After the Flood Richard Pearce

expresses so eloquently, ‘[L]ooking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does.’

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Educational assessment is a shared, socially constructed enterprise. Principal and assistant examiners are engaged in a dialogue concerning educational standards and the limits of what is acceptable in a candidate’s response to an assessment item. Such dialogue is not restricted to establishing which ‘facts’ the candidate is required to reproduce. It will be more sophisticated than that because it is likely to address not only the extent of subject knowledge to be displayed by the candidate, but also the forms of words to be used. Command terms or action words such as state, list, defi ne, describe, explain, compare, contrast, calculate, analyse, predict and evaluate, among others, indicate to the candidate the form that each response should take. By reference to a negotiated mark scheme, the assistant examiner interprets the candidate’s response according to the evidence of what the candidate has written (assuming a written examination). Furthermore, the mark scheme must be suffi ciently fl exible to account for interpretation of the unexpected because there will always be ways in which candidates can say things that are not specifi ed in the mark scheme (often referred to as ‘Words To That Effect’/WTTE in a mark scheme) or a candidate may leave gaps for the examiner to fi ll (identifi ed by the label ‘Benefi t Of Doubt’/BOD in a mark scheme).

pedagogical knowledge is an interpretation of realworld knowledge.

The reliability of educational assessment depends on the consistency of examiners in their interpretation of examination materials and candidates’ responses. The sources of this reliability are diverse. Partly, assessment reliability is assured by selection of suitably qualifi ed examiners with experience of teaching to a given specifi cation, but reliability is also assured by examiners being in receipt of relevant training in how to interpret and implement the mark scheme. Whilst it is diffi cult to calculate the exact proportions, the most important component in the assurance of reliability may well be the tacit knowledge that is conferred on an examiner by being part of a wider community of practice in which participants interpret similar candidate responses in broadly similar ways. Many examiners may give the appearance of working in isolation, but quality assurance comes from examiners’ participation in shared discourse which is decentred and socialised. The sociology of such a dispersed community of practice could make a fertile area of academic study. How is discourse reproduced? What is the role of the team leader in the management and reproduction of discourse? How can online professional relationships in the context of educational assessment be maintained, strengthened and made more effective? Further research on such topics seems likely to yield informative insights in this important area for both national and international examination systems. ◆

References

• Bernstein B (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique (Revised edition).

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld. • Jonas M E (2009) A (R)evaluation of Nietzsche’s Anti-democratic Pedagogy: The Overman, Perspectivism, and

Self-overcoming. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28 (2), 153-169.

• Kuhn T S (1970) The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions (Second edition, enlarged). Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. • Nietzsche F (2017) The Will to Power: Selections from the notebooks of the 1880s. (Translated by R K Hill and M A Scarpitti) London: Penguin Classics. Dr James Cambridge has worked

in Britain, the Middle East and Southern Africa in a variety of educational contexts including science teaching, assessment, evaluation, curriculum development, initial teacher education and continuing professional development. ✉ global.education.today@gmail.com

JAMES CARROLL,

DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION COGNITA SCHOOLS

As Cognita Schools’ Director of Education, my job is to ensure that our family of schools across the world are doing everything in their power to give their children the best possible education.

Over the past 15 months, we have launched CENTURY’s AIpowered learning tool in 47 of our

schools. While our journey with AI started during the pandemic, it has now become an important part of teaching and learning in our schools more generally. This academic year alone, our pupils have answered over 5 million questions on the platform. the training and support they would need to turbocharge remote professional

When I was first introduced to CENTURY in June 2018, I remember thinking that the use of AI to help teachers make purposeful interventions and to bring learning to life for students almost seemed a bit too good to be true. In July 2019, we ran a pilot at North Bridge House and saw great potential in the platform and how it could bridge learning from the traditional classroom to extended study at home.

Fast forward to 2021 and we have launched CENTURY in 47 of our schools, across Spain, Switzerland, UK, Brazil and UAE. One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to take our people on this digital journey. Not only were we navigating remote learning for the students during a global pandemic, but this was all new for our teachers in terms of professional development as well. We had to be flexible and look at the needs of each of our individual schools to determine the training and support they would need to turbocharge remote professional development.

Since our schools all had very different starting points, we focused on building connected school communities to provide peer support and navigate the changes together. For example, Hastings School in Spain has built a solid digital strategy and vision over time, and they’ve been able to share their expertise with schools that are earlier on in their digital journey.

