Thinking About Assessment Feedback Lessons

It's been a while since I've blogged, but that isn't to say I haven't been doing a lot of thinking. I've been busy in the classroom and working with the Complete Mathematics team, and to say that the last two years have been incredible in terms of CPD would be an understatement.

At the beginning of the school year during a whole-school staff meeting, our department got on to the topic of feeding back on assessments. This has led to a bit of a journey on my part.
Initially, the discussions centred on teachers giving tests back, going through the test, and then directing pupils to revise in their own time. I gave this some thought, revisited my past experiences, and asked 'Can't we do better than that?'.

I left it a few months, and wanted to give this some deep thought, so I tweeted:

#mathstlp I think this might be a big one.

Assessment feedback lessons.

You know, you've marked the test, and you need to give their scores back, report attainment levels and look back over their work.

What do you do?

— Dave Taylor (@taylorda01) January 8, 2023

I haven't yet had the chance to get into it, but I think now is the time! The next few blog posts will dive into this in a little more depth.

When searching 'define:assessment' Google suggests some similar words to assessment.
Evaluation, judgement, gauging and rating are a handful.

This feeds into two of the big questions that I've been asking myself about assessment are:
1. Why do we assess pupils?
2. How do we best give feedback on the assessment to pupils?

Assessment happens at all times in the mathematics classroom as teachers gauge how well (or not, at times) their lessons are going. Asking a question is an assessment, providing an activity for pupils to complete is an assessment and asking for pupils to respond on mini-whiteboards is an assessment. Further along the spectrum, having pupils sit in silence for one hour working in an A4 booklet is also an assessment. Assessment is a key part of our lessons, so it's important that we harness it.

We can split assessment into two types - formative, and summative.

I think of formative assessment as helping us to decide the next stage of the lesson and the direction that our learning episode continues.
Summative assessment, on the other hand, gives us an opportunity to compare the class against each other or to compare each pupil against a pre-determined grading system in the hope that learning has occurred and progress had been made.

A colleague recently spoke to me about the feedback he'd given a trainee teacher. The trainee had taken responses from pupils but had failed to act on them. When he asked 'Why did you ask for answers from the pupils?' the response was along the lines of 'That's what teachers do - they ask questions'.

I'm of the opinion that there's very little point in asking a question if you already know the answer, or if you're not going to do anything with the answer.
Sometimes lessons can feel a little bit like a game show - only the correct answer is important - but it's vital that we allow pupils to feel safe in giving incorrect answers or saying 'I'm not sure' and 'I don't know' so that they understand that school isn't one big quiz in which they're expected to win the grand prize.

In my opinion, formative assessment (AfL - assessment FOR learning, or 'responsive teaching') provides the cornerstone of effective mathematics teaching and should be present at all times to ensure that we are responsive to the needs of our pupils.
This might be a reaction to work which is produced in exercise books, with the teacher altering the course of the lesson based on what they observe as they circulate, or could be in response to whole-class responses on mini-whiteboards, or pupils answering multiple-choice questions using their fingers or lettered/coloured cards. The important part is that learning episodes are directed by the information we collect and that it's OK to throw the plan out of the window if it isn't serving the needs of the young people in front of us.

I feel that this path is well-worn, and the conclusion of these discussions seems to be strong: if you're basing your decisions in the classrooms on the responses of a confident few, then you're doing the rest of the pupils a disservice.
You don't take a group abseiling down a cliff face based on one person fastening their harness securely without checking the rest, and you don't move on to new learning because one pupil has 'got it' without checking the rest.

The part of assessment that I'm more concerned with at the moment is making 'summative assessments' (or 'tests') more formative. I'm thinking about end-of-unit assessments, where pupils get a score and we move on, or Year 10/Year 11 mocks, where pupils are given a grade and we/they move on. I want to be more impactful when responding to such assessments, and I want the time taken to leave an impression on pupils' knowledge and understanding, rather than being the messenger about the grade they've scored and the catalyst of significant disruption where the pupil attempts to identify their place in the pecking order.

I'll be using forthcoming blogs to digest responses to the prior-mentioned tweet and think about the best way to increase the impact of these lessons, testing it out on my Year 10s as they complete their mock examinations over the next month. My intention is to share the process I've developed, the outcomes in the classroom, and whether I think it has improved my impactfulness or not. 

Hopefully, you'll take something from it!