As teachers we often talk about educating children for the 21st century. One way that we can help children to be ready for an unpredictable future is to help them to develop the ability to asses their own learning needs. If children can understand what they know now and what their next learning step is then they will be able to continue to learn throughout their lives. If formative assessment is something done with children and not to them they will be ready to tackle and understand the changes that will take place in their lifetimes. SIMPLE? I DON'T THINK SO!
I understand that it is important to develop children's ability to access, interpret and use information from assessment to further their learning. But what I am unsure about is how we go about teaching them this. How do we develop independence in a generation that seems to be increasingly dependant on others? How do we get children from the point where they know they don't know something, to a point where they understand what they need to do to learn to do new things and understand new concepts. It is easy to say we need to teach them to assess their own learning, but what does this look like in practice. What do we need to do to encourage this learning to happen?
Any thoughts?
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Great idea Karla.
ReplyDeleteHow can we do this? I believe it is important for us to do the modeling of what we require and then to build this into the programme.
As Clarke says, start with one area and then build on this. We can't do everything at one time but a little bit often amkes a difference. We started with learning buddies- outlining the xpectations and then building on this. All of our classes use learning buddies (they change these at least twice a term), followed by developing Learning Intentions and then success criteria. A prolonged period of PD has also helped.
We share next steps with children as well this has come from the use of exemplars and the curriculum so that the children can see what comes next. We had some sceptics at first but the teachers have discovered that when the children know what, when, and how they learn better.
Once again I know this sounds simplistic but a lot of work has gone in and the children are achieving because they know what they are being marked on, they know what the next stage of developoment is, they know how well they are achieving because they have had feedback from a buddy, from themselves and from the teacher.