Mentor materials
Fundamental principles of effective assessment
Learning intentions
Your ECT will 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.
Your ECT will learn how to:
Avoid common assessment pitfalls, by:
- Planning formative assessment tasks linked to lesson objectives and thinking ahead about what would indicate understanding (e.g. by using hinge questions to pinpoint knowledge gaps).
- Drawing conclusions about what pupils have learned by looking at patterns of performance over a number of assessments (e.g. appreciating that assessments draw inferences about learning from performance).
- Choosing, where possible, externally validated materials, used in controlled conditions when required to make summative assessments.
Topic introduction
In their self-directed study session last week (week 1 of Module 4), your mentee extended their knowledge of some fundamental principles of assessment. They spoke to a colleague about the different ways that they use assessment in their practice. They then worked on planning assessment for a forthcoming lesson, which you will work on together in this session.
This week (week 2 of Module 4), your mentee should have attended ECT training focused on statements 6.2, 6a, 6b and 6c of the Early Career Framework.
In this session you will help your mentee build on their learning from both their self-directed study and the ECT training session. You may find it helpful to work through the materials available to your ECT to support the training session as part of your preparation for this ECT mentor meeting.
Meeting activities
Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the Review and Plan section of this session.
Review and Plan: 5 mins
Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee.
At the start of this module, you looked at all of the ‘learn how to’ statements for Standard 6 and conducted a module audit with your mentee. In some areas, they will already be confident and skilled; in others, they will want more practice and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.
Theory to Practice: 40 mins
Analyse artefacts / collaborative planning
Work together with your mentee to review and improve the planned assessment activities from their self-directed study session in week 1 of this module. Make sure the assessment activities are linked to lesson objectives, will generate useful assessment data about pupils’ understanding and make efficient use of both pupil and teacher time. Select one or two of these activities for the mentee to use during the forthcoming planned lesson/session.
As part of their self-directed study, your mentee identified what they thought was their ‘best’ assessment method of the three they prepared. Ask them to return to this now and see whether they have revised their judgement. Prompt your mentee to share their reasoning, and use your expertise to highlight where they reason well. As needed, respond to their comments with your own perception of the relative strengths of the different approaches discussed.
To support this activity, you could:
- ask your mentee to connect their reasoning to research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials and to the content of the Module 4 ECT training session
- support your own feedback with explicit reference to research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials
- be clear, where you highlight strengths, why these are positive, with reference to the contents of the Early Career Framework
- use the research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials to help you suggest ways to further improve your mentee’s planning
Sharing of practice
Model with your mentee how you make use of patterns of performance over multiple assessments to draw conclusions about your pupils’ learning. Share some examples of your own inferences about pupils’ learning from their performance in one or more assessments.
Explain how you adapt your assessment practice to respond to different pupil needs (especially across different age phases) and the nature of the learning that you are assessing.
To support this explanation, you could:
- talk through two recent sequences of assessment conducted with pupils in contrasting key stages, contrasting subject areas or assessing different types of learning (vocational/academic or theory/practical, for example)
- pick out similarities and differences in how you constructed each sequence of assessment, and link these to the characteristics of your pupils and the nature of what was being assessed
- ask your mentee to connect your explanation to the content of the ECT training session that looked at patterns of performance over multiple assessments
Discuss with mentor
Talk about the use of summative assessment in your mentee’s phase/specialism and how these judgements are reached. Discuss opportunities to make use of externally validated materials to support summative assessment, in line with the school’s agreed assessment practices for your mentee’s phase/specialism.
To support this discussion, you could:
- use the internet or resources held at your school to show your mentee the range of materials available to support summative assessment in their phase/specialism
Next Steps: 5 mins
Agree with your mentee how they will now put their learning from this week’s session(s) into practice in their teaching. Help your mentee to clarify:
- the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improving pupil learning
- what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
- how they will evaluate their success in taking these action(s)
Note the date of your next mentor meeting, when you will check on your mentee’s progress.