- teachers need to mark student work, provide timely, relevant and specific Feed-Back and Feed-Forward.
Writing this in a student's book at night for the child to read the next day, is fraught with issues. Tiredness, frame of mind (the influence of a glass of wine?), the background knowledge that exists in the teacher's mind but perhaps not in the child's, latency etc.
- conferencing with the child and making a notation at that time is the ideal - but again, that feed-back and feed-forward is not readily accessible by parents.
We need a new system
- one that provides an audience for student work and engages parents in the teaching and learning process - the third leg of the learning stool. (NB: Three legged stool is the symbol of Chieftainship in Ghana.)
- one that ensures the Ministry focus on Plain Language reporting, reporting against the National Standards and involving parents in the child’s learning is met effectively, efficiently, and in a much more timely and relevant manner.
- one that provides for a Digital Collaborative Approach
that allows children to
regularly set SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely -
regularly reflect on their goals, and the steps from process to product.
annotate their learning - via video, audio, written annotation or submission
that Allows teachers to
provide timely and relevant feed-back and feed-forward to students on their learning - process to product
share in examples of children’s learning - process to product
provide responses to their children’s learning
that provides the opportunity for anywhere, anytime, with anyone
learning
sharing of learning, process to product
cumulative record of each child’s learning that belongs to the learner and stays with them as they progress within and between learning institutions
allows for Learning Stories to be told that
focus on formative feedback
allow for Summative record of achievement and progress to be formally recorded at least twice a year because...
The most powerful educational tool for raising achievement and preparing children to be lifelong learners, in any context, is formative assessment. The research evidence for this is rigorous and comprehensive. Hattie (2009)
Receiving appropriate feedback is incredibly empowering, because it enables the individual to move forwards, to plot, plan, adjust, rethink, and thus exercise self-regulation in realistic and balanced ways.
So if formative assessment is so important - how should it happen, how could it be recorded and shared?Formative Assessment:
Feedback from peers and teachers which focuses on successes, where the excellence is, and where improvements are needed
Cooperative peer Feedback in which examples of improvement are modelled so that feedback and improvement-making is immediate and part of the lesson
Effective ends to lessons, where learning is summarised and reflected upon
We need a Digital Collaborative Approach that provides for those forms of formative assessment to be incorporated because
Students want to know how to improve their work so that they can do better next time. In my experience, learners tend to be future-focussed.
This Digital Collaborative system needs tools that ensure all the previous criteria are met, are easy to use, effective, efficient, and provide easy access to their work . They need to be based around the understandings that children own their learning, and that parents are regular, active participants in their child’s learning.
This Digital-Collaborative system needs to be highly “Hattie” effective.
Should ensure thatDigital-Collaborative work is for an audience of many through to any.
Should ensure that Digital-collaborative work is available anytime, anywhere, by anyone (with accredited access)
We investigated a variety of tools and ideas and realised that an ePortfolio system was what we needed.
My next blog post will look at the reasons for using an ePortfolio solution...
As outlined in my blog on reporting to parents, we faced some serious problems. They could be summed up by looking at our core business - children's learning.
Presenting it; Sharing it; Moderating it; Marking it; Reporting it to Parents; while Addressing - the Digital Divide, and the Engagement Divide.
The current situation - as for most primary learning institutions in New Zealand, if not the western world in general - is that we use processes, procedures and methods that are little changed in the last 120 years - exercise books, parent conferences, long-term goals (usually six month goals), long-term reflections (usually covering a six month period again), and a plethora of tools that titivate but do little to address the underlying shortcomings of our system.
This system though, does meet the National Standards Reporting to Parents requirements, but compliance should never be the limit of our goals.
The issues with this system
- books are designed for an audience of one. They are inaccessible to parents most of the time, to future teachers, to relatives overseas, to the children outside of school hours (unless they are all lugged home every day, and then they may or may not return).
- setting goals for a six month timeframe is poor practice, goals are often out of date within days (particularly in our junior school where progress can be rapid through the stages of early learning and where steps are often smaller and more specific).