The Landscape of Assessment

Getting things going and pinning things down

Schema and definitions are supposed to help us clarify a dynamic process. With the use of charts I try to represent the dynamic interplay that goes on when we are learning and teaching. Maps and images, once grasped, may be more easily remembered. Getting active education to feel active on the page is not necessarily so easy!  Research confirms just how much is going on in a classroom at any one time, as if we teachers didn't know that. How then do we get a handle on it all? Setting up assessment so that both our students and we as teachers know where they stand, and how well they are learning, requires a framework. The framework needs to be based on relevant skills and how we actually learn.

Overview of  the dynamic between the metacognitive, the formative, and the implementation of skills 

An overview of metacognition, formative learning, and assessment and the activation of skills

Since the late 20c two other types of assessment besides Assessment of Learning (AoL) have been identified in learning. These are typically known as  (AfL) Assessment for Learning and (AaL) Assessment as Learning. Each assessment mode is formally distinctive but also needs to be seen as fluid and interpenetrating between realms. These diagrams  attempt to show the dynamic of how we assess learning in ways that are different according to the function and context, but also how the movement between the realms of metacognition, learning formatively over time, and the activating of skills, all weave together. Each realm mutually influences the others in an evolving process. This might make it easier to see how active formative assessment is really bonded with process based education and why comment and reflection are the engines of both student and teacher development.

The Six Major Skill Areas 

Mastering the skills

This may be the dominant preoccupation for many of us as teachers. Are we supporting our students sufficiently in achieving the skills they need for the challenges they face and the 21c world they must navigate? All the major skills can be identified under the key six categories identified by the NCCA and an enormous number are developed through interaction with others. Self awareness grows in relation to the other. Students come alive when they feel growing competency that is tangible, experienced through their own bodies and reflected back to them. I deliberately represent skills at the earth or soil level since this idea of evolving tool use, activation through our bodies, movement and operation is fundamental to how we know ourselves in the world. I can tie my shoe laces, I can carve, I can write, I can code. Seamus Heaney's poem Digging evokes the contrasts of digging with a spade and writing poetry with a fat squat pen. Both are tools and both require skill. Being Heaney, neither one is elevated over the other.

The metacognitive and formative realms of learning and evaluating are treated in greater depth below. The chart represents the metacognitive (AaL) by contrast with the skills at the sky level,the aerial perspective which offers altitude and overview to learning and is guided by key questions. The formative learning and assessment (AfL) is seen as the middle realm influenced by and influencing the other two realms. The physical is helpful as a metaphor but is also essential for a kinaesthetic knowing and too often abstracted out of classroom learning. Many skills are activated through the limbs, known through the body, and so grow in muscularity and tone. The metacognitive can be seen as how the mind frames strategic questions, adapts, and directs while growing in self awareness. The formative middle realms work in time and represent the duration of the course we are studying. This path we tread together is  book-ended by the projected goal at the end and the criteria at the beginning which is rooted in how we have assessed and diagnosed learning needs.

Assessment as Learning: metacognitive
How do I know what I know?

Functions of the Metacognitive

When our students reflect on what they have learnt and how they learn, questions are activated. These kinds of questions open the door into a much larger awareness of our personal and individual ways of learning and how we can evaluate our strengths and challenges. As we discover the strategies that work for us, the subjects that kindle our interest, and how we can recall and synthesise information, autonomy and self direction become increasingly possible.

For teachers and students the key metacognitive question is 'What do I understand about how I learn?'  Moving easily into this realm gives us altitude and perspective on how we learn. Insight, Eureka experiences, and an enhanced self knowing increase the joy and motivation to learn. We find our way into new experience and we gain leverage to operate, influence, and actively participate in the world.

The awareness that comes at this level redounds to other levels of learning as the chart overview attempts to show. Process is not linear but interactive and cross-fertilising. So reflective practice, the activity at the heart of awareness, shows us how through all the modes and means of learning available to us, we move between the activity of thinking and doing in the implementation of skills. Reflective practice is fundamental.

Formative assessment is anchored
by Criteria Setting and the Goal

Assessment for Learning: formative

How am I doing? Where are my strengths?
Where are my challenges?
Where do I need to develop?

