Learning Tipe

When we celebrate good practice, it helps if we have a shared understanding of what it looks like and a common language with which to review, analyse and discuss it. Having a common language helps us to ensure that every lesson is of the highest quality we can deliver with the focus on achievement and engagement for every learner. Once this language is consistent across teams, deconstructing classroom experiences good, bad and ugly becomes a valuable exercise, promoting teacher reflection and informing continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities and performance review (PM) targets.

Effective department teams share a clearly articulated vision of what they intend to achieve, a vision and a strategy for achieving it which underpins and promotes the wider organisation's drive for improvement. When cross-school conversations about learning and teaching are based on a mutually agreed and understood framework, it is easier to harness the potential of the learning conversation, teacher to teacher, student to teacher and student to student. This common, consistent language can be achieved via a range of effective initiatives which in due course most teams will use in order to promote team and school improvement.

The introduction of such important protocols as: common lesson planning formats, clearly articulated marking and assessment protocols, a jointly developed and agreed team teaching and learning policy, peered observation schedules and the introduction of Assessment for Learning (AfL) bring with them the capacity to bring about real improvement in teacher classroom practice. They do this by helping us agree benchmark standards for practice in our own classrooms and our own teams and promote dialogue beyond subject boundaries. They help create dialogue around the standards and expectations that each department head expects from their teachers and around what each student has the entitlement to expect from their teachers. Such initiatives harness the potential for teacher and pupil improvement because they lay the foundations for consistency of practice and expectations.

As individual teachers, we are ultimately part of teams in which securing high standards should be the main drivers of our daily practice. In this respect, although the team in which you may work may currently do none of the above, by introducing these areas in your work you have the potential as an individual to drive standards of achievement and engagement forward, modelling for others the potential that resides in effective teams. However, a word of caution if you are a lone voice in the wilderness of your team, start your initiatives small, maybe choosing one or two new approaches to try out making mistakes and revisiting and refining your practice in the security of your classroom or with a colleague who you know shares your philosophy and passion. Perhaps you might consider team-teaching with the other teacher or maybe enlist the support and insights of your teaching assistant or other in-class supporters. And whatever you do don't forget to ask the students what they think about these changes.

You might wish to begin distilling good practice in order to develop a teaching and learning policy and in order to do that you could simply write a list of some of the things that make for successful practice and then share that with the wider department team or with another teacher or teaching assistant with whom you work closely. What do they think? By beginning this conversation you will be moving your practice forward by exploring key concepts related to effective learning.

Through this process you will begin to understand the shift towards personalised learning and through this you will doubtless discover the potency of developing assessment for learning practice in your classroom.

The focus on individual needs and the emphasis on monitoring and evaluation in promoting effective learning is what lies at the heart of the move toward afl in schools. Afl approaches have much to offer in the drive to develop personalised learning and these approaches lie at the heart of the new Ofsted inspection framework, where assessment of and for learning are influential elements of inspection.

In some schools there is little real dialogue around effective learning and teaching, either across teams or within teams. This is because some subject specialists see themselves as just that - they don't see themselves as a school-wide driver for improvement. Thus they can lack the inclination to move beyond subject boundaries. Clearly articulated whole-team and whole-organisation policies help to promote the idea that we learn from each other in a professional climate of respect with mutually shared values.

By looking briefly at one area, that of afl, we begin to see how these initiatives can easily be absorbed into planning and delivery of teaching, regardless of whether you are a historian, a PE teacher or a modern linguist.

Assessment for learning
When classroom observations are undertaken by colleagues or inspectors the quality of learning will be reviewed in detail with observers expecting to see that pupils:

• know what they are learning
• know whether they are consolidating previous skills or learning new ones
• make links between previous and current learning
• can work independently
• collaborate with other pupils

In other areas, such as the enjoyment of learning, quality of provision, assessment to support learning and pupil progress, consistency regarding AfL practice can provide a cornerstone for quality classroom experiences, with AfL enabling teachers to differentiate effectively for all learners, thus providing the type of personalised approach good practitioners are striving for.

In essence the key to AfL is students being active participants in their own learning. This requires teachers to consider and plan for ways in which content can be manipulated towards these ends.

Key characteristics of assessment for learning

• 'Sharing learning objectives with pupils
• Helping pupils to know and recognise the standards they are aiming for
• Involving pupils in peer and self-assessment
• Providing feedback that leads pupils to recognising their next steps and how to take them
• Promoting confidence that every pupil can improve
• Involving both teacher and pupil in reviewing and reflecting on assessment information.'

