Meaningful Assessment at the Margins

There is a global learning crisis in which students are being taught too much by rote and those from underprivileged backgrounds are not getting their educational needs met. Asyia Kazmi explains how the Assessment for Learning approach is helping teachers work with disadvantaged children across the world and in the UK.

My interview for the senior position in a tough London inner-city challenging school was going swimmingly until the head teacher asked about the barriers students face. I didn’t understand the question so the head teacher repeated it, which is never a good sign in an interview. My confusion remained – What barriers? What are barriers? The head teacher then helpfully expanded: poverty, English as an additional language, single parent families, etc.

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      string(5746) "Alysha Allen, award winning deaf teacher, who teaches hearing childrenLast year was a very good year for Alysha Allen who teaches pupils at Brimsdown Primary School in Enfield. She won a pretigious award and was recognised as an outstanding teacher as well as an influential figure in the deaf community.Alysha is profoundlydeaf and communicates using British Sign Language and lip reading. She is oneof the very few deaf teachers working in a primary mainstream school, teaching hearingand deaf children side by side.At the end of 2019 she was presented with a Special Contribution Award from Maths Hub London North East, a programme involving around 600 schools focusing on improvement in mathematics. In November, she was one of eight finalists in the New Teacher of the Year category of the TES Schools Awards 2020.Coping with deafness in childhoodAlysha was slow to walk and talk but she was two and a half before her family realised that she was deaf.  A doctor diagnosed problems with ear balance and deafness and warned that she was unlikely to talk, so she should learn to sign instead.  She started in a mainstream nursery setting but was labelled as disruptive because the teachers had no idea how to engage her interest or to cope with her behaviour. Her mother found a speech and language therapist who worked with her on her speech and an Australian teacher of the deaf took an interest in her and started to work with her through music and rhymes.Specialist teachingThebig breakthrough came when she was nine and started at Mary Hare, a specialistboarding school for deaf children, which focuses on lipreading and oralcommunication. ‘The classes were small with maybe six or eight students sittingin a horseshoe shape so we could all see one another’s faces,’ said Alysha. ‘Itwas an amazing education.’She did A-levels in psychology, history, performing arts and English literature. When she left, she went to London Metropolitan University to study Events Management. ‘I had visions of being a nightclub owner,’ she said. However, the university could not provide her with a notetaker: ‘They seemed to think that I could hear because I could talk.’ She fell further and further behind, lost motivation and dropped out.First taste of teaching Not one to sit around doing nothing, Alysha worked with adults with learning difficulties and moved on to volunteer a day a week at Riverside, a local special needs school, where she  became a teaching assistant. ‘I really loved it,’ she said,‘especially when I covered for an absent teacher. The trouble was I found ithard to go back to being a TA, because I could see different ways of doingthings, especially for the children who were not really motivated.’The deputy suggested that Alysha should think about teaching as a career. She liked the idea but opted for a sabbatical before making a decision. She and a group of friends went travelling for several months and spent a lot of time on beaches planning the future but they did visit a school in Thailand which had different methods for teaching deaf children. When she returned to Enfield, she went  back to Riverside for teacher training because they would let her work and study at the same time. Alysha liked the idea of working with teenagers but opted for primary because she did not have one strong specialist subject and had realised that she had a particular knack of working with children who found it hard to learn  because of their global delay in development, autism, motor /sensory loss  and simialr conditions. Choosing which sectorHertraining posed a few problems especially when she discovered that she wouldhave to do one teaching practice in secondary mainstream. She was daunted bythe prospect of standing up in front of 30 hearing children but adamant thatshe did not want an interpreter in the classroom. In the end, Alysha had aplacement in a supportive school which had a Deaf Unit and where theCommunication Support Workers who were in several of her classes could smoothher path if necessary.‘I had a lot more fun than I thought I would and planned to try it for a year,’ said Alysha.  She did her second placement  at Brimsdown Primary School in Enfield, a mainstream school where children were in classes with hearing children but had the support of an on-site Deaf Unit that provided extra English lessons and support.  After qualifying, she got a job there.A signing school  Brimsdown recently celebrated 10 years as an accredited hearing impairment resource base by Signature, the leading awarding body for deaf communications qualifications in the UK. The school has a policy that every child will sign. 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Blogs