Involving our students directly in choosing the project, in assessing methods that can be practiced and developed, and in understanding why we do the things we do, immediately increases engagement and meaning. Formative learning or Assessment for Learning happens over time and helps the student to see how they are doing through cumulative and qualitative feedback that comes out of shared learning criteria. This requires clear planning so that the goals, students' needs, the learning criteria and the skills are shared and made explicit. The teacher offers leadership without being overtly directive.

Here is an example of launching a play project using this method

Poster for a production
with Fifteen year olds

1. Meeting, mobilising, and framing the context
The project is introduced by framing the context. The teacher meets and mobilises the students, engaging their enthusiasm for how much their participation will shape the venture. Warming  up, stretching and short games prepare the ground here and get them active from the start.

2. Envisioning the goal/theme
Together we survey the task at hand and the imagined learning outcomes. In this case putting on a play and what we are going to be doing to get it underway. We aim to engage our students as much as possible in sensing how their participation will shape the venture. So envisioning the goal and how we get there, conjuring with them imagined challenges and why we are taking this on, can all serve to map the territory and provide opportunities for humour and a sense of security which will enhance confidence in participating. Our voices, our expression, artistic envisioning, timelines, schedules, a script, and individual journals will be used throughout the process, the latter serving as a regular record and as part of the final evaluation.

3. Focus and criteria
The teacher introduces the focus for this lesson and asks for suggestions. Criteria and learning outcomes are very closely related. We use criteria to guide the learning process towards the desired outcomes and to evaluate those outcomes subsequently. Ensuring active skills are well presented, we might also include a quality we are looking for. The focus might include: taking risks and experimenting with the parts we are reading, finding a sense of flow in the first few scenes, full class participation and sensitivity to others. The focus is where we set criteria according to what we diagnose are the needs. This can be done to great effect with the students.

4. Getting underway
Students take over before one third of our class time has gone.

5. Evaluation and Reflective practice
At the end of the lesson the teacher allows ten minutes or so to guide the evaluation of what has occurred and whether the criteria have been met. This can be noted in the journals as reflective practice and also in discussion. Training our students in this might require the teacher to structure the questions initially, based on the criteria. Three questions can go far and can encourage depth. Lots of questions can trigger glibness. The art of questioning is ensuring that we have enough variety and repetition in the right amounts to get our students familiar with the process, and evolving as thoughtful, keen observers and supportive of each other. The growing quality of the work sharpens the relevance for them of this process and is not merely an exercise.

 

Sample Reflective Practice Questions

What was our goal today?
What is our long term goal?
Did we see any interesting risks being taken?
What can taking a risk offer us ?
Did we meet our criteria?
Did the rehearsal flow easily or did we need to stop and start  a lot and if so why?
Did everyone offer focus as actor or as audience?
Why do actors need a good audience?
What is working well?
What needs strengthening?

Out of this a brief discussion can take place and the territory charted for next time. This process easily moves us towards the metacognitive. What is easy for me? What can I learn from him/her? What strategies will help me focus?  What do I appreciate about my fellow students? At the same time, we are building a cooperative body where step by  step we invest together in the project. Evaluation can develop from lesson to lesson as :

Peers evaluate each other 
The whole group evaluates the project 
Director/teacher evaluates the journals and takes in every week
    or every other week to comment on what has been noted down.

Process and Product

A play works towards an end product, as does most significant learning. The challenge in a play is to keep everyone actively engaged all the time. Enrolling the students in diagnosing, defining other supportive roles such as  as designing, set making, handling PR and understanding the role of an appreciative audience, builds a microcosm of a healthy society and can activate a large number of social and communicative skills, The gradual schooling of each person helps in finding a voice and activates an array of skills as the reflective practice slowly builds an awareness of how much is going on here, where the student is in control and responsible for his/her own learning. Playing a part beyond the one in which the students has been cast, learning to observe and critique skilfully, to understand and develop mastery of the  skills as the reflective practice grows, learning from mistakes and taking risks, can all add to the appreciation of hard work. Activated learning takes places at very deep levels as a sophisticated knowing and supportive appreciation of each other comes into play.  This is formative and takes time.

