As a College we have already made changes to our assessment policy to try and shift the focus from marking to feedback and decrease the amount of time teachers spend writing on students’ books in favour of time being invested into planning learning episodes that address the issues we spot. Last year, all subject areas created their own assessment policies to ensure that assessment approaches were adapted to the demands of the subject discipline.
I have advocated whole class feedback before during CPD sessions and in previous blog posts (available here and here), and I am still convinced that it represents huge benefits for students and teachers. Teachers don’t need to spend hours writing comments on books, and students receive high quality verbal feedback that helps them to understand how to improve. Rather than write detailed comments on students’ books, I deliver a verbal explanation, offering explicit instructional steps for students to act upon and modelling how an expert would approach the task.
As stated in my previous blog post, I am not a big fan of whole class feedback proformas as I prefer to have my little exercise book which I fill with scribbled notes about students’ work and their learning. Some of these notes I share with students, others are entirely for me to use. However, I have this term been experimenting with an assessment planning sheet that I fill in after reading through a set of students’ books. I still make notes in my exercise book, but these mostly take the form of disorganised observations that I make as I read. I then attempt to add some structure to my notes by completing the planning sheet. This is really a short to medium term plan rather than a lesson plan as I am mapping the things I need to reteach in the coming lessons. I don’t necessarily fill in every box on the sheet – only those that I consider relevant and useful. Some things I might teach straightaway, others might wait a week or more, but by completing the sheet I ensure that I don’t forget. And I think that is really the main purpose of the sheet: the questions are the things we think about all the time when marking anyway, but when we are all so busy, it is easy to forget that I really need to reteach appositives to year 9. Below are images of how I have developed my use of whole class feedback this year:
