One of the perils of being a beginning teacher is the process of induction – a series of days away from the school where there is learning about the profession. The learning is frequently useful and the networking is always great. However, it’s hard leaving the students in the hands of relief staff, and it’s even harder adding to the stress levels for the Executive staff.
Today’s course focussed on assessment: assessment for learning and assessment of learning; formative and summative assessment. It was a great day, and I picked up some really useful points. The plenary session had some great information – I particularly liked the educational philosophy about triggering revolutionary possibilities in young people! From the presenters, I learned a great deal more about the nature of assessment for learning. I also learned about taking assessment of learning, and using it to create opportunities to assess for learning. Very cool… Some great information about unit design: take 2-5 essential questions and design your unit around them. The questions dictate your content and you plan assessment items around the questions themselves. I’ve heard the term ‘backwards by design’ many times, but this time it actually clicked! Something that I need to do some research on I learned about during a presentation of a Maths teaching/assessing framework. (Remember that I’m an English/Home Science teacher, and I still learned something during that presentation….) It’s a concept called ‘Newman’s Error Analysis’ – apparently it’s a series of questions designed to get the students actually engaging with a problem rather than being helpless hand wavers. I’ll post some results after I’ve done the research.
From the discussion/sharing/networking I pulled out some brilliant strategies for teaching and assessing spelling. I particularly like the idea of giving 3/4 possible spellings of a word to a group of students and having them figure out which one is correct, explain to the class why they think it’s correct, and only then check the words in the dictionary. Another version is ticking all the correct letters, and providing written feedback on what went wrong and why. I’m actually going to try that one on my English students tomorrow morning for their end of week spelling test. There were some extremely useful ideas about points to include on unit outlines – particularly incorporating the outcomes as questions rather than statements. Also the idea of collecting parent/guardian email addresses, so that homework/assignments could be emailed home as well as given to students.
Next term is about being a reflective practitioner. I’ve suggested that they have a look at blogging!!