Active learning:  developing fencing skills  for a play project

                                     

The Eight Phases of a Lesson

The play lesson described above also activates the remaining four phases of the eight phase lesson.

More student talking less teacher talking
Student talking and participation increases as the teacher's decreases. Students may well need help to come into this gradually so that every voice is heard, each student takes a turn at facilitation, group work is high functioning and and universally productive.

Multi-faculty learning

Multi-faculty ways of learning increase as kinaesthetic, visual, and auditory modes are all drawn upon in the course of this lesson. The cognitive, the affective, and activity are also drawn upon.

Making

Students' creativity is engaged as they are asked to express, appreciate, observe and comment. The teacher having established the territory can recede, vocally at least.

Memorisation

Memorisation and recall  can be engaged at the beginning of the lesson. This can include reviewing what was achieved in the previous lesson and might include consulting the journals. Sleep, time and distance are great aids in digestion and reflective practice. 

Mapping

Foreshadowing and looking ahead builds context, strengthens group resolve and the sense that both the goal and working in time are held. The message to the students is Your input counts but I  can provide goal and framework.

In an earlier post we looked at: Meeting; Moving and Mobilising; Motivating;  and Multi sensory learning

The Role of the Teacher in Assessment for Learning

The framework the teacher offers is the plan. Over time this can come with the invitation for modifications and questions, as can generating the calendar together and looking at how to pace towards the final goal. Diagnosing needs and setting criteria bookends with reflective practice and evaluation every time. The teacher, in conjunction with the students, offers a search light to make explicit and give a sense of value and opportunity to what might be missed or undervalued. The importance attached to things that might be thrown away, such as the journal commentary, attention to changes, development, and hard work, are all fruits of allowing a reflective space for shared digestion and commentary. 

The fundamental task for the teacher in formative learning is to

• Articulate the goals, set the criteria and framework, and make explicit the activity and skill development that has deepened over time.
• Develop in role from initiator to facilitator to witness and back again where appropriate.
• Ensure the environment is safe so that risk taking and making mistakes are seen as a vital and creative part of learning.
• Develop modes of discussion and decision making that activate all the voices and skills of the group.
• Encourage each student to discover his/her own goals and the highest standard of his/her learning potential.
• Create modes of regular qualitative feedback through a variety of sources: individual and peer group as well as teachers.
• Keep records and summarise your observations.
• Keep your own reflective journal and cultivate practices that support fallow time and insight: the rewind, walking etc.

Questions for the teacher

• How can I apply this model to my own lessons?
• What are the challenges?
• What benefits do I see?

Staying Present. Finding Joy in Presence

What do we know but that we face
One another in this place.
                                                 -W.B. Yeats   'Man and the Echo'

Pressed for time and often hungry for nourishment, teachers are, in the best sense of the phrase, 'giving out' all day long. Like health workers, our profession is intensely human with myriad daily interactions. How do we prepare for that moment when we step into the room and launch our lesson onto the waves, with the wind in our sails and all hands on deck? How do we sustain through the day, the week, and the year? How do we keep freshness and positivity as we share the space of four walls and lighting that, all too often, is of a flickering flourescent sort devised by the US navy to grow plants many leagues under the sea.

Preparation, as all good teachers know is more than half the job. Students will pick up quickly our mood, our intention, and the level of clarity and enthusiasm we bring. Hopefully, each time we meet we begin anew. How do we do this? How do we practice presence so that we are awake to the possibilities in the dialogue with our students and have the courage to let the surprise elements of a lesson delight and expand the learning for all of us?

Touchstones and Talismans

A single Touchstone, or a pocket full of them, can serve to remind us what personally nourishes us, gives us strength and enjoyment, reminds us why we chose this profession and what we love about it. These can be as mundane as the mid morning latte or as profound as meditation, a quiet moment before and after the class, becoming aware of my breath in the midst of it all, reciting Saint Patrick's Breast Plate every morning on arising, or listening to music on the way to work.

