TeacherBee

This is the final post in a series of three in which I have reflected on my experience of trialling comparative judgmement as a way of assessing children's writing. After the second period of remote learning, writing soon emerged as the skill that had taken the biggest 'hit' for a majority of our children. The complexity of writing, and its range of constituent sub-skills meant that to address the issue as a whole, we had to support the development of each part.  As a junior school and a very small primary, most of our children are of junior age. For those who were already in Y3 or above prior to the pandemic, writing stamina and spelling needed to improve, whilst for the younger children, fine motor skills and handwriting were additional areas for our focus. We had already begun to use a new  handwriting scheme  in September 2020, following the first period of remote learning, but after further disruption, we went back to the beginning with all year groups. Teachers in jun

My previous post described my introduction to comparative judgement as a way of assessing writing. As a federation, we embarked on our trial of this approach, using No More Marking (NMM), and facilitated by our regional consortium, in September 2022. We were using NMM's 'Assessing Primary Writing' product. For each year group from 1 to 6, there was an assessment 'window' and these were spread across the autumn and spring terms. A set prompt for writing was supplied just before the assessment period began and the children had to write on individual, pre-printed lined sheets. This meant that there was a certain amount of administration on my part, entering names, dates of birth, classes, gender and entitlement to free school meals (the category on the spreadsheet is 'Pupil Premium' as it's designed for the English system), and then printing and distributing the sheets for the children to write on.  The teacher guidance is clear that after explaining the ta

Assessment in the new Curriculum for Wales is a hot topic. The practice of making a 'best-fit' judgement against (at best woolly) level descriptions is no more, and many would say good riddance to these and even more so to the additional nonsense that was sub-levels!  As a result, teachers are now having to grapple with the hugely challenging task of working out exactly what progress along a continuum of Progression Steps looks like, ensuring their curriculum is built to enable this, and deciding how it will be assessed, in all six Areas of Learning (AoLEs) and the disciplines within these. There is a lot of guidance from the Welsh Government on the Hwb   platform and in the  Progression Code  document, but the emphasis is on school and cluster-based agreement on how learners will be enbled to demonstrate their progress. Against this background, and as the lead for LLC (Languages, Literacy and Communication) in our federation, I jumped at the chance, provided by our regional c

Writtien in April 2021 Following my Performance Management meeting in the autumn term, I found myself feeling a little adrift. The meeting itself had gone very well and I was happy with the targets I had agreed, yet I somehow felt something was not quite right. Afterwards, I listened to and enthused with younger colleagues who had, in their meetings, been discussing professional pathways, and hopes and plans of future promotion. While I felt excited for them, I realised what was bothering me: I am now, most probably, in the final decade of my teaching career and so what lies ahead for me?  In the past, I have been part of a leadership team (as an ALNCo) and have worked as a regional Teacher Adviser but more recently, I have relished being 'just' a classroom teacher again. The classroom, for me, is the beating heart of the job and nothing else comes close to the sense of privilege there is in helping to shape young minds and lives.  Even so, the drive and expectation to achieve