AFL - Assessment for Learning

Formative and summative are the two main types of assessment. Students complete assessments for many reasons including, informing parents, the board, or the government about achievement.  

Formative assessment is a tool for teachers as it informs them about the next steps for students.

Assessment for Learning helps us with this process, creating Learning Intentions to focus on and a list of the Success Criteria for the students to help them achieve each step toward the Learning Intention. 

Today's session was about:

How Confident are we in Writing Success Criteria

I thought I was confident in writing Success Criteria. As I have been part of Assessment for Learning schools for years. What I hadn't thought about was making the Success Criteria challenging yet understandable for Years 7 and 8 students. (This didn't register until I was doing planning for Term 3).

We discussed the importance of Success Criteria: 

•     Learning Intentions without Success Criteria is hopeless
•     Success Criteria without Learning Intention is not bad

It's about what we are learning not just what we are to do.

What is often found in Year 7 and 8 classes are Success Criteria are based more on performance and students can parrot it but that doesn't help them understand the learning.

Our expectations should be high but always reflect back to the Success Criteria, especially in what we say, well done I can see you are able to make groups of ten and add them together. Next, let's see if you can make groups of 100 and add them together.

Our Focus was on Reading which ties in well with our other Curriculum Focus on T-shaped Literacy.

For the last, while I have been focused on teaching Questioning and Answering Skills for Literal, Re-organisation, Inference, Evaluative, Vocabulary and Reaction. I can see the reaction and evaluative questions being useful to help develop a deeper understanding through T-shaped Literacy but I feel I need more direction and support with this.

What I do like about AFL is it gives control to students about how fast and how far they take their learning and helps to get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter.

If learning isn't secret and students have the keys they can continue to break down learning into steps and hold the keys for lifelong learning.