something simple to offer

Tags

Bloom's taxonomy, curriculum, educational behaviourism, evaluation, hierarchy of learning, knowledge, learning, levels of attainment, National Curriculum, organic education, results-led education, SATs, understanding

Abstract: Assessment for Learning has become the prime drive in education in recent years.   It has not launched easily because it seems to add yet another exponentially complicating layer onto a pedagogy which has already been excessively fragmented … but if used simply …

National Curriculum spent twenty years making teachers focus on content in order to measure pupils’ levels of attainment of that content.   Nationally.   SATs were implemented in the big three subjects in order to ‘standardise attainment’ and the remaining subjects gradually acquired their own level descriptors in order to keep up.   But the experience with SATs was that they soon became ends in themselves (especially because school performance was attached to them – a wholly un-educational mistake) to the detriment of the means (teaching and learning within a nationalised, uniform curriculum). SATs became grafted – rather Frankenstein-ly – onto all the subjects and their (uniformly burgeoning) curricula.   Descriptors of levels of attainment proliferated as extensively and as randomly as gas.   Confidence in using levels of attainment was never achieved, either in schools (moderation still came down to ‘hunches’ in despair of trying to apply the descriptors in a hierarchy of attainment), let alone nationally (cf. even SATs had to become very blunt measures in order to be comparable).

It was just all too complicated, for both teachers to do anything more than just ‘get through the curriculum’, and for pupils for whom the only constructive course was to indiscriminately ‘try harder’.   Most pupils don’t have a clear sense of how to learn because the content is too overwhelming.   Their un-trained response, at best, is to just include more detail, or make it neater, or at worst to give up – angry and defiant.[1]

Aaagh, what to do?   How to teach something simple-enough and attainable-enough to pupils without exposing ourselves to the charge of un-professionalism? Learning skills or content?   Thematic or integrated?   Do we lurch from one to the other, or just wobble?   Or do we stay where we are, dazed and confused?

Knowledge before (or without) skills is,

• vague (‘where are we going, why are we learning this’)
• unstructured (understanding is developed by association rather than analysis)
• un-measurable (or measurable only by expansion, breadth, detail rather than understanding or analysis)
• un-transferable (skills developed are particular to the subject, or even topic, they were learnt in)
• un-applicable (true enquiry needs to go deeper rather than just more broad)

Skills before (or without) knowledge is,

• pointless (‘where are we going, why are we learning this’)
• wide but superficial (understanding is developed by association rather than analysis)
• only measurable according to the effort made; and its neatness!

Knowledge considered irrespective of Skills, or Skills considered irrespective of Knowledge are un-holistic, lead to un-natural learning and are un-effective[2].

The solution is … Assessment for Learning.[3]   Assessment is the means of identifying progression for any given aspect of an attainment target.   Assessment for Learning is the means whereby the pupil understands what this progression means so that they both know how they have achieved so far and how they can progress further.   For every single Attainment Target (every lesson/learning cycle) we need to present, task, assess and feed-back in a clear level 3-8 way.   In order for us to do this and for pupils to understand (and use) it, it needs to be simple.   Therefore:

Level 3	Knowledge
Level 4
Level 5	Understanding
Level 6
Level 7	Evaluation
Level 8

Level 3-4 you have to know it (detail, facts), level 5-6 you have to explain it (how it works), level 7+ you have to test it. What is ‘it’? It is any given Attainment Target. To break this down a little further:

Level 3	Knowledge	Detail, fact
Level 4		Collections, sorting of details, facts
Level 5	Understanding	Explaining idea behind detail, fact
Level 6		Explaining how ideas fit together
Level 7	Evaluation	Testing ideas for purpose, enquiry
Level 8		Consolidating enquiry

With this simple structure we could take an Attainment Target, any Attainment Target, and we could present it, we could task it levels 3-7, we could assess pupils work on it levels 3-7 and we could feed back to pupils levels 3-7.   What precisely is required for each of levels 3-7 would depend on the respective Attainment Target as exemplar …

