Formative assessment as an integral part of learning: Balwearie High School
Listen to senior managers and pupils describe the benefits of using assessment for learning strategies in this secondary school.
Transcript
Depute headteacher: I am the depute here in Balwearie High School in Fife. Round about four and a half years ago I came and I immediately had my remit, target setting, Assessment is for Learning. We involved the pupils in a committee and those pupils had a huge impact on the way target setting was taken in the school and round about the same time we also engaged staff in a discussion about 'what is assessment?' - and a philosophical debate took place around what assessment was. Do we agree that young people should know what it is they are expected to learn and know what success looks like? Do we agree that they should be given feedback on their learning? And of course the answer was very quickly 'yes'.
We created networking groups - all departments began to audit their practice against the toolkit that came out from the Executive. Where a department was seen to be strong at say formative uses of summative tests, another department was regarded to be weak. They were put together in a small mini network group to see if good practice could be shared. They begin to organise seminars which we run in INSET days on sharing their criteria, peer and self-assessments, formative uses of summative tests, feedback, feed forward and so on. Because staff led staff seminars it wasn’t like some national guru coming into tell us how to do it- because it was staff leading staff againI really feel it helped to accelerate the process and make some of the strategies of formative assessment much more embedded within the practice.
Teacher 1: When I am talking about effective learning and teaching - effective learning, what do we mean by that? I think it’s about getting young people to take some sort of responsibility for their own learning- taking an interest in their own learning. What are they good at? What are they not so good at? What do they have to work on? And there is no question about that Assessment is for Learning has promoted that - it really has promoted it. Where youngsters can see what they are good at and what they are not so good at, what they have to work on. Where youngsters can discuss with teachers issues around formative assessment, where youngsters can discuss with youngsters - you can’t do that unless you are into learning. And for youngsters it’s tremendous, absolutely tremendous and by golly I think they have taken to it big style.
Pupil 1 (discussing with another pupil): Traffic lighting is when you take a coloured pencil and you write a circle next to each of your answers. It can either be green, amber or red. If it’s green then you are pretty sure that you know the answer is right; if it's amber then you are quite sure that it's right but you are not all that sure; if it's red then you are sure that it is wrong. It is helpful because if you are in a group then you can gather all your answers together and the people with green answers can share them with the rest of the group and if the same answer is circled in answer as someone with an orange thing then they can become more confident in their answer.
Depute headteacher: We actually have some statistical information to show that as the years have progressed the gender gap between the boys and the girls has severely reduced practically to nothing. Initially the girls outperformed the boys quite exceptionally but as more task-oriented approach … feedback being much more specific so that a young person knew that it was their paragraphing. It has much more specific targets that particularly the boy’s performance has increased. Across the board though, both girls and boys, the quality of the performance has increased and that has been a very encouraging thing.
Teacher 2: What we are trying to do is we are trying to create an atmosphere where the pupils will be able to discuss difficulties that they have got and come up with some of the solutions themselves. If you put a mark on the paper immediately the pupils will focus on that mark and perhaps pay little attention to what you are saying afterwards by way of explanation. If you give them a comment they will be much more interested in having a look at the comment and why you have put the comment down and are much more likely to take that comment away and use it I think.
Depute headteacher: One of the things the pupils have told usin one of the committees was: 'We are very good at telling them what the areas for improvement were but we are not particularly good at telling them how they can make improvements.' As Dylan Wiliam himself said, and I think I am quoting him correctly: 'It’s not so much important to know I have got a D but what are the steps I need to take to get a C.' That’s the principle that is very much in place. In the upper school practically every department now, if they have to use a summative assessment there is a grid where every pupil is beginning to tally up were they have lost marks so that young people have very good feedback from these summative assessments that if you like 'were forced to do'.
We have also involved the cluster - we are aware there is a lot of personal learning planning happening in the cluster of primaries. There is a lot of good expertise and we wanted to have further sharing of strategies so that, the good information coming out of the personal planning learning process is carried on into the secondary sector.
Pupil 2: Personal learning planning is just any homework, any work that gets done you have to give feedback, put anything you have got wrong. Comment on it all basically so it gives you an overview of what you have been doing.
Teacher 1: We have got them involved in personal learning planning and we want them to think ahead about their learning what they are going to do to improve - just taking that responsibility. Now, it’s very easy to talk a good game in these things - the doing of it and to get as many people as possible to do it, that’s a challenge for us and I think we are winning.
Depute headteacher: In the very early days one of the major concerns was: 'Where are we going to get the time?' We obviously had to face this one head on and it was interesting because we had to discuss this at the philosophical level. We said 'Is it right that pupils should know what a success criteria is?''Is it right that they get feedback against that success criteria?' and because they agreed that that was important then it was something they had to incorporate within the practice. So we never said in the early stages, 'You must interview people on a termly basis', but that’s actually inevitably what happened as people developed these strategies. And although we say that all pupils should log their learning on a weekly, fortnightly basis - in practice its happening all the time because pupils are seeing, parents are seeing and teachers … the impact on not only raising attainment but also on the relationship.