Aspiring Leaders for Teaching and
Learning
Session 4: How to get AfL & Inclusion to
make the difference to Personalised Learning
Jacky King
20th March 2014
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Learning Objectives
By the end of the session Aspiring Leaders (and
Coaches where present) will have:
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Been introduced to the concepts of for, as, and of
Assessment
Begun to gather ideas for different ways of assessing
pupils formatively.
Considered the link between formative assessment and
personalisation of lessons.
Considered the importance of tackling teacher
underperformance.
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The Sneetches by Dr. Suess
You have been given a sticker with a Star on it or
a Plain sticker.
You have been either a
Star-bellied Sneetches
or a
Plain-bellied Sneetches
Now watch the video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMolzESn4oI
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FREETHINK
Write down your immediate thoughts when
you hear the word Assessment
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Assessment is…
… the ongoing process of gathering, analysing and
reflecting on evidence to make informed and
consistent judgements to improve future student
learning.
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Assessments should…
 Include a variety of contexts - where, who, when, what?
 Be real tasks and occur in natural everyday settings
 Be interesting and motivating
 Be simple and use materials / language at pupils level
 Be done over time
 Provide information to benefit the pupils learning
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Assessment Strategies
Individually then in pairs please think about
assessment strategies used in your school /
classroom.
Please write each one separately on a post it note
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Assessment Purposes
Assessment for learning (formative)
Assessment as learning (formative)
Assessment of learning (summative)
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Assessment for learning (formative)
Usually informal,
Is and integral part of classroom practice
Involves the pupils
Can occur many times in every lesson
Provides descriptive feedback to shape learning
Teaching is adapted to meet need
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Assessment as learning (formative)
 Self assessment
 Peer assessment
 Pupils reflect on and monitor their own progress
 What did I learn?
 How did I do it? (Think about how they learn)
 What next? (Set own goals)
 How can we support pupils with
differing SEND to do this?
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Assessment of learning (summative)
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A measure of what know and can do
Overview of previous learning
Periodic - At a given point in time
Identifies if goals are met
Usually takes place at end of learning activity
 Scored or graded
 Comparison with others
 Ensure consistent judgements and moderation
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Assessment of learning (summative)
Now please put the assessment strategies you
came up with (and any more) into the same
categories
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Where have all the Levels gone?
NfER:27 September 2013
In the wake of the Government’s decision to abandon National Curriculum
levels as part of its reforms, the education sector must develop shared
point of reference for assessment standards to avoid uncertainty creeping
into standards in pupil achievement.
This is the key message in the latest of the NFER Thinks series of policy
papers, Where have all the levels gone? The importance of a shared
understanding of assessment at a time of major policy change.
Whilst many in the profession are glad to see the back of levels, the
importance of a shared language and understanding of standards should
not be underestimated because it provides a crucial benchmark against
which to measure pupil progress.
Without this shared understanding, the sector risks a return to assessment
localism in its worst sense – with no agreed external reference point –
which could undermine confidence in standards in pupil achievement.
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What’s the purpose of the Assessment?
Assessment of learning
Assessment for/as Learning
Checks what has been learned to
date
Checks learning to decide what to do next
Is designed for those not directly
involved in daily learning and
teaching
Is designed to assist teachers and pupils.
Is presented in a formal report
Is used in conversation about learning
Usually gathers information into
easily digestible numbers, scores
and grades
Usually detailed, specific and descriptive
feedback in words (instead of numbers,
scores and grades)
Usually compares the student's
Usually focused on improvement,
learning with either other students compared with the student's 'previous
or the 'standard' for a grade level
best' and progress toward a standard
Does not need to involve the
student in outcome
Involves the student -- the person most
able to improve learning
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Formative assessment: a new definition
“An assessment functions formatively to the extent that
evidence about student achievement elicited by the
assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions
about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be
better, or better founded, than the decisions that would
have been taken in the absence of that evidence.”
(Dylan Wiliam, 2009)
Formative assessment involves the creation of, and
capitalisation upon, moments of contingency in the
regulation of learning processes.
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Discuss!
Examples of Techniques
Learning intentions
“sharing exemplars”
Eliciting evidence
“mini white-boards”
Providing feedback
“match the comments to the essays”
Students as owners of their learning
“coloured cups”
Students as learning resources
“pre-flight checklist”
Paired marking
Two stars and a wish
Traffic lighting
KWL grids (Know, Want to find out, Learned)
Learning logs
Plenary sessions.
