Summer week 3

Mentor materials

Applying good assessment practice in the classroom

Learning intentions

Your ECT will learn that:

• 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.

Your ECT will learn how to:

Check prior knowledge and understanding during lessons, by:

• Using assessments to check for prior knowledge and pre-existing misconceptions.
• Structuring tasks and questions to enable the identification of knowledge gaps and misconceptions (e.g. by using common misconceptions within multiple-choice questions).
• Prompting pupils to elaborate when responding to questioning to check that a correct answer stems from secure understanding.
• Monitoring pupil work during lessons, including checking for misconceptions

Topic introduction

In their self-directed study session earlier this week, your mentee extended their knowledge of applying good assessment practice in the classroom. They explored how good assessment helps teachers avoid the pitfalls of being influenced by other factors when making assessments of their pupils. This included being aware of how the examples that Robert Coe terms ‘Poor Proxies for Learning’ may affect accurate judgements of learning.

In this session, you will help your mentee build on this activity, focusing in more detail on its practical implications. You will discuss with your mentee their plan for classroom activities intended to make more accurate assessments of pupils, especially those where they are finding it complex to understand what the pupils know and can do. You will do this while identifying and avoiding common pitfalls in assessment practice.

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 sections of this session.

Review: 5 mins

1. Start this session by briefly following up on the actions that your mentee set at the end of last week’s session. Ask your mentee to summarise:
   • what they did
   • the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this)
   • what they will do going forward to build on these actions
2. Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee.

Plan: 5 mins

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: 35 mins

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Analyse artefacts / collaborative planning

Work collaboratively with your mentee to review, discuss and improve, as necessary, the assessment plan which they drafted in their self-study session. This plan should support their gathering of evidence about pupils for whom they find it difficult to make assessment judgements.

To support this conversation, you could:

• ask your mentee to explain to you the reasoning behind their plan, and highlight aspects of strength in their thinking
• use your expertise – and the the research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials – to draw their attention to aspects of the plan could be further developed
• work with your mentee to make the improvements that you identify

Discuss with mentor / sharing of practice – discuss with your mentee:

1. How they might use assessments in their phase/specialism at the beginning of new topics as a way of checking for prior knowledge/skill and pre-existing misconceptions. Share examples of your practice as appropriate to support this discussion. You might find it helpful to draft with your mentee a list of the most common misconceptions that you have encountered in your teaching, if you are experienced in the same phase/specialism as your mentee. If you work in a different phase/specialism, you may wish to seek input for this activity from a suitably experienced colleague.
2. How to plan and use carefully structured questions during lessons that surface pupils’ thinking and enable the teacher to accurately identify knowledge gaps and misconceptions. Explore how hinge questions and elaboration might be used in the mentee’s phase and specialism to support assessment and therefore pupils’ learning. Share examples of your practice as appropriate to support this discussion. As above, you may find it helpful to seek input from a suitably experienced colleague if you work in a different phase / specialism to your mentee.

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Rehearsal

Using the activity produced in the mentee’s self-study session and the outcomes of your discussions so far around assessment, support your mentee to rehearse their use of assessment strategies.

To support this activity, you could:

• play the part of a pupil who gives the wrong response (to a multiple-choice question or during an activity) while the mentee rehearses strategies for addressing this (strategies might include prompting the pupil to elaborate on their reasoning or questioning to help challenge and shape the pupil’s thinking)
• If appropriate, replay the situation a number of times and adopt different roles on each occasion (i.e. pupils with different misunderstandings or different types of incorrect response) to help deepen your mentee’s thinking and practice

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:

1. the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improving pupil learning
2. what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
3. 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.