Curriculum

There is now a large and growing evidence base that helping teachers develop their use of minute-to-minute and day-by-day assessment is one of, if not the most powerful ways to improve student learning. However, adopting formative assessment, or assessment for learning as it is sometimes called, involves far more than adding a few “quick fixes” to teachers’ classroom repertoires. It involves a fundamental shift in focus, from what the teacher is putting into the process to what the students are getting out of it.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn what formative assessment is and what it isn’t, when it works and when it doesn’t and find out about the five key strategies of formative assessment, together with over thirty practical techniques for implementing formative assessment in every classroom.

There is now substantial evidence that there is a “knowing-doing” gap in education. The problem is not that we do not know how to improve schools. The problem is implementing what is known to work in more classrooms. This is why approaches based on “sharing good practice” have been relatively ineffective. Teachers do not lack knowledge—rather they lack support in putting into practice changes in what they do in their classrooms, and this requires time.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to create more time for teachers to improve their practice, and how leaders can ensure that such time is spent in a way that best benefits their students

Even the best-designed assessment system needs to be implemented thoughtfully, which requires that all users of assessment evidence have a certain degree of assessment literacy— an understanding of both the meanings and the consequences of educational assessments.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn what makes some assessments better than others, why student progress measures are almost entirely useless, why most tests will never produce useful diagnostic information on students, and why most school assessment systems do not do the things they are intended to do.

The workshop will include a consideration of how assessments are interpreted, recorded, and reported to key stakeholders, as well as some in-class suggestions for how to get good and quick feedback from students.

For many years, most teacher education programmes included substantial coverage of theories on the psychology of education. However, many pre-service teachers did not find these courses helpful, since they offered little more than bland platitudes, or, at the other extreme, provided findings that worked in laboratories, but were difficult or impossible to implement in real classrooms. As a result, many teacher preparation programmes now contain little in the way of educational psychology, which is unfortunate, because over the last thirty years or so, cognitive science has produced deep insights into how humans learn.

In this interactive workshop, Dylan will introduce participants to the latest findings from cognitive science about how we learn and the kinds of things we can do to help our students remember what they are taught for longer.