I was feeling a little crabby earlier this week, but that’s probably because it’s been a relatively long half term, from a mid-August beginning. The holiday weather has helped to restore balance, allowing bike rides and walks in the countryside and beside the sea; chances to just enjoy the passing scenery, to stop and look at everyday things, to acknowledge the passage of the seasons.

The week of Autumnwatch programmes on BBC has been an opportunity to indulge in a nature fest, aided by the multiple technical advances that allow nightwatching in detail, or the identification of passing birds and bats from their signals.
Crabbiness could sometimes be use to describe reactions and interactions on Twitter, to Government edicts or press commentary on some, often narrow, area of school life.

The downside to crabbiness is that those caught in that mindset are sometimes somewhat stuck, or they feel under attack and seek to use the shield of their crabbiness to keep the world at bay. It becomes a self-fulfilling, self-limiting approach. However, the seeming simplicities uttered by Government ministers can drive some to stick to the basic need, rather than to go beyond and evolve. If it’s going to hurt too much, people will naturally show an aversion; the aversion creating the perfect place for reality to strike hard and hurt more…
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It was the clip on Autumnwatch that showed spider crabs moulting in order to grow, that has given food for thought this week. Inside the hard shell, the spider crab, along with other crustaceans, is growing. It would be like a human never changing out of their clothes, yet still eating and growing. At some stage there would be a need to get out of them, in whatever way was possible, in order to develop properly.
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So, growth needs a little room.

At the same time, the crab’s body, after shedding the shell is soft and vulnerable, so it needs to find a safe space to avoid being eaten or attacked by predators. Damage at this stage would be life limiting. We all have similar experiences in life, where we hunker down and keep things as simple as possible for a while, to allow for some recovery time.

Growth also needs a period of safety, to allow the new skin to harden.

It can appear that the crab now appears to plateau in growth, but much is happening beneath the surface that cannot be seen, before this requires a new release and evident change. Like other arthropods, they may pass through several instars before reaching maturity.

The hope is that growth leads to maturity.

We are currently living through the strangest period of change in education that I have known since I walked into training college in 1971. In many ways it is the least mature incarnation, in that ideas are shared half-formed, with key elements to be devised at a later stage or left in the hands of practitioners, to be developed at the same time as getting their heads around and delivering the current expectation.

We have an expectation of the most rapid growth of young human potential; every child must succeed at a nationally set standard, at particular years, which is subject to very detailed testing, at the same time as the most limiting approach to the Primary curriculum that sets exactly what should be covered (and achieved) within each year. (Largely Maths and English, the foundation subjects can appear to be peripheral, when they are central to the thinking and verbal curriculum) We are also seeing a continued loss to the profession of teachers, often within the formative period of their development. This diminishes the development potential and the maintaining of the school “tribal memory”, seeking to avoid continual recreation of the wheel.

Teaching is a humane, thinking profession, whose main purpose is to engage younger humans in the act of learning, to share those things that they will need to know at different points in their lives. These lives, by the time they start school will already have started to impact on their development and they arrive at school at different developmental points. Understanding the different starting points is important, if children are not to be driven back into their shells, simply to safeguard themselves.

So what do we do?

We create a national curriculum, deliverable in year based chunks, assuming that all the children are at the same stage of development.

Schools develop approaches to planning, assessment, marking and data management that seek to ensure that the school is doing what is expected. In such a situation, it is not surprising if less experienced teachers “work to rule”. With more in post with careers of less than ten years and with visions of promotion, to stick to the script is a safe place to be. Schools who feel insecure because of their data and with the spectre of academisation for “failure” may well stick to the script, rather than thinking for themselves and their local needs.

We start to talk in mantras; we “do” growth mindset, learning without limits, go inside “black boxes”, gain marginally, create adapted (quicker) plans, BYOD bring your own devices, revere Shanghai maths… each one the panacea for all the current educational ills.

We use Wagolls (what a good one looks like) as a means to show what we are looking for. If this is a peer model, unpicking the process by which it was produced, with reference to key areas, it is possible for others to have a go at adapting their thinking processes and actions. Just to “copy” may ultimately become self-defeating, if a child can’t be “as good as x”. We may have devalued the process in the search for the ultimate product. It does need an aware guide and coach, to be able to pick up those moments where some additional support is needed.

We create “streams” and “sets”, and talk of creaming groups, such as “Grammar Schools”, so developing potential additional self-limiting elements within the whole system. The separation into defined groups automatically sets a limit on the potential for peer models to support general learning; let’s look at how x has achieved this. It creates the need for the teacher to provide the model, which automatically becomes a top-down directive of how children should think, rather than a peer unpicking how they thought. It leads to “recipe” thinking, delivery and expectation, so becoming a self-limiting system. It leads to three parallel classes “doing” the same activities, with one “expert” creating the activity for the team. Some will argue with the stereotype, but it is seen more often than might be healthy.
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It was with interest that the following two tweet extracts from the TES 28.10.16 passed by my timeline.
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 will
​The teacher is the key thinker in any classroom, not a functionary. Each class, whether streamed or selected, is mixed ability and has it’s unique dynamic, which can relate to the make-up of the group. This will impact on the levels of challenge appropriate to different children, or the levels of personalised need of some.

