Think you've implemented Assessment for Learning?
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4.5 average rating | Comments (7)
Last Updated:
14 April, 2013
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news
Think again - most schools are doing it wrong, says its creator
It is seen as an essential classroom technique, taught in teacher training colleges and inspected by Ofsted. But despite the seeming ubiquity of Assessment for Learning (AfL), the strategy is largely missing from England's schools, according to the two academics who popularised it.
It is a situation that Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor at the University of London's Institute of Education, views as a "tragedy" - one he blames on the interference of government and on himself.
Fourteen years have passed since Professor Wiliam co-authored Inside the Black Box, the booklet that introduced a generation of teachers to the concept of using assessment to help pupils improve, rather than to grade their knowledge (see panel, right). Tens of thousands of copies have been sold and most teachers and schools are familiar with the term. But the problem, says Professor Wiliam, is that they have not understood it properly.
In his first comments to the media on the failure of the technique to take hold in schools, Professor Wiliam has laid much of the blame at the door of the Labour government for launching its own £150 million AfL scheme in 2008. And he believes the impact is still being felt in schools today.
"There are very few schools where all the principles of AfL, as I understand them, are being implemented effectively," Professor Wiliam told TES. "The problem is that government told schools that it was all about monitoring pupils' progress; it wasn't about pupils becoming owners of their own learning.
"We have (DfE officials) saying: 'We tried AfL and it didn't work.' But that's because (they) didn't try the AfL that does work."
Professor Wiliam's comments follow a similar admission from his Inside the Black Box co-author. In 2010, Professor Paul Black from King's College London said that the technique was not being used in a "very large number of classrooms", also blaming government for emphasising the measurement of pupil progress.
Professor Wiliam said that he and Professor Black were consulted on the government's AfL strategy and pointed out faults, such as its failure to mention the dangers of grading, but to no avail, as "they failed to include some of the most basic ideas that we had been advocating".
John Bangs, honorary visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, described Professor Wiliam's work on AfL as "authoritative and innovative". But he said that the technique had not had the impact it should have done because of the lack of a proper strategy for teacher professional development.
"Instead we had a highly bureaucratised and ossified way of turning AfL into some kind of weird amalgam of formative and summative assessment where everything had to be recorded to the nth degree," Professor Bangs said.
Professor Wiliam partly blames himself for underplaying a "really crucial aspect" of AfL: "designing your teaching on the assumption that pupils aren't going to get it all the time".
"The big mistake that Paul Black and I made was calling this stuff 'assessment'," he said. "Because when you use the word assessment, people think about tests and exams. For me, AfL is all about better teaching."
How it should be
Dylan Wiliam's key Assessment for Learning strategies:
Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions.
Eliciting evidence of pupil learning, through the use of tests and quizzes, for example.
Providing feedback that moves learning forward.
Using pupils as learning resources for one another, through methods such as peer assessment and peer tutoring.
Encouraging pupils to be owners of their own learning, through self-assessment and other methods.
Comment (7)
14 years is a long time to try and understand something! What is wrong with the word "assessment" if it measures some aspect of learning? I think we have to agree about what we are doing to find out if the learner has improved that is he understands more, he can explain in his own words very clearly his 'new' knowledge and can apply what he now knows better. He has made good progress, is that not what we want to find out? Sensational terms or not! Simplicity is always a good thing, if I use a formative test I am "assessing" some knowledge or other!
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15:07
13 July, 2012
fraydom
Is it me or are professionals making it more complicated than it is? 3 questions I always instil into the learners: WHERE AM I NOW? WHERE COULD I BE? HOW DO I GET THERE? Learners still expect to complete a piece of work without ever actually identifying what the assessment outcome is supposed to be and I do not just mean marking! What have they really learnt - Q+A in their own pairings, buddy systems etc. Maybe it is I who have got it wrong - simple fact of the matter is if the learner recognises where they started and the progression INDEPENDENTLY alongside self and peer techniques than job done!
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19:33
13 July, 2012
mistag
So, teachers are doing something else wrong. Who'd have known? If only the educational experts would tell us which set of educational experts we should be listening to, then we might stand a chance of getting it right. I'm reminded of the novel Nice Work by David Lodge - where Professors jet around the world on lecturing tours, collecting fat fees for their efforts. But what I know - I'm only a teacher.
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9:56
14 July, 2012
JustMathematics
I have some sympathy with JustMathematics. It is rather ironic that the QCF, the new framework discredited by Wolf in her report on vocational qualifications that told the SS what he wanted to hear, lends itself to the "true AfL" described yet is largely only usable in FE. Yes all these things can be abused and will be if the pressure of accountability drives things in that direction. This is the snag when people that know enough to be dangerous drive a complex system that they think is simple. Its why the problems with AfL arose and its why politics and education don't mix at an operational level.
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12:07
14 July, 2012
INGOTIAN
fraydom's comment is an almost perfect example of teacher's completely misunderstanding AfL. AfL is not about 'measuring some aspect of learning': measuring learning (such as through tests) is what summative assessment does. Having a child explain their new learning at the end of a lesson is all well and good, but I'd rather find out about the child who is struggling in the middle of a lesson: AfL is essentially there to help that child, helping them identify what it is they need to do, and allowing the teacher to give them feedback to help them move on, ideally in the same lesson.
Trouble is, the politicians very successfully hijacked Afl within a few years of Inside the Black Box, and convinced a generation of new teachers that AfL was about sub-levelling, APP, tracking and the frankly laughable notion of 'using summative tests formatively'. Meanwhile, slapping your learning objectives on the board is enough to convince the failed teachers from Ofsted that you are 'doing' AfL in the classroom.
Even Dylan Wiliam makes it more complicated than it needs to be because, at its heart, AfL is simply about giving children feedback that they can act upon as soon as possible.
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0:54
15 July, 2012
sulla
To anyone who has not just finished an exhausting year at the chalk face, back off and leave us alone. Let us recover from the last term before you start telling us something else we aren't getting right. Why don't you have a look at what the bankers or the wretched coalition government are doing and give us a rest for 5 minutes. As they used to say on 'Friends', Professor Williams, Professor Black, Professor Bangs, ENOUGH ALREADY! Its summer and for a few weeks, we just don't care!!!
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22:56
19 July, 2012
minnie123
The real culprit for individual, long term, critical must know, learning is the one to many teaching approach
Where individual, long term, critical must know learning, = Appropriate, Professionally Facilitated: initial understanding, ongoing reinforcement, fluency/mastery, recall (eliminating forgetting), application, stick/behavior change, adaptive reasoning skills, in the most effective and most efficient way possible
All of the solid brain based, learning proven, classroom proven, learning research points to replacing the one to many teaching approach with a truly personalized learning approach...what I call the new learning model:
“ Instructor facilitated, truly personalized learning, over time, with Instructor facilitated, truly personalized reinforcement, over time, in an Instructor facilitated, truly personalized, blended learning environment, over time”.
I'm interested in knowing why this new model has not been embraced
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16:14
14 August, 2012
TomMcDonald