Why the Rethinking Formative Assessment Working Group?
After working closely with two lead teachers in two schools during our assessment project, we wanted to invite more teachers from a range of contexts to explore how focusing on formative assessment for English might enhance their classroom practice and their understanding about their students’ learning. As we have stressed throughout our project write-up, we feel strongly that over-emphasising summative assessment has had a detrimental impact on our subject, crowding out opportunities for genuinely formative practice. While we felt we had begun to address this through our project, we felt the next logical step was to further spread the impact that proper formative assessment can have on students’ experience of English.
What follows is a write-up of what happened when we invited several more teachers to investigate their own formative practices in their own classrooms. At the end of this blog, you’ll find some prompts to support you to take the principles of the project into your own school, and join the movement to extricate our subject from the stranglehold of summative assessment!
How did we start?
We set up the Rethinking Formative Assessment Working Group with a call-out for participants on our assessment project mailing list, receiving responses from teachers with a wide span of experience and contexts from all over the UK. In our first meeting, we:
- Asked teachers to share their reasons for joining the working group
- Clarified what we mean when we say ‘formative assessment for English’
- Shared some of the research behind and key findings from our project
- Considered possible obstacles to successfully changing practices in school
- Suggested a format for participating teachers to use to collect their findings during their own action research in formative assessment.
Comments from the participants of the working group from their initial sign-up surveys
The key findings we shared with teachers in our initial Zoom meeting
Participants in the first meeting discussed these prompts. Most teachers were positive about ways to overcome the potential challenges that are listed in the slide below. They recognised that time would be saved on ineffective, overly-frequent summative assessment. They also felt that an emphasis on formative assessment would foster increased student independence and confidence.
What happened when we asked teachers to rethink their English teaching and put the focus on formative assessment?
After the initial discussion, we set a date for another online meeting after the Easter holidays to give participants the time to explore and reflect on their formative assessment practices over the course of a half term.
During the second meeting six teachers presented back their findings and several more attended to ask questions and offer feedback on these presentations. We were so impressed by the presenting teachers’ efforts to prioritise their KS3 students, especially at such a busy, exam-focused period of the academic year, and it was brilliant to see the range in the approaches they’d taken to improving their practice.
Sam at Highams Park
We started off with a presentation from Sam. Sam started by explaining the journey his English department had been on over the past few years in terms of how they organise their curriculum and assessment at KS3. His department had implemented EMC’s Curriculum Plus for KS3 a few years ago, and had been making various adjustments to the intensity and frequency of assessment over the course of a few years as they struggled to find the balance between teaching a really varied curriculum and the need to assess their students. He explained that at his school there was currently no formal summative assessment at KS3, except for the end of year exams, which gave his department relative freedom to decide how and when to make use of assessment in class.
Sam presented on what happened when he deliberately planned ‘formative moments’ into his Year 7 narrative writing unit, slowing down the pace of curriculum delivery and building in episodes of self-evaluation and peer assessment.
He found that he needed to adapt the curriculum to accommodate these moments. The relationship between curriculum and assessment is something we realised was really important during our initial research, and Sam saw this in his classroom context too. He chose to introduce a piece of flash fiction called ‘The Monster’, by Jon Mayhew (see below), as a model for students to use to explore structure and plan their own flash fiction stories.
The ‘formative moments’ that Sam built into his scheme were:
- Students explaining their writing choices to their talk partners and then sharing either their own or their partner’s ideas during whole class discussion or with their teacher
- Students giving written peer assessment on their partner’s initial plans for their flash fiction stories
- Students completing a self-evaluation form after writing their full story, reflecting on their choices
At the end of the unit, Sam marked the students’ final flash fiction piece with a positive comment and a target and looked over the students’ self-evaluations (see below). He hopes to continue to embed this approach with his Year 7s, planning in ‘formative moments’ for other units of work.
Ayesha at Hall Cross Academy
Although our project focused on formative assessment at KS3, Ayesha used the principles of the project to work with her Year 13 students, focusing on episodes of ‘peer feedback’. She decided to stop using the term ‘peer assessment’ as she felt this was too loaded and intimidating for students and instead wanted to emphasise the process of student dialogue as they supported each other with their writing, rather than any sense of criticism or judgement. Ayesha had noticed that her sixth form students were overly reliant on her feedback, treating it as having more authority than other students’, and she was trying to move away from this.
Ayesha used a series of stages to improve the quality of students’ feedback: first, she marked student work, then the students responded to her comments, and then they workshopped each other’s plans in dialogue with each other before writing their next essays independently. She wanted to show them how to take responsibility for giving feedback and understand what she’s doing when she’s giving it. She used the phrase ‘you be me’ a lot with her students to help them inhabit this mindset, and reported starting to see an improvement in their confidence.
