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The fetish of marking

2015-05-10T14:49:34+01:00April 30th, 2015|assessment, myths|

Even the most valuable fetishes will turn into dusts and ashes! Mehmet Murat Ildan Fetishism hasn't always been about rubber and high heels. The word originates from the Portuguese feitico, meaning an object or charm of false power. When explorers first encountered native religions in West Africa, whatever talismans or totems the locals revered were dismissed as fetishes. A fetish has since come to mean an object or practice onto which power has been displaced from the original source. Marking seems a good example. At the most basic level, marking is a totemic symbol for the power of feedback. What we want is [...]

Back to School Part 5: Marking

2014-08-25T17:23:42+01:00August 24th, 2014|assessment, Featured|

This series of #backtoschool blogs summarises much of my thinking as it’s developed over the past few years and is aimed at new or recently qualified teachers. Each area has been distilled to 5 ‘top tips’ which I hope prove useful to anyone embarking on a career in teaching. That said, I’ll be delighted if they serve as handy reminders for colleagues somewhat longer in the tooth. Marking is a chore. Whether or not it has a measurable impact of pupils' outcomes is arguable; that's not the reason we do it. The reason we spend so much time marking is a combination of we're [...]

The AfL debate: does it matter who's right?

2014-04-28T23:35:37+01:00April 28th, 2014|assessment|

If you're not already aware of my critique and Dylan Wiliam's defence of formative assessment I do recommending getting up to speed before reading this post. Dylan's defence rests on the idea that although we can never be sure what's going on in a child's mind, "teaching will be better if the teacher bases their decisions about what to do next on a reasonably accurate model of the students’ thinking." He makes a rather interesting and surprising point: it doesn't matter that we can't know what's going on in our students' minds because his "definition of formative assessment does not require that the inferences we make [...]

Dylan Wiliam's defence of formative assessment

2014-04-25T09:03:19+01:00April 25th, 2014|assessment|

Back in March I wrote a post called Why AfL might be wrong, and what to do about it based, largely, on Dylan Wiliam's book Embedded Formative Assessment (If you haven't already read it, I encourage you to do so as many of the common misconceptions about AfL are specifically addressed). I'm pleased to report that Dylan has taken time out of his hectic schedule to comment on the post and defend the essentials of formative assessment. What follows is, in its entirety, the comment left on the original post. In his post on “Why AfL might be wrong, and what to [...]

Does it do what it's supposed to? Assessing the assessment

2014-04-06T06:22:54+01:00April 6th, 2014|assessment, English|

In response to a request for constructive criticism of the English assessment model I helped design, Michael Tidd got in touch to query whether it met his 7 questions you should ask about any new ‘post-levels’ assessment scheme. For the record, these questions are: Can it be shared with students? Is it manageable and useful for teachers? Will it identify where students are falling behind soon enough? Will it help shape curriculum and teaching? Will it provide information that can be shared with parents? Will it help to track progress across the key stage? Does it avoid making meaningless sub-divisions? My initial response [...]

One step beyond – assessing what we value

2014-09-01T09:31:17+01:00April 5th, 2014|assessment, English|

Hey you, don't teach that. Teach this! Do we always teach what we value? it seems to me that when push comes to shove, we end up teaching what is assessed. The urgency of accountability results, inexorably, in teaching to the test. And this, sadly, ends up with teachers teaching stuff that they don't particularly value. I'm not in any way a mathematician, but one of the problems with maths at GCSE is that the knowledge students are taught is atomised: they are rarely shown the links and connections between, say, vectors and averages. Why not? Because the examination doesn't require them [...]

Getting feedback right Part 4: How can we increase pupils’ aspiration?

2015-07-08T20:26:01+01:00April 2nd, 2014|assessment, learning|

You may remember that over the past few weeks I've been trying to refine my thinking about how we can improve the way we give feedback. If you haven't already read the previous instalments, you might find it helpful to go over  Part 1 (which discusses the different purposes for giving feedback) Part 2 (which looks at how to increase pupils’ understanding) and Part 3 (which considers how to get pupils to expend greater effort.) In this post I want to explore how feedback can be used to encourage pupils to aim higher, want more and go beyond their current performance. Many high achieving pupils [...]

Getting feedback right Part 3: How can we increase pupils' effort?

2014-03-19T13:44:26+00:00March 19th, 2014|assessment|

I started to explore how we might make feedback more meaningful a few weeks back but then got sidetracked. If you haven't already looked at them, it might be worth spending a few moments on Part 1 (which discusses the different purposes for giving feedback) and Part 2 (which looks at how to increase pupils' understanding) before reading any further. Right. Still with me? Once we can be reasonably sure that pupils understand how to improve, our next step is to check that they can actually be bothered. It's become something of a cliché to say that success depends on hard [...]

Getting feedback right Part 2: How do we provide clarity?

2016-05-26T23:50:49+01:00March 5th, 2014|assessment|

As discussed in yesterday's post, I am currently working on the assumption that there are only 3 meaningful purposes of feedback: To provide clarity To increase pupils' effort To increase pupils' aspiration I had planned to discuss how we might go about giving each of these kinds of feedback in one post, but on reflection it seems sensible to divide the how of giving feedback into 3 separate posts which will discuss each process in detail. So, first off is providing clarity. It ought to go without saying that if pupils aren't clear about how to improve, they're unlikely to get [...]

Getting feedback right Part 1 – Why do we give it?

2014-04-02T01:34:07+01:00March 4th, 2014|assessment|

It's become a truism that feedback is the most important activity that teachers engage in. Feedback, we are repeatedly told, is tremendously powerful and therefore teachers must do more of it. Certainly Hattie, the Sutton Trust and the EEF bandy about impressive effect sizes, but the evidence of flipping through a pupil's exercise book suggests that the vast majority of what teachers write is ignored or misunderstood. Teachers' feedback can certainly have a huge impact but it's a mistake to believe that this impact is always positive. I written in detail about marking and the power of Directed Improvement Reflection Time. I've  also considered [...]

AfL: cargo cult teaching?

2015-12-10T13:53:58+00:00August 31st, 2013|assessment, Featured, learning|

OK, so here's a quick summary of the story so far: A few days ago I suggested in a blog post that maybe AfL 'wasn't all that'. Lots of lovely people kindly got in touch to point out that I clearly hadn't got a clue what AfL actually was, and then Gordon Baillie wrote a really rather good response in defence of AfL on his blog. Right? Right. At this point I'm going to tediously catalogue what I know about AfL so no one's confused about what I might and might not be suggesting. Here's a collection of posts I've written on feedback [...]

Chasing our tails – is AfL all it's cracked up to be?

2013-08-29T21:17:40+01:00August 29th, 2013|assessment, learning, myths|

Is it blasphemous to doubt the efficacy of AfL? While purists might argue that it's 'just good teaching', we teach in a world where formative assessment has become dogma and where feedback is king. (Don't worry, I'm not about to start upsetting the feedback applecart although there are occasions when pupils can benefit from it being reduced.) But AfL as a 'thing'? I'm not just talking about some of the nonsense that gets spouted about lolly sticks and traffic lights, I'm questioning the entire edifice. Is assessment for learning really all it's cracked up to be, or is it just me? You [...]

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