The “bell curve” teacher mentality can be a determinant of how challenge will be adapted, to the real or perceived needs of the class, which can mean under challenge for some, and over challenge for others. With a single activity, only a small proportion of the class may actually be challenged appropriately.

I feel crabby about the endless, pointless “debates” about traditional versus progressive and ancillary “discussions”.
Whichever “camp” a teacher feels themselves to be, they need to know their stuff; for Primary teachers, across ten plus subjects, at a level appropriate to the needs of the age group being taught.

All teachers need to be ordered, organised and good communicators. They need to have good class control. They need to know how children learn and develop as learners, how to challenge them appropriately, then engage with their journeys to guide and mould their steady progress. They need to be able to spot signs of insecurity and address these, to the limits of their ability, then to address concerns to a “knowledgeable other”, who may be able to offer fresh insights or suggest alternative approaches.

Teachers need to have flexible structures that allow them to know that it’s ok to start a lesson by teaching a group, whose need is to be primed or to overlearn previous information, to enable them to join with the main class lesson. At the same time, the rest of the class might be challenged to rehearse aspects of the previous learning.

The significant fundamental, though, throughout all this, and always has been in my career, is the capacity to design appropriate tasks that enable a child to embed and utilise what they know, to identify points where they will need additional knowledge or skill to be able to tackle the set problem. These are often called “open tasks”, with some definition of parameters, but with opportunities for a child to extend within their current abilities. Such tasks need classrooms set up to accommodate child decision making, providing a range of resources, or knowing where they are to be found, so that independent acquisition and return can underpin working practices. They need appropriate space and surfaces to enable children to work and perhaps to leave work in progress, so that time does not necessarily become a restrictive element.

Teachers need to be enabled to be autonomous thinkers in their own classrooms. They are the people who spend their waking minutes either working with or thinking about the children who make up their class. They need to know the children so well that their interactions are nuanced and specific to each child. They need to be allowed to create the environment where they can nurture their charges and impact on those aspects of nature that might restrict some or that need to be extended.

​And in the best classrooms, they are.

Teaching is, and always has felt like the art of doing the impossible, but this is the reality of daily life. To have significant, limiting structures imposed upon teachers ensures that, over time, everyone becomes a little more crabby and looking for an escape.
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Now, having shed my skin and exposed my soft side, I’m going to find a suitable rock under which to hide…  

This means being professional from your first contact with the new school to give the school confidence that you are an appropriate person to be trusted with their children. Find out about key policies, including safeguarding and behaviour management. From the beginning, get to know the children from talking to them, generally and about the work in their books; establish appropriate expectations. This will be added to with discussion of tracking documents and knowing where the teacher would like the children to be by the end of the period. Find out the themes and topics being covered and those specific areas where you will take a lead role.

Two key messages; know the children as well as possible and know your stuff…

Create an overall plan for the six or seven weeks. Put into the plan any specific areas that you need to observe, within this key stage, whether structural like planning or behaviour management, discussions with particular staff, to address any gaps in, or to broaden your understanding of different areas. Plan in any assignments that have to be completed within this timescale, particularly if they depend on interactions with children or staff. Use your professional time well and remember that your colleagues fit you in around their other jobs.
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The practical teacher standards will need to be developed within the experience. 

2; Progress and Outcomes or knowing the children, in class terms. The range of abilities, how they are organised for learning and tasking. Finding out about the school approach to assessment and feedback.

4; Planning. This will have school specific elements. Hopefully, you will be able to get the plan for the half term, from which weekly plans will be developed, again that you should have, so that daily and single lesson plans can fit into a weekly dynamic, allowing reflection, during the week, of the need to adapt and also to evaluate the progress made during the week.

6&5; while some assessment will be after each lesson, with the next lesson altered if there is a need, there is also a need to consider assessment within the lesson. Whereas you may think that you have created the challenge within tasks appropriately, children will demonstrate, through a variety of means, that they do not understand something, or that they are finding the challenge too easy. It is important that you spot and deal with issues that arise with fluency, so that children’s learning is not disjointed.

2; the loop is closed with evaluation of outcomes and greater understanding of the children, as a group, but also as individuals. The repetitive cycle enables a refining of understanding and of approaches.
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Seeking to put this together into a coherent plan that allows for all these elements might be achieved with the following model.

Go outside; there’s such potential out there.
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With the arrival of autumn, you can’t help but notice the changes of the colours of the leaves, and that they are beginning to fall in profusion, together with their fruits, conkers, acorns and various nuts, providing food for a variety of animals.

Knowing something of what you are looking for is really important, if children’s attention is to be drawn to specifics that might lead to an interest that lasts a lifetime. I was lucky as a child, that an uncle in Wales took us for walks over the mountains, sometimes after a nightshift in the mines, to clear his head, but also to introduce us to the world around us.
Uncle Don won’t ever have known that he instilled a love of nature in me, as a messy parental divorce led to estrangement from Wales that existed until one of my own children was eight. Deciding to make contact with my mother, I arrived on the doorstep on the morning that Uncle Don had died in his chair. Life can have a strange symmetry.