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Beyond the Black Box
The research indicates that improving learning through
assessment depends on five, deceptively simple, key
factors:
 the provision of effective feedback to pupils;
 the active involvement of pupils in their own learning;
 adjusting teaching to take account of the results of
assessment;
 a recognition of the profound influence assessment has
on the motivation and self-esteem of pupils, both of which
are crucial influences on learning;
 the need for pupils to be able to assess themselves and
understand how to improve.
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Beyond the Black Box
At the same time, several inhibiting factors were
identified. Among these are:
 a tendency for teachers to assess quantity of work
and presentation rather than the quality of learning;
 greater attention given to marking and grading, much
of it tending to lower the self-esteem of pupils, rather
than to providing advice for improvement;
 a strong emphasis on comparing pupils with each
other which demoralises the less successful learners;
 Teachers’ feedback to pupils often serves social and
managerial purposes rather than helping them to learn
more effectively;
 Teachers not knowing enough about their pupils’
learning needs.
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Effective Formative Assessment
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Clear targets / outcomes
Time to respond
Give choices
Shared answers or voting (avoid embarrassment of getting it wrong)
Use strengths / preferred learning styles
Use discussion & interaction (including between pupils)
Observe and guide (adapt teaching)
Over time / revisit
Change activity when an observation is made of a pupil’s unexpected
knowledge, skills or behaviour
Prior learning
Scaffold learning after pupil demonstrates a misconception
Ensure pupils understand what the goals are so they can strive to
succeed
Chance to share work / reflect
Is “authentic”
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Aspects of formative assessment
Where the learner
is going
Where the learner is
How to get there
Teacher
Clarify and share
learning
intentions
Engineering effective
Providing feedback
discussions, tasks and
that moves learners
activities that elicit
forward
evidence of learning
Peer
Understand and
share learning
intentions
Activating students as learning
resources for one another
Understand
learning
intentions
Activating students as owners
of their own learning
Learner
Thumbs up – Thumbs down
Debate
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What does being assessed feel like?
You have one minute to write down how being assessed
makes you feel.
Please put one idea down on one piece of paper. We will
then collect our ideas together as a Community of Learning.
It is important that we continue to remember what
assessment processes have been like for us.
If we can recall these feelings then it will allow us to engage
in a more empathic way with our children and young people,
but also their parents and carers and families.
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Raising Achievement Matters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLo15A80lI
For individuals
 Increased lifetime salary (13% for a degree)
 Improved health (60% reduction in ill health for
a degree)
 Longer life (1.7 years of life per extra year of
schooling)
For society
 Lower criminal justice costs
 Lower health-care costs
 Increased economic growth (Dylan Wiliam)
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Which of the following categories of skill is
disappearing from the work-place most
rapidly?
1. Routine manual
2. Non-routine manual
3. Routine cognitive
4. Complex communication
5. Expert thinking/problem-solving
Dylan Wiliam 2010
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…but what is learned matters too…
Skill category
% change 1969-2010
Complex communication
+14%
Expert thinking/problem solving
+8%
Routine manual
–3%
Non-routine manual
–5%
Routine cognitive
–8%
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Low skilled jobs are vanishing…
Over the last eight years, the UK economy has
shed 400 no-qualification jobs every day
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We just don’t use as many people as we used to
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Three Generations of School Effectiveness
Research
Raw results approaches
Different schools get different results
Conclusion: Schools make a difference
Demographic-based approaches
School factors account for only 7% of the variation
Conclusion: Schools don’t make a difference
Value-added approaches
School-level differences in value-added are relatively small
Teacher-level differences in value-added are large
Conclusion: An effective school is a school full of effective
teachers
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Class Sizes
Reducing class sizes by 30% (from 30 to 20) results
in an extra 4 months of learning per year
At a cost of £20,000 per classroom per year
Plus the cost of building 150,000 new classrooms
And only if the teachers are on average as good as
the teachers we have
Adding 150,000 weak teachers to the system will reduce
student learning by 5 months a year.
So we could spend an extra £5bn and lower student
achievement…
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… a BIG difference
To see how big the difference is, take a group of 50 teachers
• Students taught by the best teacher learn twice as fast as
average
• Students taught by the worst teacher learn half as fast
average
And in the classrooms of the best teachers
• Students from disadvantaged backgrounds learn as much as
those from advantaged backgrounds
• Students with behavioural difficulties learn as much as those
without
The value of having had an outstanding Reception teacher can be
detected in the annual salaries of 35-year-olds
Economic value contributed by an outstanding Reception teacher
each year: £200,000
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How many Teachers and Teaching
Assistants are there in schools?
