Formative A.

The word “assessment” has become quite a bad word in the education scene, and in particular, a country like Singapore is highly sensitive to that word. So when we talk about formative assessment, a lot more attention than is due is often placed on the thought of assessment rather than the idea of it being formative — something that helps students attain the next level of achievement en route to a learning outcome. It’s not scary. It actually makes a lot of sense.

What was also interesting today was hearing teachers from England and the USA talking about AfL and trying to figure out the subtext in what they were saying, to get a sense of whether we all use AfL in the same way in class. And i guess the same pressures are in every classroom: students are not always convinced that they are learning if they are not writing something that will be marked and returned by the teacher; teachers don’t always ask the right questions to do AfL; the AfL task is not always truly AfL.

As we looked at sample lessons and student work in the discussion about AfL today, i found myself going back to a rather familiar train of thought that went something in this order:

1. A fun classroom activity is often a very useful and engaging AfL task, tapping on various modes and media for students to represent their learning and move to deeper forms of performance of understanding
2. But too often, many (Singapore) teachers discount the amount of learning that takes place in things like recitation (expressing one’s understanding of meaning through tone and emphases etc), group work (verbalising one’s understanding and checking that with peers, then correcting one another and adjusting the expression of one’s understanding), and creative work that taps on different modes of representation. There is a reliance on the traditional pen-and-paper response to a conventional type of question that often isn’t too authentic.
3. The best teachers are able to tap on opportunities in the classroom to underscore the learning that students do through an activity, and make that learning visible and clear to the students.
4. Often, that process has to do with the effective and skillful use of questions.
5. But many teachers are not naturally good question askers — first roadblock. How do we teach teachers to ask good questions?
6. Do they want to learn? — second roadblock. What is my belief about teachers and their belief about themselves and their students?
7. If we were to teach teachers the pattern of effective questioning, how organically would they be able to use it in class? Will they end up only following the letter and not the spirit?
8. How do we help teachers differentiate between the letter and the spirit of any strategy, especially that of AfL? Can something that is learnt step-by-step ever be used organically?

But the other thing that i was thinking about regarding students working through a task was also whether they learn better when they get the bigger picture first, then set criteria as a learning community, then work down to the details as they consider effect first. Rather than to always break things down to smaller parts for students and then just force them to piece it back in the exact way we tell them to…backward engineering might work better in a task-based curriculum.

The next thing i need to think about more is about teacher belief. Teacher-training should focus on reshaping teacher beliefs, and not about equipping teachers with more strategies and skills. More on that later.