Examples >>>			History – Peasant’s Revolt	Geography – Water Cycle	Religious Studies – a Mosque
Level 3	Knowledge	Detail, fact	Key names, places	Key words: rain, clouds, sun etc.	Key words: minaret, quibla etc.
Level 4		Collections, sorting of details, facts	Names & places on a timeline	Key words on a diagram showing cycle	Key words on diagram of Mosque
Level 5	Understanding	Explaining idea behind detail, fact	Causes that made names and places happen	Explain how each element happens	Function of the key features
Level 6		Explaining how ideas fit together	How all the causes came together into PR	Explain how elements work in a cycle	How Mosque practices worship, study, community
Level 7	Evaluation	Testing ideas for purpose, enquiry	Did the PR succeed, what did rebels & leaders say v. do?	Explore where WC is problematic	Mosque as ‘submission’ & ‘peace’, umma
Level 8		Consolidating enquiry	How does PR fit into wider Medieval age?	How WC features on global scale issues	Mosque within Islam

We would need to deliver our lessons with tasks that access the Attainment Target at a level 3-4 level (knowledge – all), at a level 5-6 level (understanding – most) and at a level 7+ level (evaluation – some), so that each pupil can concentrate on the task that corresponds to their target level.   This would de-complicate the curriculum (by making it both presentable by teachers and accessible to pupils) AND develop skills (because pupils would know how to develop from level to level because they are simple and they would be used to them lesson by lesson, rather than give it, at best, their best shot).

Isn’t this all just so familiar? Hasn’t every teacher since the 1960’s had Bloom’s taxonomy wheeled before them, o so very satisfactorily?   It maps the cognitive development from identifying facts (knowledge) to connecting knowledge (understanding), to testing connections (evaluation).   Well, ‘Phew!   That’s a relief – thank goodness Bloom thought about all that complicated stuff – now we can get on and teach!’   I am not sure that the taxonomy has been integrated into lesson-to-lesson teaching, partly because it seems possible to have lessons ‘happen’ without reference to it, partly because it takes time and creative energy to plan the working through of a piece of learning (both of which resources significantly disappear when teachers begin their teaching career), partly, also, because the pervasive drive and focus on ‘results’ (grades) in education has required teachers to condition reactions to learning in their pupils rather than nurture them through cognitive development.

Assessment for Learning should be the very working through of this cognitive hierarchy in each piece of learning: used at the beginning (structured KUE teaching), the middle (integrating K>U>E learning) and the end (formative >>> (occasional) summative KUE assessment).   The result of this will be educated pupils who have developed their intelligence (and know how to learn) rather than educated pupils who have ‘received’ their education as is their due consumer right.

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[1]And this, quite possibly suggests the explanation for why there is a dip in KSIV: the majority of pupils, overwhelmed by KSIII perform flatly at KSIV simply because they are already tired and frustrated at the beginning of year 10 rather than a sense of seeing how far they could take their learning developed at KSIII.   They possibly pick up at KSV simply because they have ‘dropped’ all of the subjects which completely overwhelmed them before, not because they suddenly learn to study better.

[2] (I’m sorry), Aristotle said that the form and essence (of anything) are only notionally conceived of separately, they cannot actually be separate, the same as you cannot think of the shape of the wax of a candle separate from the wax itself.   If the wax is the ‘knowledge’ and the shape is the ‘skills’ (of understanding it), the teaching of one over (or before) the other is non-sensical, or certainly ineffective.

[3] Why hasn’t it worked so far (its been touted for a good 4/5 years to date)?   Simply because it is too complicated: a complicated, 8-levelled system of attainment across many possible skills applied to an often-revised but still complicated curriculum.   The three elements – content, skills and measure – have never ‘plugged’ into each other because there are simply too many ‘pins’ and ‘sockets’ to co-ordinate.   All we have managed to achieve so far are intricate level descriptors for single pieces of assessed work which have become so complicated that you have to be a very clever pupil to follow their progression (even when we have tried to easy-speak them).   They have become complicated in anticipation (we have been required to show how we are meeting Learning Objectives) rather than through use (i.e. ‘Learning’), and therefore they are not useful.

