There are many areas which school can focus on to improve its overall quality. Probably the most important however is ‘teaching and learning’. This is what school is about. Place where teaching and most importantly learning takes place.
Traditionally, as in many other countries no matter what tradition or culture, learning was happening to the students by teaching. So they came to school to be taught. Today, based on evidence and sometimes on fashion too, there is a shift from this view. There ought to be less teaching or teaching should transform into facilitating learning and learning ought to be active process. Learning is done by learners not to them and it is their responsibility too.
This requires new approach to delivery and instruction. Luckily Slovakia does not have high stake tests and accountability, which means, that it is much easier to take risk and try new ways of teaching and assessment. Interestingly enough, there is very little evidence, that Slovak teachers are innovative and do try new ideas in the area of teaching methods. (please, let me know if I am wrong) They stay rather within tradition and conservatisms.
It seems today, that this could mean staying also on the bottom of PISA and TIMMS tables (which might not be most important) and compromise the quality of education, thus quality of life of future generation. New school reform (being too fast, and maybe to some extent under designed) had this in the mind. On the paper it calls for new approaches, innovative and modern methods. The question is what are they? Probably the reform documents cannot define these methods and approaches, as this is not the area of legislation. Ministry and other agencies though should have some idea of what they are asking for. Teacher will not try new method not knowing, if it works and just because minister wants him to… especially if nobody knows what the New Methods are. And how they work, and what to do to make them work.
This can be illustrated in the area of assessment, where new state educational programme and example of school educational programme call for more effective ways of assessment than oral examination in front of the class. What is more effective?
Tests? Because you can assess all class at once? Test measures only parts of achievement and they need to be designed well to measure more than just knowledge. How many teachers in are trained to design tests valid and reliable? And how many of them have time to do it?
Projects? They can measure skills and effort, and some of key competencies but fail to measure knowledge. Our curriculum is still driven by knowledge and by close examination of new school programmes it will remain so for long time.
What else have we got readily available for assessment in Slovak schools? Not much more than some presentations, writing essays and reports etc. But how do you mark these? It might be clear for people from Anglo-American tradition, where clear criteria and rubrics are sort of a norm. Not so in Slovakia where, except languages, marking essay is rather intuitive.
Where to start then, to improve school? Using ideas from Assessment for Learning (AfL) and taking some risk we can impose some change and even answer the call of the reform for innovation. AfL has few main principles, which when transformed and applied to Slovak system. Most important drives of improvement I can see in sharing success criteria, effective feedback and peer assessment.
Success criteria
This would not be too big shift from current practice, but still would require some change in point of view. Many teachers share learning objectives and students will know what is expected from them to be successful when answering. But it in mostly knowledge, learning objectives (as brief analysis of school educational programmes shows) are mostly what teacher does, what he explains and stresses as important and what students will know. Content, content content. It is very likely that successful and able students and those, who have no problems with memorising will be very successful. Those less able will struggle.
Let’s go back to basics and look at Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objective and sit down and write clear criteria for success. What student will know? Everything? Unlikely. So write it down like ability to write a list, name, compare, understand (How to show understanding?) … all active verbs and all about what student does. This will help to identify what learning intentions we have and communicate them clearly to less performing students. May be create rubrics with expectations and ask students to highlight where they thing they are. And this leads to another principle:
Feedback
Effective feedback leads to the action. It can be student telling me, that he is well ahead of far behind the class. It is worthless, is I do not act on this information. It can be me telling student that he has missed some important information, or misinterpreted something. Worthless, if it is last thing we do about it.
To apply this principle, there must exist clear information about expectation. So that both student and teacher know, where are they heading to, what is the objective. And based on that teacher provides information about the ‘gap’. What is missing. And also information about how to close the gap. what needs to be done. It does not to be done explicitly, so that teacher will in effect finish the work. Clue, question, example etc. could be sufficient. And it even does not need to be a teacher, who is giving this kind of feedback. It can be peer.
Peer-assessment
is third principle I want to draw attention to. When criteria for assessment are clear, than peer-assessment can drive achievement even higher, as even less performing students can participate in this process, thus internalise criteria and try to act on them. Of course this requires some training and time spent on practising.
Overall this three principles can lead to better achievement and improvement not only in learning, but in teaching too. And with system, where high stake test are rare and teachers exercise huge autonomy in what happens in the classroom (even if not in the area of content), there is little risk of changing this practice into ‘assessment as learning’, where criteria and standards are the drive of teaching (checklist of standards: can do- tick, cannot do – this is what you must do to pass… ).