We identified a year group or a department that could spearhead the implementation, because cascading early experience was highly effective. Our Digital Education Advisors work closely with colleagues in schools to identify pioneers and champions within the classroom, which has really enabled us to build momentum, rally the teams and move schools on at a pace that suits them, all while delivering that highquality online learning experience.

One of our main areas of focus over the next two to three years will be looking at how we can further develop our digital professional development offering to help teachers use the data provided to them through EdTech to make purposeful interventions and bridge the learning gap after

pandemic, but this was all new for our teachers in terms of professional a very disruptive a very disruptive period.

CENTURY will play a clear role in that because the way the platform provides data is second to

none. You can You can look at group level, look at group level, then at a school level, then at a school level, and then teachers can also look at it down to the class and individual student level.

From a teacher’s perspective, having immediate access to the depth and breadth of data CENTURY provides reduces time spent collating it through other means. Access to high-quality resources, the auto-marked question banks and the ability to automatically personalise learning can all play a role in minimising teacher workload. It all supports

our final focus: to use technology not only to boost academic outcomes, but also to improve student and teacher wellbeing.

We’re in a really great position now to be able to take what has been such an amazing tool during the pandemic, and to look at how it’s going to drive learning within our organisation going forward.

Process over outcomes: Extraordinary possibilities within Early Years education

By Matthew Silvester and Gregory Biggs

There is growing frustration among practitioners and leaders across the education spectrum relating to how the process of learning is being placed as of secondary importance to the summative outcomes of the process. Now, more than ever, we see the open questioning of the relevance of summative judgements that increasingly seem to defi ne the lives of children as discrete categories, without appreciating their broader context, personality, and the characteristics that each child is developing. A question arises from refl ecting on the process vs outcome debate when considering how we design learning journeys for young people: Is the cart leading the horse?

This debate can be broken down to three areas for consideration: ‘What is learnt and taught?’; ‘How is it learnt and taught?’; and ‘Why is it learnt and taught?’. Increasingly, there is a body of opinion that believes that these three areas of consideration are out of balance. Improving learning journeys in the Early Years relies on a process of learning made up of meaningful and appropriate experiences and interactions (the ‘how’ learning is happening); a focus on the outcomes of learning (the ‘what is learnt?’) skews this balance. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Profi le (Department for Education, 2021) illustrated this effect; curriculum narrowing and a lack of focus on the child’s ongoing learning was the result. Teaching to the test became the curriculum (the ‘why’ and ‘what is being learnt?’), ‘with a signifi cant loss of focus on learning, step by step.’ (OFSTED, 2017). With all the extraordinary possibilities this period of human development offers, a curriculum for the Early Years needs to be broad, deep and enriching.

Curriculum is a key measure in educational quality. The rapid expansion of international schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) and Early Years settings around the world, and the increased understanding of the importance of the fi rst 5 years of life, have highlighted the need for a curriculum to ensure that young children experience ambitious learning journeys and get the best start to life and education. The EPPSE project (Taggart et al, 2015) clearly shows that quality of education within the Early Years is central to both improving ongoing learning and development and improving learning throughout schooling and beyond.

Working with hundreds of schools and Early Years settings globally, and having the privilege as parents asking on behalf of our own children in Early Years, we regularly hear a common response to ‘What curriculum does the school learn and teach with?’ ‘We use EYFS’ is the answer used by most. Why is it that the Early Years community is so content for the predominantly outcome- and goal-oriented framework for Early Years (the EYFS) being defi ned as a curriculum? Does purposefully interrupting children to tick off a judgement seem child-focused? Does the ability to demonstrate a tripod grip really do children justice when considering their lifelong learning journey? Learning is an ongoing, incremental and cumulative process, and curriculum is a lived experience, for both learners and teachers; this experience is a key indicator of quality. An Early Years curriculum supports teachers to lead meaningful learning as children explore their environment, express their ideas and intentions, and extend their experiences and interactions, laying the foundations for the future learning journey of each child. The structure of a curriculum needs to support teachers within the process of leading learning, shaping the child’s experience of, and within, the curriculum. A contemporary international Early Years curriculum can ensure that the scope and sequence of learning and development is rigorous and appropriate, but also understand and accept that different contexts will scaffold learning journeys in different ways. It needs to accept and encourage personalisation to specifi c contexts, understanding this to be a key aspect of implementation. If successful, it will be the starting 

Early Years relies on a process of learning made up of meaningful and appropriate experiences and interactions