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ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING

 

Situation

As you’ve discovered, making your assessments nearer to your pupils’ learning is very powerful. But don’t you find that even then it’s sometimes too late? What if you could get nearer still to your pupils’ learning? That way you’d avoid…

  • Pupils making repeated mistakes because core misunderstandings aren’t clarified
  • Addressing the results of learning and not the mechanism that forms it
  • Passivity in your pupils as they increasingly rely on your coaching assessments to produce their work
  • Peer and self–assessment dominated by the search for tips to correct responses
  • Lost opportunities to describe and model the whole learning process right from the initial stages

 

Solution 

Using visual tools allows you to work more upstream than other approaches. They allow you to make real–time assessments in real– time learning. How? By getting to the source of your pupils’ understanding. And by directly influencing the formation of your pupils’ concepts and understanding. In this way, you move from assessment for learning into the next stage…assessment–as–learning.

 

Benefits 

When visual tools are incorporated into every teacher’s assessment tool box, and used throughout the curriculum, you can expect to see:

  • - Sharper focused questions about pupils’ thinking
  • - Earlier and more useful feedback on pupils’ formative understanding
  • - Direct challenges to pupils’ ideas via a visual tool that avoid upsetting personal sensitivities
  • - More talk about the learning process as a whole
  • - More explicit modeling of thinking processes by teachers
  • - Less impulsive responses by pupils as they work through the visual tool methods
  • - Pupils accurately reporting where they’re stuck in the learning process
  • - Ongoing self monitoring by pupils as they make repeated self assessments in action
  • - Productive discussion of learning problems among peers

 

Case Studies/Testimonials 

Model Learning has been working in partnership with City of Edinburgh Council and its schools since 2005, providing training to cluster networks, individual schools and key individuals. Our focus has been on integrating visual tools into current agendas including Assessment is for Learning, cooperative learning, thinking skills and A Curriculum for Excellence.

 

Links 

Click here to read about the benefits of using visual tools in … Thinking Skills, Collaborative Learning, Learn to Learn