Although a fairly narrow view on the barriers to implementing assessment for learning, the cross section of views shared on the Google Document have been excellent as a starting point for discussion.
The above Wordle is a helpful representation of those contributions. I have removed the following words from the visual: assessment, formative, teachers, learning and students in an effort to focus on the other language more readily used to describe the issues.
“Time” appears as a perceived barrier to quality formative assessment or assessment for learning – but is it really such an issue? Is curriculum time often shunted and pinched too readily? Do we not protect our curriculum time, and so time for reflection, fiercely enough from the other pressures in school?
Time is a perceived barrier as suggested below. I would add that the main barrier is understanding or to put it more clearly, a lack thereof. I was wondering, will there be a follow-up to come from canvassing opinions? I would be very interested in seeing some outcomes personally.
It is a matter of getting priorities right. Question some of the accepted authodoxy, do we really need to do some of the stuff that takes up so much of our time? Is it more important than having engaged learners who are in control and aware of their skills and knowledge development? A ten minute plenary can be worth more than half an hour’s worth of textbook Q+A (and is a damn site easier to mark!) 5 minutes spent at the start of a lesson or block where the kids develop success criteria against which they will judge their own and other’s work takes no planning time.
Lost in translation there, and agreed. 🙂
Ultimately, (and I’m in the middle of putting this into a blog post) it’s about helping young people to become life long learners (IMO). I feel that teachers who don’t view AfL as an add-on but rather understand the value of it, embedding it in their classroom will achieve far better results in terms of helping their students to become more independent.I guess to clarify, I don’t see AfL as an ‘assessment’ strategy but rather a ‘learning’ strategy. As Tom commented in an earlier post, it’s about process not outcome.
Oh, sorry, by ‘what we’re trying to achieve’ I wasn’t specifically talking about #purposedassess – although that, of course, is very relevant here. I meant more holistically, in terms of what we’re doing when schooling children. 🙂
I think that’s what I am saying though. AfL is already there and happening, teachers (including myself) at different stages of their careers need to the PD in AfL to recognise where they are already using AfL strategies already. AfL has always been a part of my classroom but there were certain activities/features of my lessons that for some time I did not see as AfL. Once I started to look at them in this way AfL became even more intrinsic to the learning of my students.
I don’t think that the lack of clarity does preclude the goal of #purposedassess but rather is an important part of the debate. In clarifying what terms like ‘assessment for learning’, ‘assessment of learning’ and ‘formative assessment’ mean can help the debate move forward as each term raises different ideas, values and contexts in which the question ‘what is the purpose of assessment?’ can be considered.
Yes, but that lack of clarity shouldn’t preclude the overall goal or aim of what we’re trying to achieve. What really used to – and still does – wind me up about some teachers is their treatment of new things as an ‘add-on’ (rather than an opportunity to refocus upon) what they’ve been doing up until now. :-/
Agreed. If you value AfL as a learning process then you won’t even have to make time for it, it will simply be embedded within your lessons.
One of the problems with discussions surrounding AfL/formative assessment is that there is a lack of clarity to what these terms mean and what activities fall under the umbrella.
Do you share learning objectives with your students?
Do you enter in whole class, group and paired discussion?
Do you have students draft and re-draft work?
Do you offer opportunities for reflection and evaluation?
Do you do peer-assessment activities?
Do you mark and comment on students’ work?
These are just the first six activities that came to mind and are all features of AfL.
To make AfL a more intrinsic strategy is actually quite simple. 1. Look for ways to link these activities together. E.g.: before you start a peer-assessment task, take one minute to refer back to/reflect on the learning objectives and make it explicit to your students how the two things are connected. 2. Be explicit at all times about AfL, using a set of key terms (in other words, make the language of assessment part of your classroom vocabulary.
What it’s important to recognise is that AfL is probably already occurring in your classroom… you just need to acknowledge it more. Make it more of a priority.
Surely assesent for learning is an integral aspect of all lessons rather than a separate activity and therefore ‘time’ isn’t an issue.
There’s no such thing as a lack of time, just a lack of priorities.
There’s no such thing as a lack of time, just a lack of priorities.