Postscript: this was first written and published around 2007; seven years later OFSTED (and therefore school management) have decided that the ‘way forward’ is to concentrate on differentiation using … Bloom’s taxonomy; we don’t use the words ‘Assessment for Learning’ anymore (I’m not sure anyone but the academics ever got their head around what it meant and because it didn’t produce any demonstrable change in whatever it is we measure as development these days, it was quietly dropped in the clamour of some other technique – learning History, maybe).   But apart from changing reference from Assessment for Learning to something else (which I decided to keep anyway seeing as I spent years getting my head around it; and it works), I didn’t have to edit this at all; we have made that much progress standing still in so many different ways …

 

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evaluation & knowledge & understanding wormhole: tiered
learning wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
results-led education wormhole: just saying, is all – III

 

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just saying, is all – III

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2012, 2014, accountability, achievement, assessment for learning, career, CPD, dialogue, education, funding, GCSE, inclusion, intervention, love, measure, National Curriculum, nurture, outcome-led education, planning, politics, process, professionalism, public service cuts, pupils, results-led education, school, slogans, statistics, subjects, targets, teachers, teaching, vocation

 

 

 

                                                                                    just saying, is all – III

                                              I watched the first generation of pupils sit their GCSEs

                                              then I watched the National Curriculum
                                find a gear
                and crunch-jerk launch the level system of attainment
                                across all the subjects
                                              then I watched the whole dialogue –
                political and educational
                                and the funding that went with it –
                                              shift from process and nurture
                to outcomes and statistics

                                and then I felt the reform of teaching professionalism
                and watched the proliferation
of endless sheets of planning, four – part lessons, Assessment for Learning, Ready for Learning, Every Child Matters, Inclusion, Continuing Professional Development, targetting, intervention, Boulders into Pebbles, Investors in People, accountability, Achieving Together, Be a Part of It, G₂O                      
                                the unforgettable 2 As & 2 Bs
                the Freedom to All Think Along the Same Lines (glorious times)
(and I’m really looking forward to the innovative work to be launched soon by Professor Cobbly from the prestigious University of Fisc’ut, Corporateshire, (not least of all because he happens to be my uncle))

                                              and all the while
                                those who work hard achieve well
                                              in the wash
                those who don’t don’t whether they are intelligent or not
                                if they are going to be angry or lazy
                they will find a way to be so
                                              whether you teach them to their very marrow
                                or just let them alone

                                              most teachers
                                just get through their career
                all of them measured to within an inch of their vocation
                                some keep their love
                                some make a difference
                                              sometimes
                                when no one is … measuring

                                              all kids
                                just get through school
                                most kids do OK
                                some kids thrive

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: tag cloud poem IV – C
education & results-led education wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
love wormhole: plethora: the Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002)
politics wormhole: my life is not your market
professionalism wormhole: the Lamp
teaching wormhole: which is worse

 

the Lamp

Tags

accountability, assessment for learning, communication, curriculum, learning, management, managerialism, National Curriculum, performance, performance management, politics, professional development, professionalism, resource, responsibility, syllabus, teaching craft

Since 1988 the government has been ‘reforming’ education: to make provision and attainment nationally uniform and transparent equally for the government, schools, employers, parents, teachers and, yes, pupils.   Since 1997 the government has ‘managerialised’ education: it has dismantled the semi-autonomous remit of the teacher to practise h/er vocation, it has redefined ‘professionalism’ away from vocation and value and into process and productivity in the name of ‘accountability’, and it has quantified this process and productivity and called it ‘professional development’ (soon to be ‘licensed’).   This has left teachers estranged from, and distrustful of, the very dynamic that makes teaching happen: the skilful, adaptive, speculative, compensatory, dancing, alternative, bargaining, creative, tentative, controlling, releasing, playing, explorative, human dialectic of communication between teacher and pupil.

How is this ‘reform’, this ‘professionalism’, experienced?*   The National Curriculum has been defined – and is periodically juggled with – into core/foundation/statutory subjects, clearly and simply, so that they could be listed in a pamphlet.   Very quickly these subjects became disseminated out into national/local/exam-board subject syllabi – what needed to be ‘covered’ in each subject, especially when the need to level/grade the content became compulsory as well as statutory (‘so amusing how the syllabi, at this point, became known as ‘specifications’ rather than syllabi).   When the syllabi arrived in schools they had to be managed into a fit state to enter the classroom, so they had to be disseminated again (perhaps, better, ‘dissected’), (or even ‘disembowelled’).   Each syllabus topic to be broken down into differentiated tasks, mapped cross-curricular-ly, and All/Most/Some’d.   The fragmentation going on from the simple National Curriculum to the classroom has been almost exponential.   What was simple at the essential level (government) became overwhelmingly complicated at the practical level (classroom) – it was pamphlet-able at the government level, it became incommunicable, unlearnable, at the classroom level.

