When you teach for long enough
you’ll see many ideas and acronyms come and go, and for the most part with good
reason. Anyone who had the misfortune of
having to experience APP will be relieved that particular concept came, and disappeared
just as quickly. One idea that seems to
have stuck however, is the concept of assessment for learning. Assessment for Learning is the process of
seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to
decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how
best to get there. In short, it is used
to assess how much progress your students are making.
The most traditional form of AFL
is marking; this doesn’t give you any real-time evidence for how students are
progressing during the lesson. I’ve
found that lesson based AFL is one of the holy grails in teaching as when used effectively
can be used to hang your lessons on.
Below I’ve tried to outline some innovative ways of using AFL which you
can use within your own practice.
Simple class responses when questioned how much they know
The whole point of AFL is to get
an idea about how much students have understood. There are a few different ways of doing this
throughout the lesson that take little or no planning or resources. Some of the methods I have used are:
- Thumbs up or down: The way I use this method allows students to angle their thumbs to show where on a scale their understanding is; thumbs up meaning completely understands, thumbs down meaning they understand nothing and anywhere in-between.
- Coloured cards: Students can have red & green coloured cards that they can have out to show if they have understood a particular part of the lesson.
- Stand up or sit down: This method can be used by asking students to stay stood up if they understand what you have been through. You can then ask the students questions who have stayed stood up.
Literature Games
One key point in any lesson is
how you use literacy within it. In my opinion nearly every lesson should have
some aspect or activity where students must read something to cover an area of
content. As it’s been proven that the
more students read the higher their reading age becomes, and the higher their
reading age, the better their chances of achieving higher exam results. The trick is to firstly get students reading
without any innate barriers going up, and secondly checking that they have read
what they have been given. This is where
AFL comes in.
There are a few ways that I’ve
found work well in regards to assessing how much students have understood from
what they have read. So, the question is
“how do I get students to work through a series of questions on what they have
just read without realising that they are working through a set of questions?” The conclusion that I have come to is to
place the questions that you want to ask in some sort of game. Some of the games I use are snakes &
ladders, battleships, pacman, various grid games and many more. Once students have had chance to work though
the game and answer all the questions you can carry out a bit of AFL. The easiest thing to do is direct the
questions from the game to specific students and check the answers you get.
Dice games
Every teacher should have a big
bag of dice in their class room that can be used for a variety of reasons. AFL often includes a range of questions based
on what students have just covered. If
you simply give students a list of questions to work through their likely to get
bored as they probably spend a fair amount of their week just answering
questions. The solution to this problem
is to use just six questions that students pick to answer by rolling a
dice. By doing this they don’t naturally
equate it with answering questions and you can still assess how much they have
understood.
The use
of the letters A-D
One of the more baffling things I’ve
found with the new structure of A Level papers is that the first few questions
are multiple choice. I have however,
discovered that for whatever reason my students find answering this type of
question harder that long answer ones.
As of late I have been trying to drop in a couple of these types of
question into lessons which act as AFL questions for the content you have just
worked through.
Directed questioning
This type of AFL doubles up as a
type of easy differentiation you can use within your own practice. This method relies on knowing your audience and
the level that they are working at.
After you have finished working through an activity or in some cases
during it, simply ask specific students differentiated questions based on what
they are covering.
Peer Marking
Peer marking is often a contentious method.
Using it relies on students understanding what the correct answer is and that
they will be able to mark answer without being overly harsh or generous. The other major problem with peer marking is
the quality of the feedback that they give each other. If the feedback they give doesn’t aid progress
has it been worth the time it has taken them to give it? The way that I think effective peer marking
should be carried out follows a few key concepts.
Firstly, if I’m getting students
to do any peer marking I get them to do it in green pen. If students do their marking in green it is
easy for them to distinguish between their marking and mine. It also gives an opportunity to easily
comment and give feedback on the quality of peer feedback.
When getting students to make
each other’s work don’t presume that they will automatically know how to do
it. It’s been my experience that most
students have no idea how to mark a piece of work. The way to get around this is to give students
a strict framework to mark to. If you
want students to mark for SPAG, give them the key words that need to be spelt
correctly. If you want students to mark
for specific content get them using a mark scheme to allow them to see what the
correct answers are. Using peer marking
takes some time to get right as your students will need some training, however,
it’s a useful tool to have I your arsenal.
The last main way to carry out
AFL in a lesson is to listen out for what students are saying. By just listening you’ll pick up on how much
students have understood. I hope that
this has given you some inspiration about things you use for AFL within your
own teaching.
If you have enjoyed reading this,
you can find me on Facebook @teachlikeahero and on Twitter at @teacherchalky1
Thanks for reading
David Chalk
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