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(320) "The English education system is experiencing an era of unprecedented change, at least as significant as the move to Local Management of Schools after 1988. Nowhere are these changes more keenly felt than amongst the leadership teams and governing bodies of the country’s schools. This research offers a fascinating ..."
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      string(385) "... well as development priorities… but change is never easy for some people’.A teaching and learning support group had also been developed to provide voluntary support every Monday‘by staff for staff’. Foci had included differentiation and whiteboard use. The principal did not attend thesesessions, but was reported to support ..."
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      string(535) "The English education system is experiencing an era of unprecedented change, at least as significant as the move to Local Management of Schools after 1988. Nowhere are these changes more keenly felt than amongst the leadership teams and governing bodies of the country’s schools. This research offers a fascinating consideration of the schools’ landscape and clearly highlights how it has evolved over the 10 years since the first review of school leadership in England in 2002. By the National College for School Leadership - 2012"
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      string(5806) "learning charter, developed with the student council,which had a summary of requirements on:94 © National College for School Leadership— lesson planning: detailing expectations of lesson preparation and activities such as differentiation, varietyof tasks, literacy— lesson delivery: learning objectives (on what we will learn, rather than what we will do), interactiveteaching, starters and a plenary— AfL: questioning techniques; marking (to reflect effort, attainment and progress against targets)— behaviour: registering of absence, clear seating plans and mutual respect— environment: having bright, tidy classrooms that display the student learning charter, the rewards policyand standards of behaviour policyA second phase focused on a consistency programme in which HoDs went on learning walks with the SLT.An assistant head reported that the SLT had ‘tried to change the perception of observations, to feedbackpositives as well as development priorities… but change is never easy for some people’.A teaching and learning support group had also been developed to provide voluntary support every Monday‘by staff for staff’. Foci had included differentiation and whiteboard use. The principal did not attend thesesessions, but was reported to support the initiative. The school had several initiative-based funding streamsincluding an excellence cluster, behaviour improvement partnership and a full-service extended school. Theschool still runs a lot of these services.SummaryAccording to the survey data, headteachers spend half of their time in their office and the majority ofrespondents felt they spent the ‘right amount’ of time on leadership generally. Heads and other schoolleaders were most likely to say that they spent too much time on administration. Heads and other seniorleaders considered that ‘too little time’ was spent on the leadership of teaching and learning specifically,although about 40 per cent stated it was ‘about right’.Heads commented particularly on the pressure of increasing accountability. Time for strategic planning, bothindividually and with senior teams, was difficult for many headteachers to fit in adequately.One-half of heads, especially secondary heads, reported having appointed an SBM or bursar for a year ormore. Primary school heads were more likely to report that there were no current plans to do so.It was still considered a ‘balancing act’ as to how much time to spend working with and supporting otherschools and partnerships as well as keeping the focus on maintaining success in one’s own institution.The chapter also explored the actions leaders were taking to improve teaching and learning. The mostpopular strategies included the monitoring of teaching and learning, offering training to develop teachingand learning, developing middle leaders’ skills, lesson observations and the development of partnershipswith other schools.95 © National College for School LeadershipAs discussed in chapter 2, there is a growing understanding of leadership practice and the learning anddevelopment opportunities needed to help prepare teachers for headship. This chapter explores three mainissues related to the support and development of leaders. First, it considers the existing and expectedsources of external support used by headteachers. Second, it explores the leadership and professionaldevelopment opportunities currently used by school leaders and chairs of governors. Third, it reviews theskills and capabilities that school leaders and governors report they need in order to develop in the nearfuture.A striking change is expected by headteachers in the external sources of support they access. Currently, thelocal authority and the school improvement partner (the latter is no longer statutory) are reported to be thetwo most significant sources of external support. It is among these two sources, however, that headteachersexpect to see in greatest decline over the next 18 months. While this decline is broadly similar to theincrease in support that is expected to derive from elsewhere, many respondents predict they will be usingproviders that few schools currently use or consider important. This suggests not only greater diversity insupport but also uncertainty as schools are moving away from the known and the well used.These trends in support expected by headteachers were broadly consistent with the actions they reportedto be undertaking or planning to undertake at a whole-school level. On teaching schools, for instance, twoper cent of heads of schools in the survey sample reported that their school was already in the processof becoming a teaching school, while nine per cent were planning to submit an application to become ateaching school. A further 10 per cent were already participating formally in a teaching school alliance (TSA),with about one-fifth (18 per cent) planning to do so in the future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that thefirst 100 teaching schools had only been designated a term before the survey was undertaken, 70 per centof headteachers had no current plans to participate formally in a TSA and 61 per cent had no plans to workinformally with a teaching school.On continuing professional development (CPD) activity specific to their leadership role, 90 per cent ofheadteachers had undertaken some form of CPD within the last three years. Of these, the highest percentage(86 per cent) participated in activities provided by their local authority. Headteachers reported that the threemost effective or beneficial CPD activities were local authority"
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Leadership

Review of the school leadership landscape

6 Jul 2017