Developing Formative Assessment

1. Developing Formative Assessment Lord Williams’s School Thame UK

2. Lord Williams’s • 11-18 Comprehensive school • 2100 students • Split-site • 140 teachers • Small town and surrounding villages • Committed to development of teaching and learning

3. How we got started • King’s College project (1999) • 4 teachers join research project • Whole school launch - September 2000 • Gradual spreading of formative practices • Core group expanded

4. Key events • Introduction of Formative assessment as whole school focus for Performance Management • Commitment to AfL as a focus for curriculum development • Review of School Assessment Policy

5. More Key events • Focus Performance Management on different aspects of AfL in successive years • ‘Learning to Learn’ group established • Joint training day with ‘partner’ primary schools • Whole staff meeting to celebrate AfL practice

6. Conditions for lasting change • Commitment and enthusiasm of School Senior Managers • Support for peer observation • Meetings focus on learning not admin. • Teachers encouraged to ‘mark’ less and ‘assess’ better • Development of comment banks

7. Lasting change • Communication of good practice • Sharing of resources • AfL approaches and tasks written into Schemes of Work • Communication with parents • Keep Formative Assessment on the school agenda

8. Challenges • Consistency across large teaching body • Reluctance to change • Need for internal summative events • External high stakes summative assessment looms • Self-assessment is hard! • How do we capture and keep it?

9. Where next? • Response to primary practice • Archive of peer and self-assessment strategies • Video leading practitioners in action • Introduce student self-assessment as focus for Performance Management • Research formative-summative relationship