The myth of the exercise book.

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:

1. It is a summative assessment.
2. The quality of the student work (prose, content, detail) matters and the work (and the learning) would benefit significantly from redrafting.
3. There is significant content being applied in a new(ish) situation.
4. 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.