Welcome back! In this episode, we discuss a topic that gets a lot of attention – assessment for learning. After a short intro of what it is and why it is important, we dive into top tips, examples and advice to help both new and experienced teachers.
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Tamsin: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Brighter Thinking pod from Cambridge University Press. I’m your host, Tamsin Hart. This time, we’re here to discuss the ultimate guide to assessment for learning.
On my travels, I’ve encountered a lot of questions from teachers about assessment for learning, and it’d be a great opportunity to explore some of these. Let me introduce our guests to you today. You’ll recognise Dr. Mark Winterbottom from our previous podcast on active learning. Mark is Senior Lecturer in Science Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.
We’re also joined by Sarah Tolbert-Joyce, Education Manager for Teaching and Learning and Dr. Melise Camargo, Training Materials Manager at Cambridge Assessment International Education.
It’s great to have you all here with us today. Before we get started, remember you can get in touch with us on Twitter using the hashtag #BrighterPod, or by tweeting us at CambridgeInt. We want to start this episode by getting to know our guests a little better.
What is the best lesson you have ever had?
I have a question that we’ve asked Mark, Sarah and Melise to think about. So what is the best lesson you’ve ever had? This could be one you’ve taught yourself or one where you were the student, but we want to know what made it stand out to you, Melise, what’s your best lesson ever, and why?
Melise: I’m not sure it was the best lesson, but it was one that I really remember. So I was teaching a classroom and we wanted to cover area. I really wanted them to understand what a square meter is. So I asked them to cut magazine pages and make a square meter, and then they glued them together and they put them on the floor and we started exploring it. I asked them, okay, let’s think about how many chairs can we fit in that space or how many of you we can fit in that space. So they could relationally experiment on that and fit themselves in between.
I remember at one point they were trying to fit as many of them as possible. And then one of them came and pushed them and they all fell over! So they were really having fun. I think that’s what made me think about that one particular one.
Tamsin: Brilliant! Sarah, how about you?
Sarah: I’ve taken this from the perspective of me being a student and I had to think really long and hard because the trip down memory lane is getting longer.
The lesson that stood out for me was actually an art lesson. So I was a history teacher, but actually here I’ve picked art. It was a GCSE art lesson where we were experimenting with sketching, shading, and texture – doing pencil drawings. The teacher came round and gave us an object for that lesson and the following lesson we’d have to draw.
I got given this massive lump of coral and I thought, my goodness, I can never draw that. That was my first impression. I actually did it and looking back with a teacher lens, really, I can really see that it was the teacher who helped me to get there.
When I think about how she set up the lesson, so she always began these art lessons by modelling what she wanted us to do. She would actually do some of the sketching techniques, so we had a really clear understanding of where we were going, and then we’d have a go. She was constantly just nudging us in the right direction, circulating to maybe show us again.
So there are these little nudges, always encouraging us to step back from what we were doing.
I think when you’re certainly doing art, you can look quite closely at the page. You’d always see, just take a step back and see whether it’s actually progressing in the way you actually intended to. That was really useful and something I tried to do in my own teaching because it was quite different to other lessons – we were encouraged to actually get up and look at others work and take ideas back to your own drawing and try and implement them. And for me, that was quite unusual at the time. It was always a lovely class, lots of positive discussions, always a hum.
Tamsin: And Mark, what about you?
Mark: I was asked this question 22 years ago when I applied for my first job as a newly qualified teacher. And I answered it by talking about a lesson, where the behaviour had been really good and the person who interviewed me, he did give me a job, but he said, if you’re asking that question again, don’t focus on a behaviour, focus on the learning.
And now when I look back (and my memory lane is slightly longer!), I remember a lesson with year nine, bottom set. They were sometimes a challenge and I had them working in different groups. One set was at the interactive whiteboard designing a zoo. Another set was down on the floor, creating an animal adapted to Mars, I think.
And somebody came in to visit. They were deciding whether they wanted to be a teacher. I remember excusing the noise and saying, it’s not always quite this loud. Now I look back, I realise that actually, that lesson was really good and the noise was the really good thing about it because the children were working in groups, they were talking together, and they were doing things that really motivated them. I think that’s my best lesson.
