of sources
  • the learner, parents and other staff…all can contribute…to setting targets for learning

Now these are clearly not going to be absent from the practice of all teachers in all schools, but these are what I felt will be new and challenging for many Secondary teachers. Perhaps this list is more a reflection of my own shortcomings as a teacher? However, I think you would probably agree that once again the theme here is involving pupils in the process.

I believe that the most significant shift for teachers and pupils in the Secondary school is the move to involve pupils in the learning process to a greater extent. This means giving pupils the opportunity to contribute to planning the lessons and how they are going to be assessed. This therefore means that the lessons and assessments can not be planned in detail before the piece of learning commences. We, as Secondary teachers, tend not to be very comfortable with this.

This, however, is fundamental to this entire of business of curricular change. We need to foster confident and successful learners who can contribute effectively to society. How can we do this if we continue to pre-plan their learning and spoon feed them it? If we can successfully crack this issue, I believe that the rest of CfE will slot into place a lot more easily.

Some Secondary teachers may not be comfortable giving up their current planning system to involve the pupils in the process and wont be convinced by the argument I’m attempting to string together here. To these teachers I would like to point out two things. Firstly, as our Primary colleagues get to grips with this way of thinking we’re going to find that our S1 pupils are going to be less and less tolerant of having their learning pre-planned for them. And finally, what are you going to say to HMIE when they come to visit and they ask the pupils in your class how much involvement they have had in planning their learning and assessment and they reply “none”?

Photo from woodleywonderworks