Formative Assessment 12 Month Reflection

• What’s the quickest way to raise the standards of teaching in a school?
• What does research say is the most likely development to raise standards?

Formative assessment. I’m not talking Afl, classroom walk-throughs and a checklist with WALT and WILF on the board every lesson. I’m talking formative assessment. Specifically, equipping our staff with a range of techniques and the confidence to take accurate readings about learning at various points in the lesson and adjusting the lesson from that point on based on those readings.

It’s this accuracy business that is tricky… Ask a question, ask a ‘middle ability’ child the answer. They get it right. Assume the other 29 children understand and move on. And that is just the tip of the iceberg with what we have begun to put in place this year using Dylan William’s Teacher Learning Community (TLC) model.

Nothing is ‘new’ with what we have done. It’s just, to be frank, been done well. That’s not me patting myself on the back, it’s simply following the formula Dylan William’s has devised over the course of his books and CPD materials.

The remainder of this post concerns itself with the structure of a TLC and why it has been so effective on impacting thus far in the classroom. If you want to read about formative assessment, I’d jump straight to Dylan’s 2015 Embedding Formative Assessment masterpiece. A book that is now in the hands of every one of our teachers.

A TLC is a staff meeting. Each month. Without fail. That’s quite a lot of valuable staff meeting time but Formative Assessment is proven to work, so why chop it out for another meeting that won’t have the same impact?

In that meeting, only staff who teach participate. In our school that means I’m in but our Head isn’t. I’ve got to say, that’s a huge amount of faith that has been give to me, a new Deputy Head. Kudos for anyone to be able to take that step back – I’m not sure I could! Part of that also means we have had very very minimal conversations about the contents of the meetings. Just the occasional adhoc ‘it was a little trickier this time’ or ‘everyone engaged really well’ is all they get. Why is this so important? Because the whole point of the TLC is to foster a collaborative, critical, professional and safe environment for staff to talk openly. That involves challenging other staff, reflecting on their own practice and planning the next steps of their formative assessment professional development. Nothing that is said about a problem they have had in their classroom reflects on them as a teacher. No one is judging them or ready to ‘hold them to account’.

What impact has this had? Well, like any relationships with any staff, there are politics at play but our TLC has definitely bridged gaps and given staff the opportunity to engage with staff they wouldn’t usually do so with. A year down the line we are definitely a tighter team and I believe that most of our staff value most of our staff more as teachers because of the dialogue they have shared within the group.

It’s all very well having a meeting a month, but the TLC only functions because there is a very clear remit and structure not just in the meetings but between them. In can be summarised thus:

• Reflect on your own formative assessment
• Choose short, medium or long term what you want to develop as a teacher (a focus on one of Dylan’s 5 strategies is a good idea here)
• Choose one or more techniques to help you meet your self directed goal, above
• Use the techniques during that month whenever appropriate (ie multiple times)
• Get watched by another member of the TLC using said techniques
• Give feedback to the group at the next TLC meeting

For this post, I’m going to skip straight to the watching part. At the start of the process, this was (unsurprisingly) the most contentious element of the process. Historically, as with most schools, ours had been one where staff would receive a termly, high stakes observation. To me, this is a ridiculous way of measuring the performance of a teacher. A couple of lessons out of hundreds does not accurately judge a teacher. Neither does the huge additional stress that many teachers face knowing the significance of these kinds of observations. I’m not against termly observations, but they should be low stakes and their purpose should as a snapshot informing the SLT (who might see similar issues or strengths crop up across teachers). They should not be used to judge teachers. They should equally focus on learners and learning.

So for the last few years our school has not tied these lessons to appraisals. Instead, one of our appraisal targets is for staff to actively engage in the TLC process. Harder to measure than numerical targets, but this way we are rewarding staff for effort, openness to change and being a valuable member of a team. That has to be the right way to raise standards long term.

So observation in the TLC are monthly (gasp). They are a maximum of 30 minutes (this is our rule, purely dictated by logistics and budget. However it has been ample for teachers to get what they need from the obs). They are peer observation (absolutely critical). More than that, the person being observed chooses what the observer is looking for. This again is crucial and hits the nail on the head of the entire purpose of the TLC. I.E. teachers taking responsibility for their own formative assessment CPD. Everything within the sessions puts the onus on each teacher rather than a subject leader or SLT member telling staff what to do. A clear framework to the observations and the TLC meetings and the appraisal target has definitely helped this avoid becoming ‘lovey-dovey’.

Over the year, staff have become used to the monthly meetings (its been quite a while since I have heard any murmur of a now defunct 3 hour maximum observation time). One unintended benefit has been that as well as being valuable for the person being observed, many if not all of our staff have enjoyed and gained from watching other teachers. This is the only slight change to the standard format of the TLC we have made. Rather than picking the same member to observe and be observed by for the whole year, we choose each month. In a Primary environment I think the benefits of a Year 5 teacher seeing someone in Year 2 teacher, then year 6 then year 4, is hugely valuable and has definitely been a key element in the tightening bonds we have as a collective team. The potential downside is that some of the feedback from the observations could be superficial as the ‘new’ observer doesn’t know the history of what that teacher is embedding. For me, as long as staff are prepared to be constructively critical, that should not a problem.

There has genuinely only been 2 difficulties with our TLC, the first of these is balancing leading this significant change myself whilst other staff take each TLC meeting, and trying desperately not to dominate the conversation in the meetings. I’m not a megalomaniac. Honest. But when, particularly in the early days, you here other staff feeding back and it lacking focus, I have had to balance biting my tongue whilst also trying to model the kind of professional, critical discussion required. This has definitely improved during the year and will continue to do so next year, I have no doubt. Picking someone who ‘gets it’ as a challenger for each meeting has definitely helped. This gives them the legitimacy to be critical of what is being said. E.g. if someone mangles a technique so it has become ‘fun for the children’ but is no longer ‘formative’.

The second is along the same lines. This change process has followed a similar path to others. That means enthusiasm and quick wins to begin with before hitting somewhat of a dip and then needing input at that stage to inject it with life again. The quick wins in this case have been a general no hands up approach across school (chosen by individual staff) and a growing use of all student response strategies such as ABCD cards. To be honest, these alone have made a huge difference to teachers ability to make well informed judgements about whether to move on in a lesson or not. In order to get out of the following slump I did take out 1 meeting. I changed it to me leading it and almost running it as a mini reminder INSET of why we are doing this and what formative assessment is and how to be professionally

critical. I think this was the right thing to do as it has given staff who were well on their way, more confidence they are ‘doing it right’ and staff who were not very far on their journey, more clarification and support. That seemingly has been all the majority of our staff have needed to engage more fully with the ongoing process.

The first few months of the next academic year are going to be crucial in maximising the whole year’s development. We need to ensure we create a snowball effect and the evidence currently is this will happen. The TLC is a great vehicle for genuine change. I’d much rather spend my time helping the odd member of staff who doesn’t understand rather than rattling a sabre at those ‘not following what I am telling them to do’. In other words, I can use my energies far more smartly to achieve the same result. The TLC helps this. I might need to do a little sabre rattling, but that will only be with the odd member of staff and the way the vast majority of our staff have engaged with the process and it is impacting on minute by minute decisions during lessons in their classrooms tells me that is is working and is here to stay. If we ever get to a point where our staff are super formative assessment-ed up, the format is so good, it could be used for many other change processes. But for the next 2–3 years at least, the ship has been given a heading and we are right on course.