Award Winning Deaf Teacher An Inspiration For Deaf and Hearing Children Alike

26 Jan 2021

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      string(5813) "�focus on global education   www.teachthinking.comTeaching Thinking&Creativity  Vol 8:2Listening to Jeffrey Sachs giving this year’s Reithlectures on BBC Radio 4 recently, I was struck by hiscomment that one of the reasons that climate changehad been largely ignored for so long by world leaders wasthat they didn’t know what to do about it.Although this may well be the case, such reasonsfor inaction are becoming less excusable in the lightof increasing numbers of initiatives and ideas offeringpractical ways of addressing the several pressing issuesfacing humankind currently, including climate change,poverty and globalisation. Whether or not we choose toact on these ideas, however, is another matter. 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Otherkey documents relevant to education such as the RaceRelations (Amended) Act (2000) and Every Child Matters(2004), address specific areas of this list.So, the significance of global education is that it can bethe prism through which thinking and teaching can beviewed, and which puts issues of justice and sustainabilityat the centre of education. It gives sense and relevanceto everything we do as it is all rooted in understandingourselves and our place in, and impact on, the world.The importance of global educationThe following are some of the reasons why it is importantto bring global education into education:l The issues that global education are concerned withare of central relevance to our lives. Resolving issues ofunfairness, lack of respect for diversity and conflict, forexample, are just as important in the classroom or localcommunity as they are in major world situations. If wewant to engage with society and feel positive aboutthe future, it is important for us – adults and pupils alike– to know that we each have choices and the potentialto make a difference. Such a difference can either be forthe better: the stance that townspeople in Modbury,Devon have taken on banning plastic carrier bags fromall shops in the town (The Guardian, 12 May 2007, p.11),for example, or for the worse: the Virginia Tech shootingsin the USA.l We are interconnected with others in the world and itis important that we and our pupils know that everydecision we make has an impact on others, even if wedon’t know what it is; for example, buying (or not buying)goods made in sweatshops; using (or not using) our car;challenging (or not challenging) prejudice when wecome across it.l Although the issues that global education is concernedwith are so complex, the knowledge, skills and attitudesneeded to begin to understand them can be addressedin school from an early age.l Many people are out to confuse us, from companiesselling us services and products we don’t actually need,to supermarkets telling us they have ‘green’ policies, tomultinational corporations who have greater wealththan a number of whole countries. If we want to try andmake sense of it all and understand why things are asthey are, it is important for us and for those we teachto be able to navigate through the hundreds of ideas,products, offers and initiatives coming at us on a dailybasis, to spot the honest ones and to make decisions wefeel are right for us and for the planet.l Global education can challenge misinformation, prejudice,and ignorance – all of which are unsustainable.The central challenges of global educationIn my experience of many years’ training of teachers inLondon and the south-east of England in global education,the central issues teachers habitually raise fall into threemain categories:l difficulties concerning a lack of the teacher’s ownknowledge and understanding of global issuesl uncertainty as to how to raise global issues inclassroomsl lack of confidence as to how to deal with the difficultiesthat might arise as a result of raising global issuesLooking more specifically at the"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Themes of global education

14 Feb 2008

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      string(5886) "the importance of recognising and respecting difference. It supported the principle that every teacher is a teacher of SEND. However, it also sought to address the lack of confidence experienced by many in the teaching profession regarding the identification and support of learners with SpLD, which may lead to a learner’s needs being either unidentified because of preconceptions of what constitutes an SpLD or unaddressed pending a specialist assessment, or to the attitude that learners with SpLD are the sole responsibility of the school SENCo. The training addressed such issues by focussing not on labels but, rather, on support based on observable behaviours and learner profiling, and, further, on utilising a range of whole-class techniques to establish a neurodiversity-friendly classroom. Devised to follow the recommended ‘train the trainer’ model, it was intended to be cascaded to all staff in the school at a ‘core skills’ level.The training was divided into three sections:Part 1. Seeing the whole picture promoted the importance of holistic learner profiling, taking into account the range of strengths and challenges that might be present in a learner with an SpLD. Part 2. Understanding neurodiversity discussed the concept of neurodiversity and its origins in the work of Judy Singer. In this section of the training, a new Combined SpLD / Neurodiversity Checklist was presented, which had been devised to take into account the overlapping nature of SpLDs. The checklist aimed to provide a framework through which to observe and understand learner behaviours and encouraged teachers to look beyond individual labels and preconceptions of what it might mean to be dyslexic, dyspraxic, and so on. Part 3. 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The webinars have since been viewed in excess of 4,500 times.Assessing the impact of the ‘Teaching for Neurodiversity’ TrainingA research team from the Education Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University designed and carried out and an evaluation the impact of the Teaching for Neurodiversity project over the year of the project, producing their Final Report in March 2017 (Griffiths et al. 2017).MethodologyTo evaluate the impact of the training, the evaluation team developed three surveys.  Survey 1 was to assess delegates’ knowledge, skills and understanding about neurodiversity and SpLDs at the start of the training day, the second to assess their knowledge skills and understanding at the end of the day and the third to be completed after three months by colleagues who had received the cascaded training.From the impact data in Survey 3, three primary schools, three secondary schools and two colleges were to be selected as showing high impact, to be researched in more depth as series of case studies, through interviews with those who had the training cascaded, plus two other members of the teaching staff.Summary of the Project Evaluation FindingsData from Surveys 1 and 2 found statistically significant gains in delegates’ knowledge and understanding of SpLDs and neurodiversity, their understanding of support strategies for the diversity of learners in the classroom and their knowledge of multisensory approaches to learning and of metacognitive techniques. 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Dyslexia