However, in my turn, as a teacher who loved the outdoors, from the early 70s and well before the “Forest Schools” theme came into existence, I was developing conservation areas, to enable outdoor study and making links with the local wildlife trust, eventually becoming a Watch (junior naturalists) leader, and voluntarily taking on the role of County Organiser for Hampshire. It was a measure of the success of this that, when I stepped down, it was advertised as a paid post!

You may wonder what there is to look for when outside. It’s worth having some sort of guide if you are unsure. One constant since it was published in 1972 has been the Collins Guide to Animal Tracks and Signs, by Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom. This series was very useful as an introduction to many areas. Other guides are published by the Field Studies Council and one still exists from my Watch days.

Conservation starts with observation and asking questions, then following up with some research, which might include asking an “expert”. It involves learning the names of animals and plants and identifying them easily.
It is about attention and awareness, without which it’s easy to miss that there have been fewer butterflies this year, or that ash trees are suffering and may well die out in large numbers in the next few years. When creatures die out, as a result of our apparent disinterest, we are partly to blame.
Go out and look; be an active discoverer of the world and, do you know the best bit? It’s good for your well-being! Go outside, breathe fresh air and look…

​And maybe you have the next David Attenborough in your class.

So, what to do?
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1)      Visit a DIY store and find colour charts with autumn colours. Get children to bring in egg boxes. Put one autumn colour in each egg space and go out to find something that matches the colours in the box. This can be a home activity.
2)      Go out and look for the signs that mammals have been eating nearby, especially where nuts or pine cones have fallen. Unpick a pine cone to find the pine nuts that are being sought. Show children something that is not obvious. Look at the nuts, especially hazelnuts, to find holes, or if they have been split in half.
3)      Look for droppings, of different sorts, even in towns, where rabbits and foxes may be most obvious.
4)      Make a sand area or find a mud area where animal tracks may be more visible. Make plaster casts; a circle of cardboard to secure the plaster, add the plaster to an appropriate amount of water (a small mound should appear above the water to make it the right consistency), pour into the mould and wait. Clean off when dry. Nb you can practice making plaster casts in the classroom, with handprints in plasticine.
5)      Look for bark scratched or gnawed off trees.
6)      Look, listen, film, photograph. Make an Attenborough style documentary.
7)      Speculate; where do the animals live? Make a map of the area, record where the evidence has been found and then look for any holes, or other signs, that might show where the animals are.

I think therefore I am;
We thought therefore we were; probably very tired after an enjoyable, engaging day…

Not only are there many ways of using the mind, many ways of knowing and constructing meanings, but they serve many functions in many situations. Bruner 1996

Dateline Saturday 15th October 2016

Venue Southampton University; Teaching and Learning Takeover 2016 (aka TLT16)

When around 200 teachers gather together from all points North, South, East and West, prepared to spend the whole of their Saturday listening to colleagues sharing their thoughts, it has to be a point for celebration. That some had been on the road for several hours, others journeying on the Friday and paying for a hotel overnight speaks volumes for to things, professionalism and camaraderie.

There is evidence of significant personal relationships having been created through events such as these, which inevitably bring together people of like mind, but prepared to consider other points of view, adding to the sum of their existence. TLT is the epitome of the growth mindset of (at least 200) teachers, led by the honest and open reflections of workshop leaders. It’s not a place to sell a product, but it is a place to be made, at times, to think hard.

Quality time to talk before the event started, with coffee and pastries to provide a second breakfast, or well deserved sustenance for the long-travelled, ensured a gathering point, where intermittent friendships were rekindled and new links made. It helps if people look like their social media pictures!

There was an interesting experiment during TLT16, with attendees asked to offer 1 minute insights into their experience and the impact on their learning, through the TLTpod, which is online.

Astington and Olson (1985) comment “thinking does not have any behavioural indices”. It is difficult to observe it in action. Teachers can only really “infer” what kinds of thinking may have taken place by listening to children’s speech, responses to questions, conversation, watching actions, close observation in working situations and judging a product. Debra McGregor 2007

No one will really know how the day will have had an impact, as each teacher will return to their home environment, within which each operates and this may be significantly different to that of the speakers. However, it can be reassuring, if working life is challenging, to know that there are places that think differently.

I always enjoy the honesty of John Tomsett. What you see is what you get, a real human(e) being. That John finds great pleasure in his job comes through every pore and every syllable. He’s grown himself into his role and is helping others to aspire to do the same, unpicking the detail of his thinking journey and sharing it openly.

He brought the word “love” into the talk, which could create difficulty, but, reflecting back, I could use the same word to describe my career; I have loved being a teacher and head, and now a helper of newbies to take those roles. I still enjoy picking over the bits and pieces that go to make up the roles, to support dialogue.