Lisa at Benenden School
Lisa presented on the work her Year 7s have been doing during their study of The Tempest, looking at the role that peer assessment could play in developing their understanding of quality writing, both analytical and creative.
Lisa started her action research with a student voice survey to find out what her students thought about peer assessment and found that their attitudes were mixed. Some students said they weren’t able to give constructive feedback to their peers, either for fear of upsetting them or not wanting to dedicate the necessary thinking time to constructing useful feedback, although they did say that they enjoyed the opportunity to look at each other’s work and found that a useful process. We had also noticed this during our work with the project schools: students benefitted from the reading part of the process, even if the written feedback they gave and received was often of limited use.
In lessons, Lisa wanted to improve her students’ feedback. She wanted to organise the process by asking students to identify particular criteria in their partners’ writing, and then to elaborate on their findings with a comment on something positive and a target for next time. Lisa used this format for peer assessment a few times during the unit.
Along the way, Lisa shared examples of successful peer review from the class to help students understand what to aim for, and to validate peer comments publicly so that students understood that she valued the process too.
Caroline at Queen Elizabeth’s School
Caroline wanted to tackle the teaching of poetry writing in a genuinely formative way. The approach she took to her action research was informed by ‘Making Poetry Matter’ (ed. Sue Dymoke), putting ‘reading as writers and writing as readers’ at the heart of the approach. Deconstructing the process was central to the sequence that Caroline taught – something more commonly done with the reading of poetry in the classroom than the writing of it. Caroline wanted to foreground the ‘design’ aspect of poetry writing, not just the emotions at the heart of it.
Using Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem as a model, Caroline wanted her students to explore how the poet uses line breaks, allusions and symbolism in her writing, and to then use these methods in their own poems. During the teaching of the sequence, Caroline positioned herself as the teacher-as-writer, sharing her own poetry with the class and explaining the choices and editing decisions she had made along the way to demystify the writing process and show the students an authentic example of poetry writing.
Caroline’s focus during this sequence was on making the process truly formative: getting students to bullet point their ideas first, then free write in prose, then select ideas from these initial bits of writing.
Caroline was ambitious in what she wanted her students to take from her short sequence of lessons, and found that her attempt to demonstrate how images can become symbols in poetry didn't work as well as she wanted them to. She reported that she’ll be pursuing this concept in future lessons, with students working on a new poem over a longer timeframe, and using peer poetry tutorials to help them develop their ideas. Caroline was planning to listen in on their conversations to help her understand how her students’ ideas are developing and how she can intervene to support the development of their poetry writing.
Tasha – Bruern Abbey School
In her action research, Tasha was focusing on how to manage her students’ transition from talk to writing. Tasha works in a specialist school for boys with dyslexia, dyspraxia or other learning difficulties and had found that they can be reluctant to commit their ideas to paper. She wanted to see if focusing on provoking discussion in the class to generate evaluative comments would improve engagement and therefore lead to better quality and volume of writing.
Tasha used what she described as a ‘controversial’ text as a means of giving students permission to judge its impact, hoping that presenting a text which the boys felt more able to critique would mean they generated their evaluative comments more readily. She used Jameela Jamil’s ‘Tell Him’ (https://iweighcommunity.com/tell-him-an-essay-by-jameela-jamil/) and although her students did not necessarily agree with the ideas in the text, they did have a lot to say about the methods Jamil uses to persuade her readers. Tasha guided their discussion to evaluate its strengths/weaknesses as a persuasive piece, and asked students to write up their thoughts about the most effective techniques Jamil had used to convince her audience – emotive language and fear-mongering being the two most prominent. The students then did some similar work around George Bush’s The War on Terror speech, before moving on to write their own persuasive pieces, a choice between:
‘Cars are noisy, dirty, smelly and downright dangerous. They should be banned from all town and city centres, allowing people to walk and cycle in peace.’ Write a letter to the Minister for Transport arguing your point of view on this statement.
Or
‘Sport has become too dangerous, we care less about the damage caused and more about putting on a show. It is barbaric.’ Write a letter to the Minister for Sport arguing your point of view on this statement.
Tasha’s students then spent about a week’s worth of lessons working up their pieces, with support in editing provided by her. Before students wrote their own pieces, they discussed the two questions as a class and generated ideas for the emotional arguments to be made for each of the tasks. Tasha emphasised that talk was a really important part of the formative process for her students, particularly in the context of their learning needs.
When it came to writing, Tasha explained ‘I wanted to leave them have a go and see where it took them rather than setting out too many rigid expectations as they grasp onto support structures too much and then flail without them instead of trying and seeing what works’. She wanted them to feel supported by her, but also confident to test out their own ideas, so she mostly saved her intervention for the editing process (which students needed more support with due to their dyslexia) and let them get on with writing independently. She spent around nine 40-minute lessons, over the course of a week and a half, on the sequence.
