Mentor materials
Setting the scene and understanding what we mean by good assessment and feedback
Intended outcomes
The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:
Learn that:
- Effective assessment is critical to teaching because it provides teachers with information about pupils’ understanding and needs.
- Good assessment helps teachers avoid being over-influenced by potentially misleading factors, such as how busy pupils appear.
- Before using any assessment, teachers should be clear about the decision it will be used to support and be able to justify its use.
- To be of value, teachers use information from assessments to inform the decisions they make; in turn, pupils must be able to act on feedback for it to have an effect.
- High quality feedback can be written or verbal; it is likely to be accurate and clear, encourage further effort, and provide specific guidance on how to improve.
Activities
Introducing module the module: what is good assessment and feedback? (20 minutes)
Preparing for this module:
- Each school will have policies in relation to assessment and feedback. The ECT will need to be aware of these policies.
- It would be worth identifying colleagues in school who are particularly effective at assessment and feedback, and to guide the ECT towards these colleagues for observations and discussions.
Welcome the ECT to the module.
Suggested dialogue for mentors: welcome to the module - Assessment, feedback and questioning. As you know, Assessment is a really important, ongoing process of finding out what your pupils know and can do, where there are gaps and crucially what they and you need to do next to progress their learning. This module will support you to establish what effective assessment and feedback practices are. You will also explore questioning as a key tool of assessment.
Some questions for discussion:
You can use Handout 5.1 to support the discussion.
- What different forms of assessment can you name?
- What different forms of assessment have you used?
- Which ones have gone well? Why?
- Which ones haven’t gone so well? Why?
- Which do you find takes you a long time?
- Have you developed any strategies to speed up assessment?
- What different forms of feedback can you name?
- What different forms of feedback have you used?
- Which ones have gone well? Why?
- Which ones haven’t gone so well? Why?
- Which do you find takes you a long time?
- Have you developed any strategies to speed up feedback?
Understanding the evidence (20 minutes)
Guidance to mentors:
- Both the ECT and mentor should have read the ‘Understanding the Evidence’ section of the self-directed study materials ahead of the topic
- In this part of the topic, the mentor will be asking questions to check the ECT’s understanding of what they have read. The guidance below provides a full range of responses which show understanding. However, this should not be treated as a ‘test’ of the ECT’s knowledge; use the prompts to elicit fuller answers or clarify if they have misunderstood any aspect.
Suggested dialogue for mentors: you completed activity 5.2 of the self-directed study materials ‘Understanding the Evidence’ in relation to what makes good assessment and feedback. Let’s discuss your response to the questions to check your understanding of that material.
- Why is assessing pupil learning important?
- To inform the teacher about what the pupil knows and can do
- To identify misconceptions
- To establish where the pupil is in their learning
- To check prior knowledge
- To inform planning
- To adapt teaching.
- What characterises good assessment?
- Is an essential part of teaching and learning
- Avoids being misled by surface observations (e.g. how busy pupils appear)
- Should have a clear purpose
- Should be reliable – measure what it is supposed to
- Should deliver information which helps inform decisions and feedback to pupils
- What characterises high-quality feedback?
- Clear and accurate
- Tells the pupil where they are and where they need to go
- Provides specific steps the pupil should take to improve
- Requires effort from the pupil
- Can be verbal or written.
- Why is high-quality feedback important?
- Improves pupil outcomes
- Supports pupil learning
- Ensures pupils’ learning needs are being met
- Means that pupils are clear on how they can improve
- Support pupils to monitor and self-regulate their own learning.
Reviewing and reflecting on practice (10 minutes)
Guidance to mentors:
- ECTs should bring some examples of their own to the topic. As this is the first topic of the module, catch up with the ECT in person or via email to ask them to do this.
- Examples could be work that has been marked in books or could be more formal assessments.
- It might be helpful to share some of the mentor’s own examples of assessment as well.
- If there is no evidence that pupils have responded to feedback, ask about how pupils have enacted the feedback.
Questions for discussion:
- Can you explain what you have brought to share?
- What kind of assessment is it?
- How did you build in time for pupils to respond to this feedback?
Planning for action
In the next topic, ECTs will need to bring a selection of marked assessments (about five would be a good number) with them that you will review. They should be from one assessment rather than a range. Spend some time now identifying what this might be and locating where the assessments are, i.e. if in pupils’ books, the ECT will need to collect the books in advance of the next topic.
ECTs will also need to identify a lesson or sequence of lessons they plan to teach in the next week. You will spend some time in the next topic planning out formative assessment tasks linked to the lesson objectives.