Which clumsily takes me into Chris Moyse’ talk about coaching. This aspect of personal development could be seen as a buzzword, and, many will attest, when done badly, it can regress to dictat. To embark on a developmental journey can be hard for the coachee, as they will be doing so in order to “improve”. It is just as hard for the coach, preparing the ground for the dialogue within the context of the institution. There have to be clear structures and high awareness, among the participants, of the specifics of the context and the personal elements. The opportunity to discuss is often a luxury for teachers in the business of their daily lives, cannot be rushed and needs purpose in order to support desired change.

Quality change cannot be rushed; another of John T’s messages.

Andy Tharby stood in for Shaun Allison, his co-writer and ideas developer. Their book is worth reading by both Primary and Secondary colleagues, as they have distilled some truths common to all phases, such as:-

·         clarity in exposition, broadened to capture appropriate links and metaphors,
·         challenge in tasking,
·         thinking, talking, anticipating, planning for and effecting change,
·         creating “baselines” from which progress can be inferred.

This to me, is where the knowledge debate forks, as the processes described, working within all subject (knowledge) contexts, create an appropriate pedagogy for each. It’s never, in my experience, been either or. You have to know your stuff, and have the vehicle(s) through which your knowledge can be shared. Broader contextualisation, sometimes shorthanded as “cross curricular” links, creates a greater imagery, which enable a learner to bring other dimensions into their reflections. Andy gave the example of reading Freud and Darwin to provide background to Jeckyl and Hyde.

The afternoon slots saw me sitting in Athena Pitsillis of Cannon’s School's session. It was interesting as a Primary person, to have some insights into KS3,4 and 5. A key area shared was the use of the Solo taxonomy as a means to promote progression. This was interesting, in that, earlier in the week, I had gone back to the report of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT 1987) for an earlier blog, to rediscover an almost identical model proposed by those authors of the original National Curriculum. Of course, while Solo focuses on the progression of thinking, articulated through words, the NC descriptors became shorthanded to numbers and letters, and therefore devalued.

Summer Turner is also Secondary and has recently had a book on Curriculum and Assessment for Secondary Education published. An accomplished writer, blogger and speaker, Summer spent some time focusing on tests, which is an area of much current discussion among bloggers and authors. Perhaps, being Primary, I’m a little sceptical about some of the claims for “testing” which can sometimes assume a purity that seeks to elevate them to supremacy in the panoply of the teacher’s armoury. With younger children, being able to ask the right question, at the right time can be sufficient unto the day. However, if a few spellings have been sent home, to check the security of the learning requires the performance of those spellings, likely to be a simple test, which then results in a need for extension or repetition. Performance, to me, is a higher form of testing, where the known is used and applied; so every piece of work is effectively a “test”, if you know what to look for.

Lindsay Skinner closed the day with another dose of humanity, reminding us that children need to see teachers as human beings, with feelings, but ultimately with the children as the centre of their thinking and actions. It was a really pleasant way to end a pleasant day.

Thanks to Jennifer Ludgate and David Fawcett for their organisational acumen; it worked a treat.

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Group activity is a natural part of life; in fact it could be said that life is a form of group work. Schools are a microcosm of life, in that younger humans are grouped together in an organisation where they are just expected to get on together and it can seem a surprise to some when some of them find the situation difficult, for a variety of reasons. Each of us has our tolerances, likes and dislikes, which we exercise in our own way, as adults, by choosing to participate in social situations or not. That becomes our prerogative.

There’s been some recent “discussion” on Twitter about group work in schools. I say discussion. It often becomes more assertion, with a selected piece of writing being trailed as the essential truth.

Over a long career, I have seen many incarnations of group based activity, some of which worked extremely effectively and some that didn’t work for a variety of reasons.

Group based activity requires a task that is designed to engage the challenge the group, as a whole, to participate in the process of creating something or finding a solution to a problem together. They should be a collaborative partnership, incorporating all members of the group.

Tasks should enable discussion and decision making by the group, who then take responsibility for their planned initial decisions and actions and for the reflective journey which may result in changes to the original plan.

Resources, space and time are all restrictive elements for some kinds of group work, and, where group work fails, it is often because one or more of these variables have been ignored, providing limits to the group capacity to succeed.

Group size can be a limiting factor. The process of learning to work together starts with a partner, then in threes, etc. This can be frequently seen in PE/games, where small team games are a part of skill application in small scale situations. Where group work becomes a “thing”, organised with different participants selected in different roles, this puts a different complexion on the process, as play acting the given role overtakes the purpose of the task.

The flexibility to use group work effectively was a key element of Primary classroom practice up until 1997, when the National Strategy introduction began to push teachers to whole class approaches. Space, time, and resources were a part of classroom creation, with areas available for a range of activities, resources available in labelled drawers and time given to the task that showed how the time was to be used and the expectation of an outcome. With a growing number of TAs, it was possible to deploy someone to keep an eye, either on the class while the teacher intervened, or the group as a guide/facilitator. I managed to employ one TA with a science and DT background/interest, and another with an art specialism so some specific additional skills were often available to support learning.