* We were having a nice game of football one day.   As with all games there were hard bits, exhausting bits, unfair bits, but we were holding a 1-1 draw.   Then – while we were playing – there were new rules to the game introduced.   The goalposts were left where they were, actually, but we now had to move the ball around the field …on a trolley!   We all had to have trolleys ready for when we had possession of the ball.   The trolleys were fitted with directional wheels to aid mobility around the field, baskets to hold the ball, racks to hold the football boots that we’d need when we had to pass the ball, shoot or defend a negotiated tackle.   We were told, ‘We have given you all this equipment.   In return we want a fast, exciting, entertaining game.’   So we pushed these trolleys around the field.   The wheels mostly got stuck.   The ball usually fell out of the basket.   No one scored any goals.

The pupil thereby received curricula which were overwhelmingly broad and complicated.   They received them in restricted amounts of time (in an ever-squeezed timetable with up to fourteen different subjects including drives on technology, IT, Citizenship alongside the drives within the Big Three subjects) which, even for the most able, required them to develop guerrilla tactics to learn – in, learn-something, get out, next.   The pupil has lost the sense of studying (exploring, wondering … mastering) a subject, it now just receives – it consumes.     The pupil has become passive, incapable of developing h/er skills of independent study – not enough time for it (or rather, not enough perspective to develop any motive other than ‘getting’ it).   The pupils have become overwhelmed, even, with the simple ‘getting’ of education: overwhelmed by content, they have no perspective, or will, to link their knowledge together (to ‘stand under’ their studies to see how they all fit together), and they will become satisfied with a factual-based appreciation of their subjects at best (making A-level teachers scratch their heads at times wondering why on earth some pupils chose their subject).   At worst they will ‘can’t be bothered’ with it all because there is more to be gained in self-esteem by publically rejecting it all rather than the impossibility of trying to master it.

For the teacher: s/he might have been able to rationalise and deliver the disseminated monster that education has become, but it was decided that teachers are fundamentally a-qualified to do the job (certainly, any profession which strikes over pay in the early 80’s needs to be sorted out)!   The nobility of the teacher has therefore been systematically (and publically) dismantled.   Professionalism has been re-defined by questioning the received image of teacher as authority-by-role (both in discipline and knowledge), and even questioning the ‘semi-autonomous professional’, by infiltrating the hallowed ground of the classroom to ensure … measurability of what they do.   ‘Measurability’ of what the teacher does is now quantitative: by input (the production of the paperwork for the lesson which proves that it was planned, what can be seen to be ‘in’ the lesson to be ticked off), and output (professional development is now linked to a performance which is measured statistically – there is so much that needs to be ‘reduced’ and screened out of consideration to make a statistic measurable – even pay is now linked to that same extracted performance).   Teachers are no longer respected but are now accountable (as well as ‘accounted’) to their Head of Department, their Head of Year, their Senior Management team, their School Governors, parents, the government, the public…   The overwhelming proportion of a teacher’s energy has now to be focussed on making sure that they are justified to all parties, before they can start to communicate.   Teachers are now taxed by needing to manage their curricula fit for process and attainment (managing ‘within’) in response to a pervasive management from ‘outside’.   The management of courses has become more important than their delivery.   It is difficult for these courses to be coherent or stepped; it is easy for them to be overwhelming for both teachers to deliver and pupils to receive.   In the past some teachers were inspirational because they could provide the portal to the world of their subject by skill of communication – they knew, through their teaching, what the seed of the subject was that drew a child’s eye.   Now most teachers have a ‘seed catalogue’ and no ‘field’ in which to sow.   Teachers have been ‘accountability’d’ and ‘consistency’d’ out of their skill of communication – out of the skill of drawing the child’s eye – by having to focus on the (measurable) process of teaching rather than the communication of teaching.   Communication has become a rather indulgent distraction in the face of ‘hard’ realities like (selective) statistical results, finance, the school’s PR with parents.    Teachers are left actively paralysed in having to meet impossibly (impractically, needlessly) wide and widening curriculum and (summative) performance indicators.^