Teaching for Neurodiversity

10 Sep 2018

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      string(5918) "opportunities. In one school, the MFL department discussed retrieval practice (deriving from training on Cognitive Load Theory) together with colleagues in Maths and Geography. One of the Languages teachers commented on what she learned from her Maths colleague: ‘My Maths colleague starts lessons with a retrieval activity responding to feedback from the previous lesson, including misconception. Also he sets a quick self-assessment task towards the end and he uses the information to create the retrieval starter for the next lesson. I like how this is systematic’ and from a Geography colleague: ‘She identifies features that students need to think about and include in their learning in order to achieve the learning objectives’.Clearly, this cross- subject conversation was very productive and transferable. The Geography teacher’s point about sub-learning objectives has immense relevance for MFL lessons where learning objectives are often rather vague. This enriching of teacher knowledge reflects Gore and Rosser’s (2019:9) advocacy of cross- grade and subject collaboration from their research that found that this type of collaboration ‘… generated new insights about pedagogy that helped teachers improve their practice (intellectual change) and lifted teachers’ expectations of students as well as their view of colleagues and motivation to collaborate (attitudinal change)’.ivSocial media: a tool and medium of professional developmentSocial media with both open learning communities such as on Facebook, and closed groups as with private WhatsApp groups are now a well-established and flourishing mode of teacher learning and information and strategy sharing. A teacher in her fifth year describes the informal learning in her subject WhatsApp group: ‘We always share ideas (now on our MFL WhatsApp group rather than in the office) when we discover a new strategy to make learning more effective on Teams. One departmental collaboration we did last week was trying out new assessment for learning strategies at home with the students. We discussed using two devices, so we can quickly scan the chat whilst sharing the screen to the students on our computer- it’s been effective so far’.Social media use is ubiquitous for general communicative purposes in education and increasingly for teacher research. A study by Prestridge of teachers in international settings showed that teachers use media in various ways including as ‘info- consumers’ (searching for information) and as ‘info-networkers’ (sharing information),v resonating with the roles adopted by many of my teachers as researchers and knowledge- sharers. Prestridge asserts that the extensive use of social media has caused a paradigm shift of professional development and a massive sharing of materials and strategies on all social media platforms.Linked with the technology upskilling, lockdown circumstances created a large open forum for sharing purposes as described and also conduits for personal research. A student teacher towards the end of the first lockdown said: ‘I have thankfully got most of my school practical teaching under my belt. To be honest, I have enjoyed exploring the online learning programme that was made available to us. I enjoyed the exchanges and banter in the Twitter and Facebook groups. I appreciated the time I had to do things that interested me. I did a lot of the OU courses, listened to TED talks- I loved hearing researchers and authors talking about their work and not just reading it. I also found lots of stuff to improve my own languages’.Memorably, there was a vast amount of self- accessing material created and made available at that time, freely available and free of charge, opening up a wealth of teacher learning opportunities from which individuals could choose.Personal Learning SpaceShanks et al. (2012: p185) in their study of Scottish teachers’ preferences regarding professional learning and development concluded that: ‘Although teachers may be part of a community of practice, they are also individuals with their own experiences and perceptions of work and workplace learning’. This alludes to the experience of personalised learning described by the last teacher referenced above. An experienced teacher, mentor and responsible for CPD explained her school strategy for promoting work both in subject teams and for individuals to follow their needs and interests: ‘In the circumstances, we have had some essential whole staff training for all staff online such as safeguarding and technical updating and EAL but staff have been asked to work in their subject areas and also to work on issues of interest to them. I and other colleagues are here to support them.’ A recently qualified teacher in the same school reports how recent teaching arrangements and restrictions have once again provided some space to explore the possibilities for self- learning: ‘We have had quite a few whole staff CPDs but we are encouraged to work in our subject teams and to participate in our own CPD areas of interest. Topics I chose included implementing languages specific online learning, the cognition- conscious classroom, retrieval practice… being a Spanish speaker, I checked out some Spanish teaching sites. As I had noticed the children were a little anxious, I also researched the topic of understanding anxiety in education’.Teachers all have their individual ways and preferences for learning. Space to allow for this is important in professional development in enabling teachers to delve deeply into issues of"
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Leading Professional Development

New Vistas For Teacher Development Are Opening Up After Lockdown

2 May 2021

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