Educating the Dragon

This chapter can be summed up in a word - assessment. Well, three: assessment is key. It is clearly saying that you should assess the children to ensure progress (but not too much)

Assessment for learning should
Be part of effective planning of teaching and learning
Focus on HOW children learn (clearly a skills based assessment)
Provide learners with constructive guidance.
Develop learners’ ability to self assess so they can be reflective and self managing.

There are others… but I feel the others come under the the general title of ‘lip service’. All good things that need to be brought to mind but which the teacher does little more than nod approvingly whilst reading.

Those mentioned above are ones I intend to actually DO something about and can see a way that they can impact on my classroom practice.

Purpose of assessment; is about finding out where a students needs are, deciding on the approach to take to feedback to the student in the best way possible to allow them to reflect on their own learning. The goal here is the development of strategies to become a reflective, and therefore life-long learner.

A great idea for a feedback form included the points:
Name
Goal
Feedback
Next Learning step.

A copy of this form I doctored is available here.

It is important to note that feedback and feed-forward are specific to the learning goal.

A good habit to get into is referred to as Informal Observation.
Seeing what the student does when choosing a literacy activity
Listening to the discussion the activity creates
Noting how they receive and act on feedback.

I think I’ll try to allow some time for this during the reading lesson particularly, targeting on those children who are at the top end of my class. The goal being to ensure the tasks are suitable and sufficiently challenging.

A note on each child at the being of the year, perhaps that the beginning of each term regarding;
Are they:
1. trying to make meaning when they read and write
2. attending appropriately to details of print
3. choosing to read and write independently
4. confident in reading to others or sharing ideas.

Running Records
I will need to timetable these in to be more evenly spread across the term if I am to take full advantage of the process. I would be most interested in observing the differences in seen and unseen text. Theory says that the seen text should be read more accurately. But I’m not so sure on that. Perhaps the difference lies in comprehension and understanding?
In the section on informal prose inventories it states that a narrative reading could be split into two sections, the first being read aloud as a running record and secondly to be completed silently with questions to discover the student’s level of understanding. Ordinarily a running record is taken on the whole text with the student re-reading before being asked to retell. Maybe a change in procedure would throw up some interesting observations.

A few key questions have arisen for me regarding the analysing of information:

• What are the strengths and limitations of running records?
• What are the qualitative influences on student performance that the analysis needs to take into account, and are these effects on the student positive or negative?
• They talk about judgements being checked and confirmed ’from many sources’. It reads like there needs to be a different, comparative assessment to running records. Is this true/ are they available? Is PM Benchmark one? What should the frequency of these additional assessments be? For they state further on:
“For a valid assessment of a student’s progress over time, however, the teacher needs to make a more considered analysis of a collection of information from more than one source.”