I can see, for some teachers, who move from room to room, that it might be easier to turn up with minimal resources and just teach, particularly if the teacher voice is the significant resource, to impart specific areas of knowledge. The current approach to timetabling, setting and streaming and withdrawal groups in Primary is also a very limiting factor, especially for space and time. It does mean some resources are now often underused.

However, discussion is group work and this has a place in all teaching and learning, in that learners articulating their thoughts are akin to testing, as it is an externalisation of their thinking. With some kind of recording facility, it is possible to focus the group on the task in hand, by creating a “listener” at the table. With my career being long enough, this was done with a tape recorder, turned to record. It focused minds and kept the groups to task; iPads and digital microphones are now available.

As a headteacher, the benefits of group work outweighed any supposed disadvantage, as, by working together, the children learned to respect each other, which in turn supported the school motto of “Thinking, working and playing together”. Playground issues became minimal over time, as children developed very good social skills. They saw the “team” in many different ways, from the pair, through to the class, through to their school.
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In other words, they saw that they had a place and that they belonged. They understood the idea of collaboration.

​See also
Teaching is a team Game
Collegiate Teachers

  

When it comes down to simplicity, assessment is the tool by which we make up our minds about something; it is a part of everyday life, we all make judgements. In educational terms, it means being able to sum up an individual child when a parent asks, or when reporting at different points in the year. How we judge will be largely based on our personal understanding of child development and development of the different subjects for which we are responsible; in the case of Primary teachers, this is across the curriculum.

In many ways, if assessment does not add to the sum of knowledge about a child, it has to be seen as questionable. If the test scores, the smiley faces of the acres of marking in response to an outcome doesn’t add to the teacher’s understanding, they are a waste of time. Just doing the test does not promote learning. Unpicking the areas where errors or misconceptions occurred might lead to some gap filling, if the complementary discussion leads the learner to understand the nature of the error and the means to address it.

In other words, the data derived from assessment is only as good as the information that derives from it and the actions that then follow to promote learning, in one or thirty children.

This is not an argument for pure subject knowledge, but might be an argument for being able to interact with the learning journeys of the learners who are working within a subject; understanding how learners come to progressively understand the subject, linking new information with what they already know.

Assessment puts teachers into an investigative mode; to what extent do they really understand what they have been taught? This requires quality questioning skills, being prepared to dig a little deeper where responses require clarification. Testing is only ever as good as the questions being asked.

We know these things today because assessment became a “thing” as part of the original National Curriculum. Since then, it has morphed into “data” and created several layers of accountability that may not impact directly on learning in classes.

Working with trainees today, I try to get them to see assessment in every action, that it is a significant characteristic of reflective teaching, responding to the evidence before them.

And 1987 begat TGAT
In 1987, I was the deputy head of a First School, 4-8 year olds, in the South East of Hampshire, when a document passed into my hands with the request to read, distil and disseminate to the staff, the current thinking on assessment. This was because I was responsible for teaching and learning and assessment was seen as an arm of that.

The National Writing Project had been an active part of the developing school practice, as it complemented already existing practices. It emphasised the process of writing, from initial idea through to the drafting stage, with children actively engaged in the whole process and ongoing evaluation, with peer critique as an element of final evaluation.
When the National Curriculum documentation arrived in school, each subject manager audited the new demands against what was on offer and there was a 95% correspondence; a few maths and science topics needed tweaking.

The 67 page report from the Government’s Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) was published under the leadership of Professor Paul Black, with three supplementary reports published in March 1988, in response to public consultation. These publications made reference to work undertaken by Dylan Wiliam and Margaret Brown and also early work by Carol Dweck.

These reports supported thinking about assessment during the implementation of the original National Curriculum.

Over time, this was altered and added to, as assessment became a thing, within a wide range of proprietary approaches to assessment that created short cuts and, in so doing, reduced much assessment to tests and mark sheets and scores, rather than the holistic descriptors of children that were originally described. These approaches, I am sure, led to the removal of levels, yet, for all that, the words embedded in the descriptors were eminently useful.

What was interesting, in the context of the developing documentation, was the raising of the quality of discussion within the school and between the schools in the cluster feeding the Secondary school. It gave a common language, to accompany the common themes of learning, especially English and Maths. As a result, outcomes rose and children were motivated by both the sense of achievement and their understanding of their personal learning journey. The level descriptors also gave a voice to non-specialists, who had a framework of descriptions that brought some coherence to how a subject deepened in challenge and expectation. They were never prefect, but they were a guide.

I thought it would be useful to go back and highlight some of the original intentions of the task group, by sharing the conclusions. The link to the whole document is at the foot of the blog. It shows me that over time, the many shortcuts that are sought and sold as panaceas that ease the workload, actually distort the whole to the point where they create a new level of workload. It also shows that assessment principles do not essentially change.

