Adding to Tuesday's meeting

Dear all,

Firstly a big thank you for your constructive comments in helping us build a Walk Through template that will provide data for us to become better teachers. I believe this has been a very productive process in establishing indicators for learning in the 21^st century and consequently the organization of and practice in our classrooms. I will be sharing another draft template with you next week, that we will trial after the half term break before placing on Mcrel.

 

Below are some of the key points that Dylan Wiliam talks about as strategies to improve student learning that he touched on in the video that I showed in our meeting and a short 3 minute vdo that looks at the 5 strategies.

 

I tried to access the Webinar's below and could only access the 3rd one. Each does have a ppt presentation that is downloadable and certainly worth taking a look though. You need to register to do this, but that only takes a minute.

Dylan Wiliam & The 5 Formative Assessment Strategies to Improve Student Learning

·         By Kelly Goodrich

·         August 16, 2012

·

Dylan Wiliam’s new book, Embedded Formative Assessment, is filled with a number of insights culled from his 35 years of experience in education. The foundation of the book highlights the importance of formative assessment as a tool to improve teacher practice and ultimately improve student learning.

In the book, he provides the 5 strategies that he has come to believe are core to successful formative assessment practice in the classroom:

1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success – getting the students to really understand what their classroom experience will be and how their success will be measured.

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning – developing effective classroom instructional strategies that allow for the measurement of success.

3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward – working with students to provide them the information they need to better understand problems and solutions.

4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another – getting students involved with each other in discussions and working groups can help improve student learning.

5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning – We wrote a recent blog on this topic: self-regulation of learning leads to student performance improvement.

These 5 strategies are also part of our Keeping Learning on Track (KLT) professional development solution that puts these strategies into action with a formal process for teacher professional development. But before formative assessment strategies can be effectively implemented, there needs to be an understanding as to what formative assessment is, and perhaps even more importantly, what it is not by school leaders and teachers.

Dylan recently gave a webinar that emphasized his understanding of formative assessment, and gave some practical techniques for implementing some of his strategies. You can access the webinar at no cost here. We’d also love to read your thoughts or experiences implementing formative assessment strategies, so drop a comment below.



See you at Monday briefing as I need to explain arrangements for Thursday's Celebration of Cultures.

Have a great weekend,
Yours
Adrian