Pedagogy and Practice, Teaching and Learning in Secondary School, Unit 12: Assessment for Learning, National Strategies

Useful tools and techniques
There are a variety of sources where you can discover more about the underpinning principles of afl. These include: Pedagogy and Practice, Teaching and Learning in Secondary School, Unit 12: Assessment for Learning (National Strategies), Working Inside the Black Box (nferNelson, London, 2002), Testing, Motivation and Learning (The Assessment Reform Group, Cambridge, 2002).

As classroom practitioners, our most influential developments are often those which are easy enough for us to incorporate in our teaching without overhauling our entire planning regime. For this reason, I include here some simple approaches to developing afl in your classroom that most of us will find easy to incorporate into our practice. Do remember to evaluate the impact of these by discussing them with your students and by reviewing them with colleagues as part of your drive to improve standards.

Student review
 
Introduce the notion of a learning partner and as part of your plenary or as a mini-plenary introduce some protocols to support students reviewing each other’s learning.

Comment-only marking
This is intended to provide students with a focus for progression and the initial marking is undertaken by their learning partner. Each student has to review the other's work by reviewing it against the success criteria for the task. Once they have decided on the level that has been achieved, they write why they have made that decision, suggest further improvements and then sign their name and date their work. This ensures that there is a progress map of achievement and each marking partner accepts responsibility for their comments which the teacher can then review in detailed marking as appropriate.

Pupil-teacher feedback
Building on the previous idea, the teacher carries out a regular review of work and targets set and then uses these to identify the areas which are causing most problems for learners and refocuses lesson planning accordingly.

Student questioning
Create opportunities for students to ask questions. Allow time for this to eliminate ambiguity related to assessment activities. You might also consider having a question box in the classroom where you could then review any written questions and plan for these in your next lessons in the series.

No hands up
Look carefully at your question and answer approaches. If these are not carefully structured you will often find the same students answering questions in every lesson, thus leaving a large number of the students as passengers, just along for the ride.

Introduce wait-time before selecting students to answer questions. If you have an interactive white board (IWB), you will probably have a programme which allows students to be selected simply by pushing on a scrolling register, if you haven't got this you will need to ensure you involve students by thoughtful selection.

You tell the students that you are going to ask them a question and that they have 30 seconds thinking time and then you will select someone to answer. This ensures that all learners are encouraged to listen and to participate. This is a useful approach in all classrooms but it is particularly useful in mixed gender groups where some boys tend to be the risk takers, answering questions even before they have been asked!

Open versus closed questions
Closed questions can be useful, but they are not very successful when encouraging thinking skills and promoting higher-level thinking. Open questions are more likely to do this and thus improve learning.

Example closed question: 'Did you have dinner last night?'
Example open question: 'Which part of your dinner do you most enjoy and why is that?'

Lesson target setting
Lessons can become more purposeful if students set themselves targets for the duration of the lesson which are related to the lesson objectives. These can then be referred to throughout the lesson and revisited during the plenary. Learning partners and in-class supporters as well as the teacher can be checking on progress towards these targets as the lesson progresses.

SMART targets
Ensure that students understand that targets are there to support their learning not to reinforce their failure and for this reason they have to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bonded.

Traffic lights
Use these as a visual means of showing understanding. Some schools have incorporated into their planners sheets of green, red and amber paper, thus enabling students to discretely signal their progress without calling attention to areas which some will regard as weaknesses and will not want to share when the teacher asks the age old question 'Does everybody understand?'

Put simply, the student opens their planner to the colour that relates to their progress and the teacher using the traffic light approach can see at a glance where he/she needs to focus attention. The traffic light also signals to the learning partner that there is a possible confusion, this then limits potential time off-task.

If your school has not got planners or has not included the traffic light system in their planners, it is fairly inexpensive and easy to do a class set of credit card sized paper in the three colours, joined by a treasury tag that can be distributed at the start of each lesson.

Achieving high-quality learning and teaching is every team's goal and achieving this through a commonly agreed, consistent framework of practices has the power to transform learning. By extending dialogue and collaboration beyond our own classroom and our teams we can begin to learn from each other in a meaningful 21st century manner.

References
Pedagogy and Practice, Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools, Unit 12, Assessment for learning http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/96853

Black, PJ et al (2002), Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom, nferNelson: London

Assessment Reform Group (2002), Testing, Motivation and Learning, ARG, Cambridge

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Written by: Lynn Maidment

About the Author:
Lynn Maidment is an education consultant whose company Beacon Development and Training specialises in high quality school staff training, development and interim management.