Being able to describe where a child is at any particular moment in time and their next learning step has been the bread and butter of teaching for as long as I can remember. Long may it be so.
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For those who would like to look at the conclusions of the original TGAT report, just that section is below. The full report and the supplements can be seen via the links at the bottom of the blog. You will see that the original premise was to support teachers in doing their day job. The changes to practice, from around 1997, were in relation to Government requirements for data and judgements on schools.
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TGAT; SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

219.  Whilst the system we propose draws on many aspects of good practice that are already established, it is radically new in the articulation and comprehensive deployment of methods based on such experience.  We are confident that the system we describe is practicable and can bring benefits to work both within schools and outside them.  In particular, we can see how provision of new types of support within a framework of a new set of procedures can replace much of the large volume of testing and assessment at present in use.  A co-ordinated system will use resources to better effect and will complement and support the existing assessment work that teachers already carry out.  Thus the system should contribute to the raising of educational standards so that the broad educational needs of individuals and the national need to enhance the resources and skills of young people can be met.

Building on good classroom practice
220.  As we stressed in our Introduction, the proposed procedures of assessment and testing bear directly upon the classroom practices of teachers. A system which was not closely linked to normal classroom assessments and which did not demand the professional skills and commitment of teachers might be less expensive and simpler to implement, but would be indefensible in that it could set in opposition the processes of learning, teaching and assessment.

Formative assessment to support learning
221.  Our terms of reference stress that the assessment to be proposed must be "supportive of learning in schools".  We reiterate that the four criteria set out in Section 1 are essential if this support is to be secured and we believe that they necessarily follow from the aims expressed in the consultative document on the national curriculum.  The formative aspect follows almost by definition. For the system to be formative it must produce a full and well-articulated picture of the individual child's current strengths and future needs.  No simple label 1-6 will achieve this function, nor is any entirely external testing system capable of producing the necessary richness of information without placing an insuperable load of formal assessment on the child.  The formative aspect calls for profile reporting and the exercise of the professional judgement of teachers.

Raising standards
 222.  The system is also required to be formative at the national level, to play an active part in raising standards of attainment. Criterion-referencing inevitably follows. Norm-referenced approaches conceal changes in national standards.  Whatever the average child accomplishes is the norm and if the average child's performance changes the reported norm remains the same figure. Only by criterion-referencing can standards be monitored. Only by criterion-referencing can they be communicated.  Formative assessment requires the involvement of the professional judgement of teachers. Criterion-referencing helps to inform these judgements. Group moderation will enable the dissemination of a shared language for discussing attainment at all levels – the central function of assessment.  These three features will help to emphasise growth.  They result in progression – a key element in ensuring that pupils and parents receive focused and evolving guidance throughout their school careers. Consistent and de-motivating confirmation of everything as it was at the previous reporting age can be avoided only if pupils and parents can have clear evidence of progress by use of the single sequence of levels across all ages in the way that we propose.

The unity of our proposals
223.  We have considered systems of assessment and testing which are very different from the one that we propose.  All alternatives impoverish the relationships between assessment and learning, so that the former harms the latter instead of supporting it.  Most of them give no clear information or guidance about pupils' achievement or progress, and they all risk interference with, rather than support of, teachers' work with pupils.  Thus we cannot recommend any simpler alternative to our proposals.  There is of course room for variation in their implementation: for example, using group moderation procedures for a restricted number of profile components, or not using all such procedures on every annual assessment cycle, or phasing in more slowly to spread the load on teachers and on the support systems.  None of these marginal changes would destroy essential features of our system, although they might weaken its impact in the short term.  However, any major change that we can envisage would destroy the linked unity of our proposals and lose most of the benefits which they are aimed to secure within and for the national curriculum.

Securing teachers' commitment
 224.  The underlying unity of the three aspects of education – teaching, learning, and assessment – is fundamental to the strategy which informs our proposals.  The strategy will fail if teachers do not come to have confidence in, and commitment to, the new system as a positive part of their teaching. Securing this commitment is the essential pre-condition for the new system to realise the considerable value that it could bring. 
 
225.  Among the conditions which will have to be met to secure this professional commitment will be the following:
•        Clear acceptance that the aim is to support and enhance the professional skills that teachers already deploy to promote learning.
•        Clear recognition that the focus of responsibility for operation of a new system lies with teachers within schools.
•        Stress on the formative aims and on giving clear guidance about progress to pupils and to their parents.
•        Widespread consultation and discussion before proposals are put into effect.
•        A realistic time-scale for phasing in a new system.
•        Adequate resources, including in-service provision.
•        Help with moderation procedures so that the system contributes to communication within schools, between schools, parents and governors, and to the community as a whole about the realisation and evaluation of the aims of schools.
•        Sensitive handling of any requirements for outside reporting, recognising that simplistic procedures could mislead parents, damage schools, and impair relations between teachers and their pupils.

​226.  If there is one main motive to explain our support for the system we propose, it is that we believe that it can provide the essential means for promoting the learning development of children: support for teachers in enhancing the resources and professional skills which they deploy.
 
Task Group on Assessment and Testing. First report.
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/1988-TGAT-report.pdf
Task Group on Assessment and Testing. Supplementary reports
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/Research-Centres/crestem/Research/Current-Projects/assessment/tgatsuppl.pdf

Discontent is the first necessity of progress. Thomas Edison

I’ve just finished two weeks of visiting a cohort of School Direct trainees in their initial month of school experience, to ensure that they are operating in an appropriate context, with supportive colleagues and a dedicated mentor with the appropriate skills and time to engage with the development needs of the trainees. It is clear from these visits that the trainees have secured a place in the classroom as a person of teacher status, can lead the class with appropriate behaviour expectations, creating an environment where children are enthused and challenged, and are well ordered and organised.

