One
of the more enduring myths of my teaching career is that student's exercise
book have the ability to show ‘progress’: it is easy to assume that a student’s
book might show increases in complexity in their understanding of the topic and
that that progress will be age and ability appropriate. However, the
un-evidenced claim that a book shows learning comes with no proviso or
qualifications. I would wager that anything that appears to be quite so linear,
that so neatly moves from one concept to the next probably shows only that the
students have attended the lesson and has engaged in the elaborate Punch and
Judy show with their teachers to perpetuate the myth that learning is visible.
What may be more indicative of learning is the students completing tasks that
have similar content, that show the students interacting with the ideas,
applying the ideas, getting the ideas wrong and then getting them right, and
then revisiting them later in the year/term or module and getting them wrong
again, and then practising with them. This is what the research tells us is how
learning happens. The purpose of a school exercise book is not to demonstrate
learning: they are focused on the now: the moment they begin to interact and
think, to practice with ideas and engage in a dialogue about what is being
learned. Student work is there to support the working memory, as well
being a crutch for long term memory. It is a formative document, not
a summative one.
Summative
assessments should be separate, so that learning over time can be ascertained
to the best of our sketchy abilities. It is much more valuable for a teacher to
know what has been learned once an opportunity to forget has occurred. This
makes the managing of learning much more difficult as it becomes a long term
venture, and is anything but wrapped
up in the here and the now of daily classroom interaction. Our curriculum needs
to be organised and designed with this in mind, and no one has the time to do
this. Despite every school stating that learning is what they exist for, the
vast majority of schools and inspection regimes are satisfied with proxies of learning performance during classwork, summative assessments being there solely to
determine a grade. What a shame.
Looking
at student performance in lessons is not necessarily a bad thing as it gives us
assessment information that cannot be dismissed. It provides a view of students
understanding taken as a snapshot, at a point, in the here and now of the
classroom; it guides towards how we might help students develop their
understanding. We do this in the hope that the incremental gains, the quanta add up to make the greater whole, but until we get a grip on what learning
truly looks like we are very much flying in the dark.
Ask
yourself how do I know that each student knows x, y and z? We can’t really
answer this as our evidence base of grades and percentages, the memories of
conversations we have and of tasks completed are imperfect. Too imperfect. The reality is that we need information about
performance and also about learning: though divergent, they are not opposite,
but are parts of a bigger whole. As Neils Bohrs points out, “The opposite of a
fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be
another profound truth." But we are kidding ourselves
if we think that student books and subsequent teacher marking in any way provides
the richness and multi faceted totality of feedback student learning really
requires.
Marking
is only part of the story therefore, albeit an important and time-consuming
part. But if you were honest with yourself you would admit that not every task we
ask students to complete are in any worthy of the 6 hours of Sunday evening
needed to mark them. This does not mean that some tasks are worthless as
springboards for feedback just they might be more suited to the interactive
variety of feedback given during the process of learning in the lesson.
To
qualify for a full-blown marking assault one of four overriding qualities in
the work set need to be present. It must at least have one of the following:
- It is a summative assessment.
- The quality of the student work
(prose, content, detail) matters and the work (and the learning) would
benefit significantly from redrafting.
- There is significant content
being applied in a new(ish) situation.
- The content is in the process
of being built upon over time (such as a threshold concept).
Marking
absolutely everything that is entered into exercise books is not a helpful
strategy because of the complete impossibility of doing this. Schools making
policies need to use what we know about learning and feedback to guide practice
and not just set some high handed, un-evidenced dictate in stone.
