Magic Wand Lesson 1
Formative Assessment works
A teaching mantra that has guided me, along with the best sporting teams, is that the training must be harder than the game.
No matter which school I’ve worked at, the benefits of formative assessment have been paramount for this result, along with building vital knowledge and skills for their students. This also leads to the importance of backwards mapping to ensure that teachers are building their students towards the task, and there are no nasty surprises.
The schools in Sydney that I’ve taught that are in the top 100 have all used formative assessment for their students, and this is taught early, sometimes as early as Year 7 for high school. Students who are continually practising the skills of writing critically, discursively and imaginatively continue to build on these skills and will not balk at assessment tasks, rather thrive in them. In many cases, I’ve valued added across a large cohort of students , because they continually apply best practice and their confidence rises as a result.
The obvious drawback for educators here is the additional marking involved, so teachers need to be strategic here and find a good balance. I find that that if you start week one of term, you may not have enough content to assess or if you do this weekly, teacher and student burnout is a high risk. I’ve found that every 2-3 weeks is about the right balance for classes (though with year 12 in the lead-up to the HSC this can be tweaked).
While teachers are consistently bombarded with admin, and need to be wary of too much marking, formative marking is a strategy that works, and if you make training harder than the game, you allow your team to grow, thrive and never to fear the test.
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