Tamsin: Lovely. A nice range of things there. Lots of active learning, lots of breaking things down, compartmentalising them. So it didn’t seem like it was going to overwhelm the students.
What is assessment for learning and why is it important?
Tamsin: So with our first question, let’s go back to basics. We’re going to have listeners today who are really new to assessment for learning, or they’ve been using it for years and years and they’re interested in different takes on it. So let’s start with this new teacher. Can you explain what assessment for learning is and why it’s important? So Mark, let’s start with you.
Mark: Assessment for learning is a process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by you as the teacher and for use by your learners to decide where your learners are in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to get there. That’s it!
Tamsin: And Melise, what about you?
Melise: Of course. I agree with what Mark just said, but I think it is understanding that it’s what you make out of that information that you just gathered. If it’s just gathering information, it’s just assessment. So the point is, how are you going to use it and actually help learners improve their learning? That’s what makes it assessment for learning.
Tamsin: And Sarah, can you add anything new to that?
Sarah: I would completely agree with both Mark and Melise and I really liked what Mark said, it’s just having that understanding of where your learners are currently and where they need to be and how to get them there.
And for me, when I was training, that was a really nice way of thinking about assessment for learning. And as Melise said, absolutely the core of this isn’t assessment, it’s about improving learning and using that to change your practice to make sure learning is the goal.
Tamsin: I was going to ask you, actually, what was your first experience of assessment for learning when you were teachers? Did you find it intimidating? Confusing?
Mark: I found it odd and I found it odd because I was I trained in 1997/1998, and that’s when the first bit of research came out from Black and William in 1998. And so it was being presented as something which was new and different, but actually it isn’t, it’s completely integrated with what you would do in a productive, active classroom where you’re trying to get your students to learn effectively.
Melise: I was a teacher in Brazil and unfortunately, teacher training in Brazil was not so good. I think I learnt what assessment for learning is quite late when I actually wasn’t teaching anymore, which is really unfortunate. I didn’t have a lot of experience of it.
Sarah: It was a big focus when I trained back in 2010 and yeah, it was a really core part of my teacher training programme. I think quite early on, I was quite intimidated by it thinking about all these different strategies and how to fit them in.
But I think as you become less of a novice teacher and it does become more natural and you do start to think in that way, that kind of need to generate feedback from your learners has become part of what you do. But certainly, early on I deliberately had to plan in all these opportunities to make sure I was doing that.
Tamsin: Would that be your reassuring advice to your new teacher? Do your thing, it will get better! It may be a tiny bit confusing or intimidating at first, but you will get used to it.
Top tips for assessment for learning
Tamsin: Let’s now move to the ultimate question for the ultimate guide. What are your top tips for implementing assessment for learning in the lesson and do these rules cross across subjects? And to be fair, I think we should start with Sarah this time.
Sarah: Yes, my top tip does apply across subjects and actually links back to what I was saying earlier on. My top tip would be in the planning stages, planning those opportunities deliberately and explicitly for your own sort of peace of mind to enable you to receive feedback from your learners. Don’t just assume it’s always going to happen.
I definitely needed to make sure I was doing that. So what I would do is I’d find it really useful to actually write down some key questions on my plans, which gripped them, because I think that asking really good open and probing questions can be quite difficult, particularly with all the buzz of a classroom. Pre-planning, giving myself the opportunity to think of those questions beforehand really helped remind me to ask them.
Melise: I would say to start slowly. It’s like a diet! If you’re trying to change everything at once, it’s going to be really hard. But if you start thinking about one particular thing that you would like to change, or you would like to improve, it’s much easier to get it done. So I would say think about one particular thing. And then you start improving from then and trying out different stuff.
Mark: I really put emphasis on getting students to take an active part in doing everything. So that might be engaging in discussion, giving each other feedback, and explaining to them where they’re going and what the success criteria are.
It might be getting them to work together in groups, but really the students are at the heart of it and ensuring that they know where they are, they know where they’re going and they know what they need to learn is the key.