Below are some examples of the student writing that emerged:
Joe – Cardinal Newman Catholic School
When he presented back his findings to the working party, Joe reflected on how we ‘expect students to write without being invested’ in their ideas or giving them interesting stimuli to respond to, and he wanted to address this by building in the time for students to develop their thinking formatively first before writing. He shared a sequence he’d taught from EMC’s work with The Arrival picture book, during which students used one of the picture panels to create a backstory for the characters in the book before they did their own writing.
Before they wrote, his students were given choices in terms of the character they would focus on and which perspective they would use. Joe found that building in the time for students to develop their thinking ahead of the writing meant students had much better investment in their writing and that the outcomes within the class were more diverse.
Here are some examples of the work Joe’s students did after they’d had the opportunity to develop their characters and perspectives:
Next steps
We noticed that most of the teachers in the group ended up exploring formative assessment within creative writing units of work, and wondered if any of them might apply the same approaches in the context of teaching a novel or another text. Watch this space!
We left the participating teachers with some reflection questions to ponder, perhaps with their departments, as they reflected on the impact the process had on their classrooms and where they might go next with developing their practice:
Lots of you focused on writing units in the last meeting. How have you approached formative assessment with any reading units you've been studying since then?
- How have you developed or embedded formative practices in your teaching since our last meeting? Are they the same formative practices you were initially investigating, or have you broadened your repertoire since then?
- Have you faced any challenges in working this way?
- Have you been able to transfer your findings from your initial action research into the units of work you're teaching now? How did it go?
- What have you noticed about your planning/marking/feedback/students' books since changing your practice?
- What are your ambitions for next year in terms of your formative assessment practice?
- Have you got any plans to spread this practice within your teams? What might that look like?
- How have your students responded to any changes you have made?
Finally, we thought it might be useful to include some pointers for setting up a formative assessment working party in your own department, in case you wanted to run a similar action research project next academic year.
Top tips for setting up your own group!
- Think about why you think it’s important to address the formative assessment practices in your team at this point. What will improving formative assessment across the department mean for your students, and your teachers? Here are some thoughts from the members of the RFAWG below to get you started. Formative assessment is about...
"trying to teach them the roots of the subject whilst trying to be faithful to the subject of literature itself."
"a stepping stone to the next thing, not a result in itself"
"Journalling, exploratory writing, editing, redrafting - core of the subject"
"teaching with a broader "horizon" in mind […] having the confidence to respond to the needs of the learners in the room.”
"Using less formal tasks to assess textual understanding"
"rather than just reading teacher comments and then moving on, making use of those comments in order to, say, rewrite or correct a piece of work, or bearing in mind a target when producing a similar piece of work. From a teacher point of view, this of course means using one's marking as a springboard for planning the next lesson."
- Spend some time thinking together as a department about what ‘formative assessment for English’ means. You might have conflicting opinions about this. This is an opportunity to address any misconceptions about what formative assessment is and does in our subject, specifically. You could share some of the ideas from the EMC R&P blogs and the list of formative assessment strategies below, which we shared with the teachers in the working group. Keep returning to the idea that we are defining what formative assessment looks like in English – not a single piece of work in the middle of a unit, or the generic AfL strategies often prescribed in whole school CPD.
Some ways of doing formative assessment in English that have the potential to provide you and your students with information about what they can do and which are well-suited to English teaching:
-
- Open-ended tasks
- Live modelling and teacher commentary
- Verbal feedback
- Talking to students about their work
- Reviewing pieces of work under a visualiser
- Sharing student models
- Sample marking students’ work to inform planning for next lesson
- Positive peer assessment – responding as a reader
- Self-assessment based on reflection questions
- Avoiding narrow technique/criteria driven outcomes
- Using students’ ideas to inform next steps
- Talking in pairs and groups - teacher listening
- Group writing
- Live marking
- Get each member of your team to identify their areas of strength and development in terms of their current formative assessment practices, and a particular class or cohort of students to focus on over a half term,or longer. Fix a team meeting for reviewing the process when it is complete (and, if possible, a check-in meeting or paired discussion at the midway point to troubleshoot any issues). Make sure there’s enough time for everyone to meaningfully explore the areas they’ve identified and to share their findings.
- Feed back your findings. Ask each member of your team to share what they did, what they noticed and any notable successes. Bringing books along to the feedback meeting is really helpful for discussion and for all members of the team to see. Ask each member of the team to make a commitment to developing their work in the following half term – they might want to try the same strategies with another group, to incorporate new ideas from the rest of the team, or tweak and develop something that worked well.