These four standards characterise the vast majority of teachers. They underpin the role.
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Personal teacher standards

The more dynamic areas comprise those which are learner-based, their start points, or baselines, the teacher planning for learning over time, the teacher ability to work alongside learners and to adjust plans, even within a lesson, to developing, evident need.

Progress and Outcomes, teacher standard 2, is likely to be the area most concerning for a teacher, as they are judged on how well their learners do in their care across the year. That this has become more difficult and exercises many minds, is a result of changes made at Government level over the recent few years.

Of course, quality control judgements, based on outcomes, need to decide just how good the work is and what support and advice is needed to remedy issues, or to continue the forward momentum.

With experience, teachers begin to collect (mentally) and through events such as moderation of physical outcomes, a personal portfolio of what constitutes an appropriate quality outcome for a particular group of children. An early career trainee or NQT, or a teacher changing year groups will not have this as a part of their professional repertoire. It takes time, immersion, in-school moderation activities and much reflection to gain security. Yet it is exactly this security that supports decision making about the next steps for the teacher and the child. In other words, the teaching and learning approach becomes more refined.
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Practical teacher standards, or 24652

Progress and Outcomes are high profile and there has been, and probably always will be much discussion about progression, within and between lessons and over time.

Perhaps we have started to use the wrong word to describe what we want. What if we used growth or improvement instead of progress, as in a growing or improving ability in an area, so that our nurturing and feeding and necessary close attention to detail has sustained impact? Growth and improvement imply development.

Progress, as a word on it’s own might seem to some to be an inevitable effect of teaching, so that teachers engage less definitely with the process and the outcomes. Progress measures are, to me, the combination of the progress of each individual child, not just the headline figure for the class or the cohort.

There is a need to be able to describe progress through each subject, not as a means to determine the exact steps that will be taken, although some tracking systems have recreated Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) style approaches, which can led to that end. Learning in reality is slightly messy and is likely to be determined by the quality of tasking with embedded challenge appropriate to the needs of each child. These challenges should enable teacher and learner to engage in dialogue which supports continued focus and effort.

While it seems reasonable to argue that one lesson is not sufficient to see growth or progression, especially across all abilities, it can also be argued that through observation, the observer should be able to infer the likelihood of progress, from the lesson intentions, the challenge to different groups, the interactions between peers and between students and teacher, as well as looking at the developing outcomes.

Expectation mind-set supports the mental rehearsal of a lesson, where a teacher anticipates the points in the lesson where learners could exhibit misunderstanding or simply encounter a block. This allows preparations which ensure that issues are addressed appropriately and in a timely way.

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The teacher/expectation mind-set:- analyse-plan-do-review-record

• expects something specific to change as a result of the carefully matched learning opportunities being offered, (analysis)
• supports the teacher in looking at the resulting activities and discerning the nuances of behaviour that suggest ease or difficulty being encountered. (planning)
• drives conversations seeking to unpick areas of concern or to understand the fact that they’ve taken five minutes to complete a task you’d planned for twenty-five. (doing)
• creates the start point from which adjustments to the expectations are made, within or between lessons (review and adapt)
• ensures that the learner(s) make(s) progress and provides food for thought at the end of the lesson about next steps. (record keeping)

There cannot be many lessons where some progress is not anticipated and planned for. However, unpicking contributory factors to progress is essential.

Are lesson expectations clearly expressed, or are they sufficiently unchallenging as to allow all to make minimal progress, or some to make none? There is an interplay between the lesson activity success criteria and individual development statements, with the latter overlaying the former, adding value to reflective developmental discussions.
Put even more simply, do the children know what they personally are seeking to improve, and in sufficient detail, that it has regular and sustained impact. Perhaps more importantly, do they have the capacity to do this alone or do they need support and guidance?

A diagram of in-lesson behaviours

In order to make specific changes in learning, the challenge embedded within a task will be a significant determining factor, even within so-called carousel activities, while the ability, engagement and resilience of the learners in the task will determine the ultimate outcome of the activity.

Teacher and TA intervention and support need to be monitored and recorded to provide a true picture of the learner’s independent ability.

Of course, many experienced teachers will, intuitively, as a result of their teaching experience, be practised in how subjects develop across the age groups that they teach.

The situation is different for less experienced or new teachers.

During the year, ITT students join their school experience schools, getting to know the staff, the children and the realities of becoming a teacher. It’s a complex mix of personal, professional and practical knowledge and skills as seen above. They have had their preparatory lectures, as do all ITT students, covering the range of needs. Whether this is sufficient for each and every student is likely to be seen during the practice, with development needs identified by their teacher mentors, supported by the mentor, colleagues and linked tutors. The mentor role is vital in this process, especially within the current climate, where each school may have different systems across several aspects of practice.

