The best way to think of assessment is not as part of a cycle which we churn through from lesson to lesson to the end of a topic. Assessment does fit in to a cycle, a conceptual framework, but we should be going through all the stages all the time as a continuous process.
Perhaps I need a metaphor here. For a simple car engine, the air and fuel mix is manually adjusted by the mechanic every few journeys to tweak performance, based on how well the car ran. That's like the teacher tweaking the teaching every few lessons. A modern car engine senses the combustion itself multiple times a second, and then automatically adjusts the air and fuel mix as a continuous process to ensure the engine is always running optimally, all of the time. That's like the student assessing themselves, continuously, and changing their thinking on a task to ensure they work the most optimally. This is what we're aiming for!
So we know that teaching and assessment should form part of a dynamic system where the teaching is continually re-calibrated to the children's needs; and even better, the children are directing themselves through learning opportunities which they've chosen and are in control of, and they've made those decisions based on skilled self-assessment and reflection. I've synthesized some mainstream educator's work on assessment in to the following model:
Whilst I've included 'Assessment by the Teacher' as well as 'Assessment by children', the key focus should be on children accurately assessing themselves, for the following reasons:
1. Less work for the teacher. Why should the teacher do something which is a great learning experience for the child in it's own right?
2. Self-assessment can potentially be more accurate than a teacher's assessment.
3. After self-assessment, the child can get straight on with fixing their weaknesses and targeted improvement of their work. With Teacher assessment, there then needs to be feedback to the child, with all the problems of miscommunication. And will the child really be motivated to fix problems the teacher has diagnosed, as opposed to something they themselves have found out about their own abilities?
4. A children improve in self-assessment, they become more self-aware, more independent learners, in control of their learning journey. Children are learning how to learn in the deepest sense.
What do we need to do to ensure self-assessment is a success?
The diagram above shows some prerequisites, which should really be quite obvious:
1. The teacher needs to be fully committed and engaged with the important of assessment. It sounds obvious, but this has been stressed as an important factor in success in the literature.
2. Create a learning ethos and a grown mindset in the classroom. Children will only be interested in finding out exactly what their abilities (and weaknesses) are, if they know they can improve on it through targeted action.
3. Children need the language of meta-cognition and the language of learning. We need to teach children to talk like teachers!
4. Everyone must be clear about the learning goal. Whilst sharing the learning objective and success criteria are mainstream, sharing exemplar work is not yet being used to it's fullest potential. Children's books from the year before can be kept as exemplars, and this can be given a special significance by the teacher - they can be called 'Books of Wonder', along with a fun magical routine every time they are brought out.
Ultimately we are aiming for children to be engaged in a process of dynamic self-calibration as they continually reflect on themselves and their learning, and change their tasks to re-focus on fully meeting the unit aims.
I'm now much more interested in the potential for open-ended project work to provide a continuous challenge to children and help engage children continually with the self-reflection process. This may be a focus for a later topic (perhaps after I've seen and taken part in some more real life examples of this).
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