Assessment for Learning

Oxford Teachers’ Academy

Assessment for Learning (AfL) is a practical classroom approach with a potentially positive impact on both learning and teaching. AfL looks beyond tests and grades. It involves establishing where learners currently are in their learning, helping them to identify where they want to get to, and finding out how best to get there. The ongoing process of closing the gap is formative. It involves both teachers and learners, and often involves exciting new roles for both.

 

This course sets out to introduce Assessment for Learning as a classroom tool, with the objective of helping participants find ways to apply it to their own classroom practice. The course will provide you with an opportunity to reflect on how you gather evidence about your students’ learning needs, before establishing a basic AfL framework for the classroom consisting of diagnostics, learning intentions and success criteria.

The course examines the importance of feedback in the process, and suggests ways of making sure that feedback is effective. Throughout, the course uses practical classroom examples, and puts learners and their teachers at the heart of the process.

Whether or not you are already familiar with AfL, the course will provide plenty of food for thought, fresh insights into the topic, and opportunities for reflection on your own situation. The course caters to the needs of teachers in a variety of contexts.

 

  • Consider how information about learning is usually gathered in the classroom.
  • Establish the importance of diagnostics in assessment for learning, and to provide some practical diagnostic tasks for participants to consider.
  • Establish the importance of realistic success criteria in the AFL process, and to suggest ways of involving learners actively in the process.
  • Explore practical classroom techniques and activities for using feedback effectively, with special emphasis on making students active in the feedback process.
  • Consider the benefits and challenges of AfL, and to identify where and how the approach might be implemented within participants’ own context.
  • Explore practical classroom techniques and activities for using feedback effectively, with special emphasis on making students active in the feedback process.
  • Examine what feedback is and why it is important by looking at the components of effective feedback.
  • Establish the importance of learning objectives in assessment for learning, and to look at practical techniques for engaging students with learning intentions.
  • Introduce ‘assessment for learning’ as a concept and to explore how it works as a classroom process for evaluating and shaping learning.

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