Core things to hold close to our hearts begin with the teacher being nourished in order to pass on the cycle of nourishment to our growing young. By being in touch with our own being we can be present to who is in front of us and appreciate what is needed to light the fire. Observation and reflection are key faculties in helping us become more present, more intuitive and accurate in gaining the measure and moment of what makes for excellent lessons.

If we can find also a forum for sharing our touchstones with our colleagues we can humanise the community of teachers, and avoid a climate that can all too easily mechanise and deaden. We all already know we can set the tone for deeper work that sustains our core themes and the ethos of our schools if we allow for humour, individual voices, and a recognition of each other. But sustaining it is the key.

Deepening our Craft as Teachers: Big Picture Thinking

Over the next month we will examine more deeply how the conceptual tool of the EIGHT PHASES for an ACTIVE LESSON can work in practice. Either a spiral or a mandala diagram can help us envisage how to implement a lesson.

The spiral offers an overview and sense of dynamic movement for an active lesson. At a glance you can check if you have included the essential elements and how thy fit together.

The mandala offers an eight division of the same lesson that is more detailed. As a tool it gives us room for annotations and additions that personalise and enliven our lesson content and its sequencing. The phases that overlap and lay foundations for each other can be seen in terms of a dynamic unfolding where what is implicit gradually becomes more explicit. Our task is to recognise when and how we are helping each phase become more explicit so that part of a lesson folds into one another in complementary relation like the swell and fall of chords of music.

If we doodle and diagram these in our own journal they can become very efficient tools for the busy teacher. At a glance, we not only conceptualise the significant aspects of a creative, active lesson that strives to meet all kinds of learners but later we can use the same tool to evaluate and reflect on what we might have missed, what we can improve on, and what miracles may have occurred! These are planning tools that can be easily shared with colleagues and sometimes, students. Over time as we practice with this tool we will discover its value for working with many related functions: envisioning and evaluating, planning and co-ordinating, crafting and assessing, observing and reflecting.

Working step by step with the Eight Phase Lesson:

The spiral image is limited to five phases to make it accessible all at once, for envisioning the dynamic of a lesson. The mandala covers the same elements expanded to eight, with a layout that enables planning and evaluation. Here I will describe the first three stages. They lay the foundation for the heart of the lesson, and engage the spatial sense and other... registered most strongly by our right hemisphere. Our goal is to call forth whole brain learning as richly as possible through the course of a lesson.

1. Meeting

How do we enter the room in which we are to teach? What kind of gaze or encounter do we have with the whole group and each individual? Is everyone met? How is our breathing rhythm? Can we feel our feet on the ground and the air all around us? Are we aware of our backs as well as our fronts? What does our body language and expression signal? What will be the first thing that we read in each other?

2. Moving and Motivating

How do we activate our group and get underway? Beginnings and transitions often require a clearing: litter moved from the floor, desks cleared, and any residues of inner torpor dissolved. The first step is based on the principle of warming us up like a musical instrument. How do we enable that? Singing, stretching, playing a game, a drama game, poetry recitation, introducing lateralisation exercises, brain gym, simple moves; there are a lot of resources out there and a few are sampled below.

To clue into the whole context is a function of our right hemisphere which gains a great deal of subliminal information before anything else takes place. A teacher who jumps right into lists, demands, and interrogations before making real contact will already have made everyone's working and especially their own, much harder. A whole brain approach allows for us to read the space, offer gestures and movement, and then more effectively move with greater vitality towards the sequence and swirl, questions and answers, of our actual lesson content. Simple movement not only warms everyone up, reminding us we share a space and work together, but also engages a deeper flowing of our breath which naturally connects us to ourselves as the diaphragm expands. As well, movements and games can evoke both playfulness and clarity of intention. Active transitions signal that we are shifting gear, clearing the way for the next step, inwardly and outwardly. Recognition and reading our students well naturally leads to gratitude and good will and therefore an increased readiness to learn.

