For those of you teachers who like to keep themselves on their toes, here is a challenge to float your boat.
For 10 days, introduce a new Assessment for Learning strategy into your classroom practice.
For those of you who like to take it a little bit easier, you can do this over a 10 week period by introducing one new strategy each week.
Let us know how you get on!
- Make aims clear: Put lesson objectives on the board at the beginning of the lesson and talk to students about why they are studying what they are studying.
- Set targets for the lesson: Make the lesson more purposeful for students by setting targets at the beginning about what you and the class are going to do.
- Wait time: Allow at least 7 seconds to pass before you choose a student to answer a question.
- No hands up: Pick students at random to answer questions. This encourages all students to participate and listen to each other.
- Collaborative thinking: Brainstorm in pairs first for 2-3 minutes before answering question.
- 2 Stars and a Wish: Allow the students to review their work in the lesson with two comments about what they have done well (stars) and one comment about something they could improve (wish).
- Regular reviewing: Check the learning against the learning objective and agreed targets at least once during the lesson, and again at the end. This can be done simply by questioning.
- Might: Introduce the word ‘might’ to questions to allow for the exploration of multiple answers and divergent thinking.
- Effective Questioning: Plan your questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy to ensure HOT skills are being developed.
- Recap: Build in time to reflect at the end of your lesson.