Assessment for learning – next steps
Tamsin: Now we’re moving on up the scale. We started with our novice teacher, and tips with general practice. And now the next question, let’s think about the more experienced teacher. What would your tips be for improving or finessing their practice?
Melise: I would say, not just for assessment, for learning actually, talk to your colleagues. I think if you observe them, if you talk, or if you ask them to observe you in your lessons, so you have like a focused observation, you can really tackle some of the harder things and really improve your practice.
Sarah: I’d say it’s great that even as an experienced user of assessment for learning you’re still looking to improve and refine your practice. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. And I think as well, that it’s really good to build up a repertoire of strategies to use with your classes, because what might work with one student or class may not work with the other. And I’ve definitely experienced that. I think one of my top tips actually comes down to that sort of the written feedback. And I think it’s very easy as a teacher to fall in the trap of writing lots and lots of feedback and then the student not doing anything with it, not using it to push their learning forward.
So one of the things that I used to do with my history essays when we’re giving feedback would to make sure that any next steps, targets that I wrote, I would make sure that they would become the focus of the next essay that the students would have a go at.
I get them to look back at their targets and write it really clearly, so they understand it at the top of their next essay and really make it a focus that they’re working towards. And what I noticed there, the difference was I wasn’t just writing the same feedback to the same student time and time again, I can actually see that progress in their essay writings.
Mark: If you are experienced, then you’ve probably not got much time. So my top tips are about time. A brilliant way is actually to record your feedback in a little audio file. You might do that in WhatsApp messages. You might do that simply on your phone and then email them the audio file.
There is some research evidence that says students listen more to that feedback quite literally, and take much more account of it if it’s an audio format, which is great.
The second bit of feedback I give is exploit your students! Because they can do the vast majority of the feedback that you need. But feedback is key, feedback is everything. And getting a student to understand where they are in their learning, what they need to do going forward and where they’re heading is exactly what you want.
Melise: Yeah, we’ve been discussing about that, Sarah, right? That move towards learners doing more, is something that’s sometimes really hard to achieve because as teachers we want to take control.
For experienced teachers, peer and self-assessment is something that’s really important because then we’re moving towards the learners doing that for themselves. And like Mark said, feedback is something really important. So they would be doing that for themselves instead of having the teacher in between. But at the same time, the teacher needs to be involved because it’s not something that is easy for the learners to do themselves at first.
Mark: What’s really interesting is, doing that, puts the teacher in more control rather than less, because you get to listen to the conversations and you get to understand what’s in the children’s heads and you get to intervene in the right places in the room. So you can hear for children who aren’t keeping up and you can go and help them.
The control factor, it feels a little bit strange, perhaps not standing at the front, but as soon as you make that break, you suddenly realise that actually you’re much more in control of your classroom when you do it.
Sarah: I would also add, with regards to peer assessment, I found that quite difficult to do well. It’s an investment of your time to train your students into understanding some of the success criteria, and then to be able to explain where another pair hasn’t quite met it in a way that they can really understand. And I think there’s a lot of thinking with regards to peer assessment, who do you match up? Which peers do you match up to make sure that the feedback and processes is really spot on? I think that it’s a really worthwhile thing to do, but it just takes a bit of time.
Melise: It helps a lot those ones that are giving the feedback as well. It helps them to develop a nose for quality. So when they are looking at others materials, they want to understand what they could have improved or not, but then they take for themselves as well. And they will be much more careful the next time they need to do something similar because they saw in someone else’s work, what they could have done.
Tamsin: What do you think is the best way to set up that kind of peer-to-peer assessment and feedback in a lesson?
Melise: I think it will depend very much on the learners and on the particular classroom era teaching, like Sarah said before, it doesn’t apply to every single classroom. So I think it will depend a lot on the task as well. It might be just two students working together and it can be very informal as they are talking things through. Or it could be something more formal, that they have some time to do a task and then they swap things and they can really analyse.
It depends on the subject as well. In mathematics, it could be something faster with one question only, whereas in history, it’s probably an essay and you need to give them a little bit more time and modelling. So as a teacher, you could show them how you would do that feedback and then give them the opportunity to do it themselves. It varies!
