Welcome to our first blog post in which we are supporting the Term 6 whole school CPD focus on Assessment. As a result of the extensive curriculum reviews that occurred in Term 5, how we assess our students has emerged as a key priority for the vast majority of subject areas. The stumbling blocks range from the development of strategies to formatively assess, the mine field of tracking and monitoring the outcomes from these day to day tools, the query of how these feed into our planning and wider summative assessments and as a school ensuring that students are set progressively more challenging assessments that allow for memory retrieval of our core knowledge.
During Term 5, Middle Leaders were asked to engage in coaching conversations based on Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli's recent publication 'Teaching WalkThru's' (it is very worthwhile watching their introduction to the guide if you do not have a copy of the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEmkoWw-l7o). Emerging from these discussions was the realisation that whilst we have made great strides with ensuring our curriculums are knowledge rich and culturally broad, as a cohort we are looking for further CPD to ensure our assessments reflect this ethos too.
As a result, the T&L team have designed our whole school CPD this term to focus on the paradigm shift towards 'authentic learning-focused formative assessment'. So whilst we are all approaching this from varying levels of experience and expertise, it is important we all refresh our own understanding of what is formative assessment? Dylan Wiliam states that 'the vital role of ‘minute by minute’ formative assessment where teachers
check for understanding, adjust their teaching and continually seek to deepen
students’ understanding and knowledge' be at the heart of all assessment shifts'. In a nutshell it's in the moment, relies on tight feedback loops and leads to specific actions.
Daisy Christodoulou’s Making Good Progress (another great read) clearly states that genuine formative assessment is high frequency, low-stakes, narrowly focused testing with raw marks that is owned only by a teacher and their students but that also feeds directly back into the teaching and learning process. Whilst this is all very clear and at the heart of our recent shifts in practice at Mangotsfield, how do we plan for formative assessment opportunities at this curriculum planning stage? With this in mind, the main focus of this post is to share specific strategies that we either have or could use at Mangotsfield School. We are hoping this comprehensive mix of ideas will ensure that all subjects can embed a range of formative assessment strategies into their new KS3 curriculums, with clear signposting of where they will occur, what they will be assessing and how.
Mangotsfield Schools Top Ten Formative Assessment Strategies:
1. Kagan Structures - cooperative learning not only promotes questioning and discussion opportunities, but also facilitates opportunities to gather 'data' on student progress. Take 'All write round robin' where students are all asked to write answers to questions in rotation, using different coloured pens. It'll soon become apparent which students have a grasp of the new learning with a simple glance. All Stand Consensus or Numbered Heads Together are also useful here as you observe each groups discussions, who dominates and shows confidence and who withdraws so may require further support or checking.
2. Hinge Questioning - for example a multiple choice question which provides an immediate check of students understanding. You can ask them to use mini whiteboards or fist of five (holding up a specific number of fingers referrring to their choice of answer), and ensuring you do not move on until a specific level of understanding is demonstrated.
3. Exit Tickets - simply put, before students are permitted to leave a lesson they are posed a question. They must record their answer to this on a piece of paper or card and hand it in as they leave. This provides the all important , instant recognition of student learning or misconception for the teacher.
4. Exit Slips/Polls - not be confused with Exit Tickets, these focus more on students reflections of their learning. These can be pre-printed with sentence starters such as 'Today I fully understood....' 'However, one part I was stuck on was....' OR 'Today I learned for the first time....', so 'Next time I wish to explore....'. These can even be dressed up as tweets, see the image opposite.
5. Low-stakes quizzes - starting or ending the lesson with five quick fire questions, multiple choice or a key word checkers. The joy of this is that they can focus on new learning from that day, that week, month or even as retrieval practice from previous topics or even years. Endless opportunities!
6. Guided Reading - These are often used alongside a piece of text or knowledge and involve ten pre-written questions that students must initially answer from memory after reading the text, before revisiting the text and self assessing or adjusting their answers in a different colour.
7. Retrieval Grids - Please refer to previous blog posts on Retrieval Practice for these ideas. Similar to knowledge checkers, you can devise ten questions that ask students to retrieve knowledge from different time periods of their learning, awarding more points for the knowledge retrieved from longer ago. See our Geography example.
8. 'I can'... - removing the 'I can't' from our classrooms and focusing on what students can do is not only informative but promotes resilience. This works well with key words and vocab - ask students to list five key words they CAN define in their books, including the meanings, selecting from a word bank displayed on the board. This means no student is sat there unable to fill in spaces on a glossary that you have prepared for them, they take ownership and feel success. You can then observe who is more confident with the Tier 3 subject specific vocabulary, or any misconceptions.
9. Questioning - Cold Calling, Say Again or Say It Better and No Opt Out are all excellent choices here (https://my.chartered.college/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/8.-Say-It-Again-Better.pdf). Please see earlier blog posts on Questionning for further information on these ideas.
10. Google Classrooms - I've left this one till last as there will be more to come on this amazing tool in the coming weeks. We can set quizzes, multiple choice, exit polls and so much more using Google Classrooms, allowing us to store our formative findings more centrally and allow for department discussions or moderation. Please see our other post on how to get started with GoogleClassrooms, we all need to start exploring its potential.
For further reading there are multiple blog posts but my top two to recommend are:
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