3. Multi-sensory

Our movement will activate the kinaesthetic for all our learners whether or not they are predominantly a kinaesthetic, visual, or aural learner. The latter two get plenty of air time in a typical classroom but movement is too often relegated, like Cinderella, to a cold hearth, seen as the domain of early childhood, PE, or drama. Bring these subjects into the heart of our learning and help them stoke the fire instead. We need to recover the joyful spirit of early play, the repertoire of movement that P.E can offer, and the games, expression, and social skill that drama cultivates. Even a few minutes at the beginning will engage more of our learners for more of the time and make them smarter. They will be with us because they know we are with them.

Tapping and stretching are invaluable because these open up the body, stimulate the nervous system and get things moving and therefore more connected, inwardly and outwardly. Sensory motor activities can be found along with other revitalising activities in the Resource Section below. But here are a few ideas. Some would take 3 minutes and others would be close to 15 minutes and might be a practice of skills coming out of a fuller lesson where they had learned fencing, juggling or capoeira.

• simple standing and stretching: yoga moves, tai chi moves
• stretching and bending
• rotating and circling
• weight shifting from foot to foot with the breath
• shaking and rotating joint areas such as ankles, wrists and shoulders
• tapping and stroking
• tapping each others backs (this requires very clear protocols for safety and trust to grow)
• balancing exercises
• back to back exercises
• ball and beanbag throwing games (throwing underarm inside)
• spinal roll
• juggling
• fencing
• capoiera
• folk/set dancing
• obstacle courses

Resources:

Chrissie Poulter Playing the Game
Caral Hannaford Smart Moves: why learning is not all in your head
Nell Smyth The Breathing Circle: learning through the movement of the breath
www. braingym.org
www.edutopia .org

Journals: thinking spatially, thinking in pictures

Here are some pictures from journals kept by captains, naturalists, artists and scientists. We can find lots of these kinds of images on the net and they can inspire our students and prove Real Men Do Keep Journals. Some great individuals have kept a very cohesive thread of doodling, designing, and note taking going on in their notebooks as they sketched, annotated, wrote lists, and made sure they left a trace of significant thoughts. They valued their thoughts. Their records can inspire students to see their own work in a different way. How a journal is developed and made our own can bring satisfaction, and help with the habit of throwing things away too soon.

Extracts from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Klee, a scout, and two naturalists. The remaining pages are from students' journals showing: costume design for a play, story boarding for a film and a map devised through group work relating to a project on designing an ideal society. 

Planning Integrated Courses

In an integrated curriculum, tools for planning, to enable the creation, envisioning and subsequent evaluation of courses, are crucial. Below I show a template for developing and integrating your goal, your theme(s), the key skills, and an overview of your activities over the duration of the course. The template lets you work as a group as well as individually, and it is also a tool for evaluation.

Here are some suggestions for securing a coordinated and well thought through course that can also help colleagues work together. If we can integrate our pedagogy and our overall course themes, the students will find that the integration facilitates their learning. They will meet a woven whole and not disjointed segments that they must either integrate or compartmentalise, often creating stress and limiting how they can use what they learn outside the classroom. If we can find themes that have a developmental drumbeat and heartbeat for the age we are teaching, our courses will open doors and kindle the students' engagement with clarion relevance.

For example, courses could adopt an overarching metaphorical theme for the year. Alternatively, six week courses with titles such as The Turning Point, Discovery, Adventure, or Challenge, could serve well for each of the first three years of secondary education. If we attune our teaching with key archetypal questions, and themes that are developmentally appropriate for each year, all our other subjects can easily cluster around these. I would suggest that the topics offer a scope so as to neither box yourself in nor drift away on a wide, wide sea with no wind in the offing.

A TOOL for ENVISIONING and EVALUATING

Interactive Chart Showing the Pathway for Gaining Perspective: Envisioning and Evaluating Courses 

This shows your aim, theme(s), the six comprehensive skill areas identified by the NCCA for the new Junior Cycle, and how to integrate them into a plan that includes your content and activities. First of all, it lets you plan and set these up visually as a whole. Later it can work as a reflective tool, letting you evaluate and make changes as you assess the strengths and challenges of your unfolding lessons. I train teachers to use this tool in a context of turning points, vanishing points, the Renaissance, and the modern age so we appreciate that perspectives change and that this is an age in which education and its metaphors must reflect nets, holography, quantum perspectives, and global connection.

