My Reflections

Mussalam noted three techniques to consider when trying to ‘spark’ learning: curiosity comes first, to embrace the mess and to reflect. The third rule was the one I thought about the most. The group that plays on my mind the most is my year eleven set one group. The last set of assessment data that I collected for the group was, in a word, shocking. The assessment indicated that the group are doing quite poorly (I will go into the limitations of assessing this current cohort later). When sharing their assessment results with them I decided to go for a reassuring approach taking the stance that this is a case of ‘trial and error’. As Beckett noted we will fail and we will fail again but next time we will fail better. 

I realised that it was quite tempting to do a couple of shallow purple pen activities during an AFL lesson mock but when I reflected on this it seemed more of a box ticking exercise. Instead I decided to go for a more developed approach to demonstrate their ability progress past this. I spent ten to fifteen minutes a week going over the skills that were required to create top band responses for the exam questions and provided the group with a set of answer scaffolding sheets for each one. Students were then asked to take one of the questions home each week to attempt independently and to time themselves. This homework task proved particularly effective; every student made progress on their assessment mark with each student jumping at least one estimated grade boundary. At the end of the half-term a second assessment was conducted in exam conditions. Again the data was positive with a ten percent improvement in students achieving 3+LOP. This example illustrates why we assess: to reassure us that we are teaching effectively and they are learning progressively. 

This brings me to the greatest barrier my department are facing currently with assessing our students. Due to the re-design of grades from alphabetical to numerical and due to the hazy information we have received concerning what constitutes an upper grade pass and even which grade constitutes an upper grade pass assessing the current KS3 is, essentially, a guessing game. For these reasons we as a department decided to err on the side of caution and to make our grade boundaries particularly conservative. Due to this decision very few students have been ranked as having achieved 3+LOP and here lies our assessment limitations and arguably why at present our assessment practice is far from outstanding; it is far from being consistent nationally or perhaps even being accurate. The proof will be in the summer results pudding.