TM4T Techniques 6.1.1.3 - Assessment: Planning

Step 3: Planning.

In order to plan your assessments effectively, you need to have the right tools available. The key tools are:

a) Schemes of Work - what TM4T calls skeleton schemes of work - which outline the sequence of teaching and content of lessons. These are called skeleton schemes of work because they do not prescribe exactly what activities or exercises will be undertaken. These will vary depending on the class being taught and the context.

b) a Yearly Plan showing key school events, onto which you can add major assessment and other activities (eg Mock Exams, moderator's visits etc).

If you are following the FT2T lesson planning methods (which are explained here) you should prepare a gardening calendar (one per year) and schemes of work (roughly one per term) for each course you teach.

In the FT2T method - and others - assessment is central to learning, and is planned alongside the teaching content. Here is an example of a Scheme of Work (click to enlarge)

This gives quite detailed guidance on the strategy of assessment, but does not prescribe or discount any means of carrying out the assessment itself: for example, Homework 1 Reasons for Travel could be tutor marked, peer assessed, or used as a group presentation.

Based on your personal circumstances, you should therefore evolve your Schemes of Work to include assessment strategies which you can cater for in your daily life. This might include tactics like those listed in Step 1c above (Know your Practical Assessment Techniques) but might involve modifying-or-substituting techniques like those below:

a) Give existing homework task, but do not mark them. Instead, substitute a peer-marked in-class test to cover the same ground.

b) Book an ICT room once a month, and substitute self-marking online tests for the scheduled benchmark tests.

c) Use partial peer-marking (for example, easy questions 1-7 are peer-marked, more difficult questions 8-10 are teacher-marked)

d) Adjust your focused marking targets (see Step 1c above) to reduce the full-marking frequency.

When you have modified your assessment, map it onto your Yearly Plan. An illustration is shown below. In this illustration, there are no particular issues. However some plans may show 'concertina' issues. This means that co-incidentally, a whole group of assessments, marking and other work are squashed together in the same week. You should identify an instances where this occurs, and resolve them (juggle lessons around) when you come to your more detailed planning.