To activate using this tool I have teachers first doodle the schema in their journals in order to feel comfortable with making quick rapid sketches. This gets synapses firing for mapping conceptual frameworks. Then we work it more carefully on a large scale. Images are core to how we think and help us to learn more deeply. Colour delights the senses, warms the soul and heightens learning. If we plan not just with lists and linear schema but also with doodles and images, mandalas and maps, we may find that greater creativity and connection of ideas and themes will come to us.

The process is best taught over two days and then used in teachers' meetings subsequently for small or large group reflection.

Working with Themes and Images that Touch the interest of the Teenager

When we find an archetypal theme, such as the Journey, we know we have hit the motherlode when ideas and inspirations keep on coming and our students are enthused as well. The boat journey offers a metaphor for all kinds of projects we might do together but also opens up the cross curricular scope of what we can offer. This means an economy  for the teacher, always desirable, and a core integration of subjects for the students whereby learning happens in a unified field. Creation works like this so why not align ourselves?

The six stages of our boat journey called, Getting Underway were explored very creatively  in group work as if we were students.

We then applied this experience of Netting, Mapping, Building our Boat, Resources, Captain and Crew, and Evaluation, in the Clouds of Knowing and Unknowing process as teachers planning a seven week course. The theme of the Renaissance was the universal Choix du Jour and produced a cascade of creativity as we bathed in  images, impulses, turning points and good ideas for a short course..

The next step is the assignment to build a bridge into the future by creating the first day of our Renaissance course using the 8 fold mandala structure.

Mandalas as a Tool In Active Learning

Mandalas are an ancient spiritual tool used traditionally to focus the mind and spirit in both stillness and dynamism. What teacher might not need that? They can also offer a simple and economic way to both plan and review your lessons in the same form.
.
Starting with the Phases of an Active Lesson spiral we can then translate this into an 8 form mandala to make sure those elements are all covered and to create a more dynamic interactive form. The categories are Meeting, Moving and Mobilising, Multi-sensory, Multi-faculty, More student talking, Making, Memorisation and Mapping

You can also use the mandala to organise a myriad of themes and different kinds of content. For example, a calendar, perhaps using a larger division, such as a 12 fold, the structure of a play or text, or a plan for a project. If six teachers were working on a course together you could create a six fold mandala and have each teacher fill in his/her segment to see how different subject areas might harmonise around the central topic as resonances and connections can be built.

Two students' cartoon storyboards for a play

A 14 year old student's character study -first page of 3 page draft

A student's overview of the play

Student's version of calender indicating key focus with the blue arrow

A teacher's mandalas to illustrate an overview calendar for rehearsing, and organising sets and props for each scene of a play

Why do we need to learn about writing and evaluating journals?

Journals can offer leitmotifs for our learning where we can muse, reflect, plan, organise, quote, diagram, cartoon, storyboard, headline, problem solve and jot down the kaleidoscope.

Good tools strengthen any craft. Two strong covers, front and back, and an excellent spine are ideal for sterling service. If we expect quality we offer quality. As well, generous space invites abundance of content. So less than A4 size and you will find the throw away: cramping, scribbling, and wasteful use of paper may rear. When a glue stick is your friend you will glue in those precious handouts. Paper aeroplanes, scuffed, dog-eared, and torn worksheets can become past tense.

How we introduce and steer the journal will give our students clues about how we work. Are we methodical, do we rate our worksheets highly enough to give time in class for training them in glueing in,dating their work, taking time initially to write guided reflections, until it is internalised and becomes an automatic habit, sans training wheels?

Borders boundary and define the work. Colour adds warmth and a personal touch, making the work more my own. Images and great quotes add a clarifying or sign-posting function, focussing the topic, stimulating memorisation and subsequent reflection. Dating the work each time grounds and anchors us in time. Encouraging some pages of white space can free up our thinking. Doodling can focus some minds and stimulate thinking.

Journals are places where we can plan, brainstorm, generate, find our own whimsy and get more in tune with our own deepening learning.