I am currently doing a lot of reading about formative assessment for an assignment I am writing. I have found this a really interesting topic. Formative assessmnet when done well can have a huge impact on student learning. One of my school's values is to promote life long learning. By using formative assessment we can really help children to become life long learners as they develop the ability to assess their own learning.
I thought that I was using fromative assessment because I use learning intentions and success criteria. But what I have discovered is that I am missing a vital step: Children assessing their own learning!
In the book Unlocking Formative Assessment by Shirley Clarke there is a good overview of what formative assessment should consist of. She talks about clarifying learning intentions and sharing these with children as well as helping them to self assess their learning against the learning intentions. What I have been doing is using learning intentions in my planning, telling children what they are, and displaying them on the classroom wall. I have in a way just been playing lip service to formative assessment rather than living it. In my classroom the learning intentions have not really been at the centre of everything that I do, and children have not really self evaluated their own learning. Any self assessment has been more about the content than the skills rather than the learning itself. My next learning step is to ensure that I plan activities really carefully to ensure that children are working towards the intended learning intention and developing the ability to assess their current ability and next steps.
In my experience this is not unusual. There are many teachers who 'do' formative assessment in this way. I believe we could benefit from professional development in formative assessment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
We have been fortunate in that we have been part of an EHSAS cluster whose role is to develop and implement formative assessment in each of our schools.
ReplyDeleteIt has worked extremely well as the 11 schools have each taken this on board.
In my previous job I got to observe a lot of schools who were using FP and it led me to believe that it was the way to go.
I also used the Irish curriculum which has alot of help and power points that can be used to help staff further develop and understand FP, we ran a series of staff meetings to introduce this and go over any problems, from it the staff have taken FP on board.
I have included the name here for you.
I believe it is really good and easy to follow.
CCEA. (2007). Assessment for Learning for Key Stages 1 & 2. Retrieved July 20, 2008, from Northern Ireland Curriculum: http:www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/assessment_for_learning/training/AFL-Guidance-KS12.pdf
There are other power points that you can download and use as well. If you want I could email them to you just let me know .
Regards
Greg
Thanks for your feedback Greg. It sounds like you work in a fantastic cluster to have 11 schools working together in this way. I would love you to email me the powerpoints. I will give you my email address through our class forum which is a lot less public.
ReplyDeleteHi Karla
ReplyDeleteA late reply to posting
I have also been fasinated by the formative assessment strategies to engage students in autonomous learning. Learners who become independent and prepared to take responsibility for their own learning.
I too have read Clarkes book mentioned in your post.
What I have reflected on is that to some extend many of our teachers in my curriculum area HEalth and Physical Edcuation use aspects of formative assessment. But to be truely effective we must engage in a deeper level and ensure that we use the data we collect to change/enhance learning in some way.
I agree with you Sandy. I think we do need to look deeper at the data we collect and use it to enhance learning. There is an old saying which goes something like this: weighing the pig doesn't make it grow. I think sometimes in schools we spend too much time weighing the pig and not enough time feeding it. In primary shools we do tests like PAT's and STAR but I don't think many of us do anything with the data other than enter it on school wide graphs and maybe use it for whole school targets etc. But there is really valuable information in the data to help us plan for learning, if only we took (or had) the time to really look at it.
ReplyDelete