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Designed by TG Design
Tudor Grange Academies Trust
www.worcs.tgacademy.org.uk
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www.solihull.tgacademy.org.uk
www.redditch.tgacademy.org.uk
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Assessment, marking and feedback.
A Guidance Document.
Tudor Grange Academies Trust AMF Guidance v4.indd 3
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‘The main purpose of feedback is to reduce discrepancies between current understandings and performance and a goal.’
Within the Trust we maintain a rigorous focus on ensuring that we provide well structured learning experiences and appropriate feedback as we believe that outstanding practice transforms outcomes for all students. It is our view that an outstanding teacher is an ‘all rounder’, someone who is so skilled and so confident that he or she instinctively makes the right decisions at the right time for all learners. Such practitioners make what is highly complex appear to be natural and simple.
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We are very clear that outstanding assessment, marking and feedback routines cannot be achieved without fundamentally good and outstanding teaching and learning. Two of the essential attributes we try to support in every practitioner are: • •
very secure subject knowledge, which includes a very deep understanding of the specific cognitive processes required in their subject area a very secure grasp of the language required to efficiently and clearly communicate the quality of their understanding of their subject
Practitioners with these attributes plan effective schemes for learning which include appropriate learning experiences and clear assessment milestones for short, medium and long term goals. Outstanding practitioners are also able to model with such success that progress is accelerated for all students through this process alone.
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Key Principles of Effective use of Assessment in TGAT An outstanding practitioner will intuitively and constantly ask what appears to be secure and what the next steps are for each learner, identifying accurately when: •
the learner is secure and the main need is to confirm understanding or overlearn so learning is retained long term.
•
the learner is secure in some aspects of learning but needs to add to this.
•
the learner needs to fine tune understanding.
•
learning is insecure and this is attributable to a lack of metacognitive ability: a lack of ability to apply learning/ problem solve independently and therefore the learner needs to address this to secure more confident and independent learning.
•
ideas of self (esteem) or ability issues are stagnating progress.
•
cognitive process issues are evident and therefore a focus on cognitive tactics will probably enable faster progress.
Precision in the diagnosis of the learner and learning that has taken place leads to appropriate interventions. When assessment, marking and feedback is outstanding, the learner is evidently given the time and space needed to respond to personalised feedback which includes well designed, appropriate learning activities outlined in marking. Clearly, such precision and personalisation of feedback is very demanding. Within the Trust we focus on collaboratively planning and writing detailed, richly resourced schemes of learning which support outstanding assessment for learning routines. Outstanding schemes of work anticipate student responses and therefore differentiated learning experiences are planned for and well resourced, supporting the individual teacher in providing appropriate learning experiences for all. Rigour in our application of this guidance and monitoring of the quality of assessment, marking and feedback is essential as it is our view that poor feedback can actually be worse and more detrimental than no feedback at all.
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Key Principles Explained ‘Ensuring that all students know what quality work looks like has a profound impact on achievement gaps.’ Outstanding modelling sustains accelerated progress for high ability learners as well as learners who are yet to develop competence, however, there is no point modelling rudimentary outcomes to a group who, the teacher should be aware, already quite instinctively know what success looks like. Only much more complex models and challenging cognitive processes should be modelled to already competent learners. Outstanding schemes of work naturally support highly differentiated approaches determined by learner attributes. As this guidance has already stated, detailed schemes support efficient planning and marking and feedback and so this is a strong focus of the Trust. The commentary below has been included to provide some clarity on effective differentiation in response to accurate assessment of students’ needs: Commentary: I was privileged to watch two year 9 English lessons in the same day based on the same scheme of work and the same learning intentions: mastery of persuasive writing. In the first Year 9 lesson, which was focused on constructing the first paragraph of a persuasive writing response, the class studied how to use the device of a rhetorical question to engage the reader through close analysis of models and then through the teacher modelling the construction of a model response. The students tested the impact of this single device by co-constructing examples of their own, this collaborative learning phase was very effectively scaffolded by the teacher. The group were taught to apply this ‘formula’ and were advised to always use this device as an opener. Students became highly proficient and confident in their use of this device and surprised the teacher with their grasp of tone and sense of audience, she therefore, during a feedback conversation, articulated how she had decided to teach personal anecdote for the next lesson to offer the students a second choice of device for their opening paragraph because she perceived that, on the whole, the class were ready to accept more challenge and demonstrate higher order thinking by making more self-directed choices. Supported by the same scheme of work, I observed a higher ability group who, the teacher had assessed, were secure in constructing successful openings in persuasive writing and proficient in the use of simple devices such as rhetorical questions. The teacher recognised that the students needed to develop a more acute awareness of selecting more demanding stylistic devices for openings to secure the highest grades. The teacher very effectively deconstructed models which featured the use of satire, extended metaphor and personal anecdote and devised appropriate activities to invite the students to collaboratively assess the effectiveness of each device. This then developed so that the students were supported in experimenting collaboratively with each of the devices, the most secure outcomes were very effectively shared with the whole group and analysed for how impact had been created. The teacher explained that she felt next steps were to continue to experiment with these approaches in response to other sample tasks before moving to an individual response which would be assessed for the quality of their selection of device and the execution of use of this. Both teachers were delivering the same scheme of work and were relying on resources available within this scheme.