                                       ^
                                       The centipede was happy quite
                                       Until the toad, in fun
                                       Said, ‘pray, which leg moves after which?’
                                       This raised her doubts to such a pitch
                                       She fell distracted in the ditch
                                       Not knowing how to run.
                                                     – Marion Quinlan Davis

So how is Assessment for Learning a solution to the atrophying of teacher professionalism?   So many curricular and cross-curricular teaching schemes have been floated during the last twenty years that have shown that attainment (no matter how you measure it) is not affected.   It was necessary to look at the learning in education as much as the teaching.   It has emerged that Assessment for Learning is the mechanism which links the teaching (delivered) to the learning (received) and still enable the measurability so desperately needed (needed, needed) when education has become the political potato that it has.   How does it connect teaching with learning?   It provides a template through which topics can be taught and learnt using the same language.   Topics are delivered broken down into levels 3-8 or grades E-A* and pupils apprehend them at whatever level/grade they can develop.   Both teachers and pupils understand the language of levels 3-8 or grades E-A*.   The skill of the teacher is in providing the ‘field’ of endeavour, the work of the pupil is to cultivate 3-8/E-A* as far as they can.   This co-working, through a commonly understood language and purpose, is called a dialectic; the working of this dialectic is called … teaching and learning.   Assessment for Learning enables that dialectic so that the power to teach and learn can be returned back to their rightful owners.   When Assessment for Learning happens the whole of the edifice which has become education becomes workable rather than impossible – education becomes what it always should have been, an enlightenment.

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

communication & performance management & professionalism & teaching craft wormhole: I don’t think I could do it anymore
learning wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
management wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’
politics wormhole: The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)

 

Assessment for Learning: the Prologue

Tags

assessment for learning, communication, giving, identity, learning horizon, learning objective, managerialism, National Curriculum, performance, performance management, professionalism, teaching craft, vocation

Assessment for Learning is not simply another government accretion brought-in-to-check-that-we-are-working-properly-and-measure-us-accountable-to-a-‘professionalism’-which-is-defined-despite-educational-values-and-teacher’s-morality … (breathe, breathe).   It has come from the government, it is true, and it has been administered, so far, as yet another measure with which to beat the ever-disinterested donkey that is the modern teacher – blinkered, pulling a large cart, uphill, when it doesn’t think it should go uphill and would rather take the long way round and enjoy life a little.   Nevertheless – quite by accident – AfL could be exercised as both a rationale and a practice which is at the very heart of teaching, something which might be hijacked by teachers to claim back the autonomy, the self-respect, the self-confidence, the prestige, the necessity, the indispensability that is the reality of a teacher nurturing her pupils in the million ways that he does.*

* The most damaging aspect of the ever-rolling-out Reform of Education was the seizure and exploitation of what constitutes teacher professionalism by Managerialism.   It became increasingly apparent that those defining, measuring and administering accountability of teaching were not … teachers.

There is nothing new under the sun.   And likewise in the classroom – no matter how much you try to mechanise the service by making it run to business models in the pursuit of economic prudence – you cannot escape the fact that teaching requires communication, communication requires flexibility and autonomy, flexibility and autonomy requires a workforce of people who have the vocation to GIVE and the vocation to Give needs a clear structure through which it can be exercised clearly, fairly and nurturing-ly.   Teaching with ‘aims and objectives’ – even with just a title – has always been the means by which teachers train, and exercise, their skills and qualification.   It is only recently, since the National Curriculum really bit down, that these means have been used to measure the teacher’s performance rather than to nurture h/er craft; to control rather than to enable.

Assessment for Learning is yet the latest way to tighten down the ‘business’ of teaching – to ‘tune’ the engine to reach maximum efficiency – but it has stumbled, in doing so, upon the very dynamic which makes the educative interplay between pupil and teacher possible.   Assessment for Learning is nothing new – it is the means of getting ‘to’ the ‘aim’, of getting from the ‘aim’ to the ‘objective’; it is the controlled burning of fuel which turns the engine, it is the valve which circulates blood around the body to work.   It is NOT a means to measure if the teacher is working hard- and responsibly-enough, it is the mechanism of teaching through which a teacher can wrest back the management of their own teaching and regain the honour which becomes anyone who chooses to grow knowledge in another.

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managerialism & professionalism wormhole: Apologia
performance & teaching craft wormhole: a bit painful this