Introductory conversations are inevitably illuminating, with simple questions often being the ones that throw the student into a slight panic.

A recent question asked during visits was what a good piece of writing for a year x child might look like. It is common for trainees to be unable to offer insights into what they might be looking for as an acceptable outcome and, as a result, they are unable to suggest what they’d be looking to offer as next step challenges.

These responses made me reflect on the place of progress and outcomes in the holistic aspects of teaching and learning, particularly for ITT students starting out, and early career teachers. If they don’t really know what to look for when they are looking at work outcomes, they are not really in a position to support development.

It is, still, to me an argument for school and national exemplar portfolios across all subjects, as reference material.

The notion of a “national standard” is in current vogue. This is having an impact throughout schools, with school reporting to parents across a number of statements at year end.
 
Above standard • National standard • Working towards standard • Below national standard
Some use above, secure, below…

These statements alter what was levelness to yearness, but with the added complication that a number, perhaps 10-15% will have the statement that they are below an “acceptable standard”.

The 15th centile and below are inevitably going to be comprised mainly of the SEND children, with a proportion of EAL children new to the country, whose ability to take the test will be compromised by limited language. So SEND and some EAL children will be told that they “do not meet the national standard”, as if they are being graded like eggs on a conveyor. Apart from telling them that they have failed, they have not met the standard, so they are sub-standard. “Working towards” also equates to sub-standard.

Has there been, in recent times, a more degrading vocabulary choice to describe children who find learning more difficult?

But I digress, if only for a short while.

C.S.Lewis We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Progress in a subject is likely to be viewed as somewhat linear, if only because learning opportunities, within curricula determined by schools and interpreted by the teacher, are created into a timeline, of knowledge transmission and activities and challenges, to seek to embed concepts and facts into a child’s mind.

Progress is linked with capability, the development of a toolkit of learning skills, in different subjects, with capability being judged in a hierarchy, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, dependent on the nature of the activity. It must be hoped that a learner can do more after a period of teaching.

At its simplest, judgement seeks to articulate the essential values or quality of the outcome. This supports detailed learning dialogue, orally or through written comment. Teacher judgement does need a frame of reference.

Where there is an arbitrary line that says “These are the features of a good outcome” clear articulation of the qualities expected at the outset of the task, with modelling and exemplars (WAGOLLs), are likely to give the learners insights into expectations. These are often stated as learning objectives (LO) success criteria (SC), steps to success (S2S), or what I’m looking for (WILF).

Assessment language talks of baselines. In plain English, this asks where the children are now. The “now” describes current capability; they know a discrete set of things, skills or knowledge. If these become non-negotiable in lessons, it is the adding of further capabilities or skills within the knowledge context which can be described as progress, improvement or growth.

Any planning for learning needs to acknowledge this expected progress, at group level, but also with the potential to be very specific to individuals or small groups who fall outside the general remit for their work group.

If these expectations are articulated in ways that children can understand and are attached to their workbooks in a way that allows them to be opened out during working sessions, they become prompts for in-lesson personal dialogue. With large class sizes, teachers cannot be expected to memorize every target for every child in every subject. Too often the personal aspect is somewhere within the child’s exercise book, but is hidden from view, so that it plays little or no part in their current challenge.

Progress on one level, is a constant shifting of the baseline, through the wide variety of means available to the teacher, embedded in progressively better outcomes.

The two essentially practical teaching standards are (6) assessment and (5) adapting learning. If these are interpreted as “thinking on your feet” and “engaging and making adjustments to expectation and tasking”, they become active constituents of lessons, rather than being seen as something that is done after the lesson, as marking and feedback, or as “tests” although that act contributes further to development and future progress.

Learners and their teachers need mental maps of progress, supported by overt descriptors as reminders. Evidence of achievement can be noted and celebrated at the moment, but also as a collation of evidence at summative points, perhaps as formal reports.

Progress is not necessarily “gap filling”. The progress of achievers when unpicked, articulated and shared, can support the progress of others.

Progress is a fluid concept. Outcomes are reflection points, which determine the next appropriate steps.
Assessment judgements which imply “not at standard” do not support vulnerable learners to make progress, yet they need to make significant progress.

The bottom line, though, is always likely to be expressed as, “How well do you know your children?”
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G.K Chesterton. The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Transmission, though, in education terms, has the corollary of receiving and, with thirty children in a room, there could be up to thirty interpretations of what has been received, moderated through the child’s personal filters of previous experiences, in school and outside. For some, it will be their physical ability to hear or see clearly, for others their baseline vocabulary, which may not match the teaching need, leaving them adrift in a sea of uninterpretable ideas.

It is the teacher role to engage with these different interpretations, to moderate and modify misconceptions, which may only become apparent on the basis of some kind of outcome, oral, written or drawn, or physical interpretation.
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While the operatives at Bletchley Park had their mechanical means of interpreting data such as this, the teacher has their eyes, ears and minds with which to spot needs and deal with them in timely fashion, so that interpretation of concern into more manageable language or chunks can enable the child to participate fully.
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