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An outstanding practitioner will intuitively ask what appears to be secure and what the next steps are for each learner. It is the responsibility of the teacher to effectively assess the next key levers for each individual learner and, in response to this, plan learning experiences which will sustain tangible, accelerated progress. In terms of marking, a dialogue with the learner should be imagined and then the ‘conversation’ flows, the teacher naturally fluctuating between a diagnostic comment and a support strategy. This may be achieved through a structure of: Diagnostic sentence/ what went well Diagnostic sentence/ what went well Diagnostic sentence/ what went well Target/ remedy/ even better if Target/ remedy/ even better if OR Summary comment Diagnostic sentence/ what went well+ Target/ remedy/ even better if Diagnostic sentence/ what went well+ Target/ remedy/ even better if (see example approaches in the Trust booklet of examples of marking and feedback)
It is the pertinence of the diagnostic comments and the appropriateness and clarity of the actions to be taken which determine the efficacy of the feedback.
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Winne and Butler (1994) provided an excellent summary in their view that: “feedback is information with which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies”. In practice this may take the form of the following diagnoses of learner attributes, a teacher should be confident in what they have assessed the need to be and their comment should reflect this very explicitly. Before constructing any written or verbal feedback the teacher will have precisely diagnosed one or more of the following, that: •
the learner is secure and the main need is to confirm understanding or overlearn so learning is retained long term.
•
the learner is secure in some aspects of learning but needs to add to this.
•
the learner needs to fine tune understanding.
•
learning is insecure and this is attributable to a lack of metacognitive ability: a lack of ability to apply learning/ problem solve independently and therefore the learner needs to address this to secure more confident and independent learning.
•
ideas of self (esteem) or ability issues are stagnating progress.
•
cognitive process issues are evident and therefore a focus on cognitive tactics will probably enable faster progress.
What do we expect this to look like in the form of the feedback the children receive? When feedback and marking is outstanding the quality of the diagnosis the teacher has made is very explicit and the way the learner is directed to move the learner forward is very clear and measurable.
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The following section provides some suggestions as to what feedback may look like. This section has been provided for clarification rather than to suggest that this is what marking must look like within students’ books or files. When the learner has been diagnosed as secure and needing to confirm understanding, the teacher may write: It is clear to me that you are now secure in your understanding of… to affirm this I would now like you to…
When the learner has been diagnosed as secure in some aspects of learning but now needs to add to this, the teacher may write: You have a secure grasp of … you now need to add to this an equally secure understanding of… in order to secure this you need to…
When it has been diagnosed that the learner needs to fine tune understanding, the teacher may write: It is clear to me that you are secure in… but you seem to have misunderstood the concept of …in order to address this you need to… You are beginning to develop an understanding of … in order to fine tune this I want you to …
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When the teacher has identified insecure learning due to a lack of metacognitive ability and this needs to be addressed to secure more confident learning, the teacher may write: I understand from your work that you are finding it difficult to think clearly/ logically/ when … in order to remedy this I would like you to…
When the teacher has identified ideas of self (esteem) or ability issues are stagnating progress, the teacher may write: I know that you think/ feel … we need to address this quickly so that it is not a barrier to your learning. I think we should…
When the teacher has identified cognitive process issues and that cognitive tactics will probably enable faster progress, the teacher may write: You seem to be able to think through the first stages of… now I want you to use the following thinking framework in order to support…
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Feedback may therefore include: enhanced challenges, more self-regulation over the learning process, greater fluency and automaticity, more strategies and processes to work on the tasks, deeper understanding, and more information about what is and what is not understood. The use of ‘feed-forward’ questioning can have some of the most powerful impacts on learning.
Poor feedback can actually be worse and more detrimental than no feedback at all. Unclear evaluative feedback, which fails to clearly specify the grounds on which students have met with achievement success or otherwise, is likely to: ‘exacerbate negative outcomes; engender uncertain self- images, and lead to poor performance’ (Thompson, 1997, 1998, 1999; Thompson & Richardson, 2001). On the flip side, ‘undeserved success feedback increases outcome uncertainty and can lead to increases in selfhandicapping strategies’ (Smith, Snyder, & Handelsman, 1982). As Berglas and Jones (1978) claimed, ‘self-handicapping stems from a capricious, chaotic feedback reinforcement history, suggesting that “it is not that their histories are pocketed with repeated failure; they have been amply rewarded, but in ways and on occasions that leave them deeply uncertain about what the reward was for” (p. 407). Classroom climate is always palpably positive when outstanding assessment, feedback and marking routines are established. Making errors and struggling with achieving mastery are very much seen as a part of learning. Where assessment routines are not embedded and the learning process has not been valued enough, learning is limited because there is personal risk involved in responding publicly and failing.
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Effective planning and well written, richly resourced schemes of learning support outstanding assessment for learning routines Within the Trust we expect that schemes for learning and collaboration between colleagues within subject areas supports practitioners in embedded assessment routines, namely: 1. Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success 2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning 3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward 4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another 5. Activating learners as the owners of their own learning (summarised from ‘Embedded Formative Assessment’, Dylan William)
Outstanding marking, assessment and feedback routines can be maintained without causing workload issues. The Trust policy on ‘Assessment, marking and feedback’ suggests that only key pieces of students’ written work should be carefully selected for detailed marking. The guidance in this document also suggests that collaboratively planned, well written and richly resourced schemes of work will support teachers in managing their workload whilst sustaining outstanding assessment and marking routines. Continuous professional development opportunities within the Trust will constantly revisit all areas of practice outlined in the list above, ensuring that all practitioners are clear as to what outstanding practice looks. Suggested further professional reading: ‘Embedded Formative Assessment’, Dylan William ‘The Power of Feedback’, Review of Educational Research, John Hattie and Helen Timperley
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