All schools:
Teachers: 2000:
Teaching Assistants:
405,800
2000:
79 ,000
2011:
2011:
438,000
219,800
And what about special
schools?
Teachers:
2000:
14,300
Teaching Assistants: 2000:

12,700
2011:
15,000
2011:
23,900
Please write your guess on a piece of paper before
holding it up.
Improving Teacher Quality
A classic labour force issue with 2 (nonexclusive) solutions
Replace existing teachers with better ones
Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
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Improving Teacher Quality
How do we improve the effectiveness
of existing teachers?
Talking Partners: In pairs please discuss the
strategies
Please list the strategies on separate pieces of
coloured paper and we’ll then share our findings.
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Improving Teacher Quality
Teachers make a difference
But what makes the difference in teachers?
Source of variation
Extra weeks of learning per
year
Advanced content matter knowledge
0
Further professional qualifications (MA)
0
Experience (10 years)
2
Pedagogical content knowledge
4
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Impact on Achievement
If we could replace the least effective 15,000
teachers with average teachers, the net impact on
student achievement at GCSE would be an
increase of one-fortieth of a grade in each subject.
Raising the bar for entry into the profession so
that we no longer recruit the lowest performing 30%
of teachers would increase achievement at GCSE
by one grade
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Impact on Achievement
If we could replace the least effective 15,000
teachers with average teachers, the net impact on
student achievement at GCSE would be an
increase of one-fortieth of a grade in each subject.
Raising the bar for entry into the profession so
that we no longer recruit the lowest performing 30%
of teachers would increase achievement at GCSE
by one grade
– by 2030
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Belbin inventory
Company worker; Innovator; Shaper; Chairperson; Resource
investigator; Monitor/evaluator; Completer/finisher; Team worker
Key ideas:
People rarely sustain “out of role” behaviour,
especially under stress
• Each role has strengths and allowable weaknesses
• Each teacher’s personal approach to teaching is similar
• Some teachers’ weaknesses require immediate
attention
• For most, however, students benefit more by developing
teachers’ strengths
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“Out of Role” Behaviour
People rarely sustain “out of role” behaviour,
especially under stress
• Please fold your arms….
How have you done it? ? Right over left or left over right?
Try the opposite way
What do you notice?
Habits are hard to break – they feel normal and
natural.
Now try it with overlapping your fingers…
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Professional Development
The most powerful teacher knowledge is not explicit
That’s why telling teachers what to do doesn’t work
What we know is more than we can say
And that is why most professional development has been
relatively ineffective
Improving practice involves changing habits, not adding
knowledge
That’s why it’s hard
And the hardest bit is not getting new ideas into people’s
heads
It’s getting the old ones out
That’s why it takes time
But it doesn’t happen naturally
If it did, the most experienced teachers would be the most
productive, and that’s not true
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Pareto Analysis
Pareto improvement
A change that can make at least one person
(e.g., a student) better off without making anyone else (e.g., a teacher) worse off.
Obstacles to Pareto improvements
In professional settings, it is incredibly hard to
stop people doing valuable things in order to give them
time to do even more valuable things
e.g., “Are you saying what I am doing is no
good?”
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Support
What is needed from teachers
A commitment to:
 The continuous improvement of practice
 focus on those things that make the most difference to
student outcomes
What is needed from leaders
A commitment to:
 creating expectations for the continuous improvement of
practice
 ensuring that the focus stays on those things that make the
most difference to student outcomes
 providing the time, space, dispensation and support for
innovation
 supporting risk-taking
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How would you feel if every other
day your boss said ‘your teaching
isn’t as good as everybody else’s’?
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Time for Coachees and Coaches to
Catch up....
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Learning Objectives
By the end of the session Aspiring Leaders (and
Coaches where present) will have:
•
•
•
•
Been introduced to the concepts of for, as, and of
Assessment
Begun to gather ideas for different ways of assessing
pupils formatively.
Considered the link between formative assessment and
personalisation of lessons.
Considered the importance of tackling teacher
underperformance.
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Next Session Date
• Monday 19th May 2014 (1.30pm – 4.30pm)
• Session 5 (afternoon): Linking Data to High
Performance (CASPA, Performance Guidance,
And Target Setting)
• Facilitators: Jacky King & Jill Ewan, SEN Adviser
• Venue: Bradbury Centre Fiveways School, Yeovil
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Your feedback on today
what went well
even better if
Individual learning point