I’ve stumbled upon 3 incidental moments over the first 3 days of this week that act as a reminder about the importance of checking for understanding at our schools.
I was going to use the term ‘assessment’… I suppose I should, and probably will do further on in this blog post, but the word assessment has lost its way in secondary schools in the UK. I think that it’s because of the multi-million pound industry that has arisen from educational experts (people who don’t work with or teach kids anymore). Assessment has become far too complicated, what with expensive software systems and algorithmic silliness. For me, it’s become the bore-buzz-word of education, but it shouldn’t be this way.
For me, ‘checking for understanding’ is the bread and butter of great teachers. The 3 instances that I’ve stumbled upon this week revolve around FIX, low energy protocols, and whole class feedback.
Firstly, FIX – ‘Formal Interventions at XP’. This basically means: if kids don’t achieve what they could or should do in a test – they FIX it! In Harriet Hickson’s lesson on Tuesday I wandered in to see her providing feedback on her findings from their assessment on The Peasant’s Revolt in order to support students’ efforts for FIXing misconceptions. Nothing complicated, just clarity of explanation accompanied with high expectations of her students. Harriet’s learning environment was brilliant: she commanded every student’s attention and they were totally focused on the task at hand. Harriet has since explained that this process will go into Y7 student’s portfolios – great practice!
Next door, Jack Cudine’s Y7 Science students were using the whiteboards protocol of ‘Show Me’ to check students’ understanding of elements and compounds. This is a very low energy teacher strategy to check who gets it, and who doesn’t. I liked how Jack followed up students’ choices with additional questioning as this probed an individual’s understanding even further. I followed this up with Jack after the lesson in order to encourage the use of other protocols: ‘Popcorn’ and ‘Whiparound’ in order to add variety to ‘Cold Call’. Let me know how you get on with this Jack.
Finally, I popped into the Science Team’s meeting after school yesterday. They were critiquing each other’s use of their mark books which recorded assessment results against each learning target for the current expedition. Mark Lovatt raised the importance of getting ‘more bang for your buck’ when considering the amount of energy that a teacher puts into marking more formal assessments. He spoke about the need to ‘share common mistakes’ with the class. The breadth and depth of his understanding in Science reveals that students benefit from an understanding of ‘where people get it wrong’ as opposed to just talking about where it went well. It reminded me of Zoe Elder’s blog post on ‘error seeking’ where she states ‘Frequently, quality learning and thinking opportunities are missed when students’ misconceptions are overlooked or not recognised.’ How can we ensure all of our teachers do this?
So let’s ignore the bore-buzz-word connotations around the lost terminology of ‘assessment’. Checking for understanding in all of its simplest forms is where it’s at. I hope the 3 examples that I’ve highlighted help to remind us about how easy it can be.