Teach Primary Issue 18.6

What’s my role? With this type of low-stakes assessment, it’s important that all the children are actively and consistently engaged with the assessment task. Within my classroom, it’s now common to hear the children talking about activities not having any ‘passengers’. What they mean is that everyone should have a role to play and make an active contribution to the tasks at hand, to the extent that their individual ability and needs will allow. By defining each child’s role within an assessment activity, you will also strengthen the purpose of the task and help to place it within a meaningful and, ideally, real-world context. Working in this way brings an additional, longer-term benefit: it introduces children to a diverse range of possible career routes. This can help to open up aspirations for the future and inspire ambition for their next steps. A change in mindset like this can lead to greater engagement with learning, as pupils begin to see that assessment experiences can help them reach their own personal goals, rather than just being something the teacher is asking the class to do for their own ends. Assigning unique roles to specific children can also support teachers to go a little deeper with their individual assessments. For example, assigning an individual the role of scribing the task would enable you to assess the extent to which that child can make and use effective notes. Who is the audience? In the real world, it’s always helpful for us as adults to understand the audience we are working to address, as this then informs the purpose of a task overall. Having an A further element of the success criteria that can lead to greater learner involvement, is the inclusion of personal target setting. This might relate to a specific aspect of the success criteria that the children have been working to improve, or to a meta-cognitive focus, such as demonstrating resilience in their learning or taking time to edit their responses. How will we share our learning? As mentioned previously, the only way to effectively assess the children’s understanding is to give them an opportunity to tangibly demonstrate what they understand about a topic, 54 | www.teachwire.net concept or skill. Regardless of the context, pupils must have a clearly defined outcome for their learning, as you will need this final ‘output’ to effectively complete the holistic assessment that should result from the Pause and Reflect approach. The children are engaged… what do I do now? Once the children are working independently on the assessment task, you can begin the first of two stages of the assessment process. Use the whole-class feedback sheet ( tinyurl. com/tp-PauseReflect ) as a purposeful scribble space – and be all eyes and ears. This feedback sheet is a place to capture simple, but meaning-laden, notes on anything that relates to the overall assessment, and which can only be seen from the practical element of the assessment task. When engaging in dialogue with individuals or groups, you can also note down: evidence of strong awareness of the intended audience for their assessment tasks will also support the children to remain focused on the ‘why’ of what they are doing. As long as there is a meaningful link to the purpose of the assessment activity, the audience could range from younger peers to notable public figures. What are our success criteria? Establishing the success criteria is the point at which the teacher can clearly and precisely define what they are looking for during the assessment activity. When laying out success criteria, it’s important that the teacher communicates openly with pupils that this task is part of an assessment process. The goal of this open dialogue is to help the children understand that assessment is an everyday component of the learning experience. It’s not a high-stakes test, or something they need to do on their own without support; it is simply an exchange of information and experience between teacher and class. This stage is most effective when the success criteria are co-constructed with the children, ensuring that they understand what the expectations are, so that they can work effectively towards demonstrating their understanding. Developing criteria collaboratively can also help the children to see how their prior learning experiences are now being built into an assessment. “Assigning unique roles to specific children can also support teachers to go a little deeper with their individual assessments”