Mark: But even take some examples of what you thought spanned the attainment range (so have different things which are good and bad), give them to a group of students, allow them to talk about those exemplars and then move some of our students to different groups to go and share their ideas as well.
Those kinds of interesting ways to foster talk, such as snowballing or speed dating, speed sharing, they could fit in really well in terms of trying to communicate that kind of feedback.
Sarah: I really liked that idea of looking at exemplars. Perhaps rather than looking at each other’s work in the first instance, which can be quite a personal thing to do, I think this kind of training and getting them ready to do that is a lovely approach.
I would completely agree with the idea of modelling as well. So as a teacher, you say ‘these are the kinds of feedback I would like you to give’. Give them a framework as well. So I wouldn’t give them free range on what feedback to give, I would be quite precise about what they’re looking for and how they know they found it.
Mark: And you could even ban words like ‘nice’!
Sarah: Definitely! It’s not meaningful.
Tamsin: Now Mark, you used some interesting terms there, and I’m not familiar with them all. So did I hear ‘speed dating’ in this context, in a conversation context?
Mark: Yes, absolutely. So speed dating, or speed sharing as we call it in some parts of a world, happens when you have two lines of seats in pairs with one student facing each other and you give them maybe one or two minutes to talk to each other.
And then you move one place along. So what it means is that they get to talk to lots and lots of different people about either the same thing or different things and share their perspectives as widely as possible.
Tamsin: And I think another one was, was it snowballing?
Mark: Well, there’s all sorts of ways of generating talk actually. Say you have five tables and each table is talking about one particular thing. Let’s say there’s five people on each table. So you could spread those five people on the table around to all the other five tables so that you can get a representative of each. So we’ve got a full set of expertise on a table.
You could also take half a table and give those to the neighbouring table. There’s all sorts of ways. If you want to research this more, then just Google something like ‘generating classroom talk’ and you’ll get loads of strategies and they’re all really mega.
One last thing…
Tamsin: So finally, if our listeners took away one piece of advice on this podcast, what should that be? Let’s start with you, Sarah.
Sarah: I think that the key, is that the focus is on improving learning. So as a result of your assessment for learning practice, you should see progress. Your teaching should change and adapt as you’re generating that feedback from learners.
I agree with the point Melise said about starting slowly and not trying to change everything all at once. I think as teachers, we want to do the best for our students and you can fall in the trap of wanting to try all these lovely, different things. But thinking about what aspect of assessment for learning you’d like to focus on, and it might be you’re questioning your sharing of success criteria, increasing the wait time, which, oh, for me, that was a nightmare! It’s a really painful thing to do, but take the time to read a little bit about what you’d like to focus on.
There’s a lot of information out there. Get an understanding of what the current thinking is. Maybe get some ideas and try out. And we’ve got some really great material on the Cambridge International website. So our getting started with assessment for learning and our assessment for learning education brief would be really useful starting point. And it could send you off in different directions with different readings and ideas.
Mark: Can I just say the wait time thing is really important because it not only allows time for students to think, but it puts the emphasis and shows them that you’re expecting them to think, which can be quite different perhaps to your usual practice.
I would say there’s three people who are important – teacher, learner and their peers. I’d say there’s three things that are important – where the learner is going, where the learner is now and how they’re going to get to where they’re going. And I’d say the most important thing is that you, or your peers or your learners need to use evidence of achievement to adapt what happens in your classroom to get that learner from wherever they are now to where they’re going.
Just keep thinking. It’s about what’s in their head that matters. Not what’s in yours.
Tamsin: Brilliant, now Melise, last but not least.
Melise: The purpose of assessment for learning is what you make out of the information you get. How are you going to use that? Because it’s not just gathering information. And I also would like to say that you shouldn’t think that it’s something that’s really hard to implement. If you start slowly with a few small changes, you can build on that and then make it work.
Tamsin: Thank you so much for all your advice! It’s been really interesting. While I’m here, I’m going to recommend our Approaches to learning and teaching series, which is written with Cambridge International. And this series looks at tried and tested teaching approaches with practical suggestions from a subject perspective. In fact, Mark is one of our authors. In these books, assessment for learning is explained and practical tips and advice are offered.
Thank you and see you again next time!
