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I put three things into that title, pedagogy, we're going to talk about simple model of learning, learning itself I try to tease out some principles or learning from what I say and what of assessment practices got to do all with all of this because at least to some in school assessments particularly end of year high-stakes assessment is the nasty end of teaching and spoils it, whereas I want to take a broader view of assessment and say it's essential to a good development
0:44
of teaching and learning. The simple model of pedagogy is quite a naive one what do you do in planning a piece of teaching you decide the learning aims, in terms of those aims you select and plan activities, given those activities in that plan you then implement it in the classroom and you review how it's gone on to see it been okay and needs correction that's what I would call informal summative assessment and finally you may have to sum it up
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formally because on that stage there may for example be decisions to be taken about a pupil next year and so on. We get into that straightaway, let's look at the first stages of that 5 stage model and they are decide the learning aims does that involve what concept understanding or thinking skills or simply rote learning or something that everyone should be able to trip off the tongue or whatever, it depends on your educational values and what your ambitions are for
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education, then you select and plan activities you have in mind the potential of those activities to involve the participants in learning, will they entertain them, will they excite them, will they lead them to want to listen then in the plan you should build in the cognitive and affective principles of learning and I'll say more about those two later on and then of course the best-laid plans come to nought if they're not carefully presented with those
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different possibilities there potential in mind, and then you implement in the classroom and that's the difficult bit because that's when it all works or all falls apart and two principles there, one formative interaction and the second one contingency, let's just talk about those two forms of interaction well I find it always helpful necessary to repeat the simple definition an assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used as feedback by
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teachers and by their students in assessing themselves and each other to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged there's a lot wrapped up in the simple rather tedious sentence first of all assessment as such is simply we're collecting some information and what matters is what you do with it, and then becomes formative if you use it as feedback and you use it in such a way that both teachers as the users and
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students as also the users in assessing themselves in each other to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged the point of the feedback is to check also redirect to make the assessment more the whole teaching and learning more effective. Okay let's get down to what that means in practice, and what it might mean can be a bit strange, here is an example of a class of primary children about year, I don't know what it was about year three or
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four they were just drawing daffodils, and they teach this as to one child what's this flower called and the child says I think it's called Betty now that's contingency you can't predict what's going to happen and you're faced with this what's the teacher do? One reaction would be well no that's not quite what I was thinking of anyone else know what these flowers are called and after a bit somebody says daffodil or if they don't
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you tell them that I'm going to write it down that's an understandable reaction on the spot you got to say something but there's a different reaction to take it calmly compose your features oh you think it's called Betty anyone got a different name for the flower and you think it's called Amanda well that's two different names anyone got another name yes you think it's called daffodil wait a minute Amanda Betty daffodil that was the same
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sort of answer to the question you could start a discussion which could just lay the basis for the difference between proper names and generic names which in understanding flowers and all other corner quite important, that's an opportunity missed, teacher can be forgiven for missing it but that's what contingency is about things happen which may or may not come good, so that's the difficulty on the Fate for a teacher to take responses which are unexpected, I go
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to a more complicated example, here's a teacher, and this is a real example, this teachers starting a lesson about photosynthesis, this is a year seven pupils probably three or more four months it was into the first term and a half in the school, and the teacher first of all practiced, thought about the practices that were used in the past, and thought about preparation, his preparation was to have two copies of the same type of plant, first copy was
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kept in the window for a few weeks, second copy kept in the dark corner for the same number of weeks, he showed the pupils the two plants the beginning of the lesson told them about what happened, they looked very different, one was flourishing the other was a pale weeping and he asked them why do you think these plants look so different, and then left them to talk for two or three minutes leaving them to talk to think about exchange ideas as one another and then he opened up a discussion and
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here's what happened in the discussion then, Monica your group, he dropped on people he wasn't calling for volunteers, Monica says "that one's grown bigger because it was on the window" on the window hmm what do you think Jamie and Jamie says "we thought that" no Jamie's not confident about what to say or perhaps how to say it and so his voice trails off and this teacher on this occasion and I emphasize this is a real transcript of a real lesson from teacher
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who worked with us in a group the teachers respond was you thought that's a very good response somebody is trails off in what they're saying the thing to do is to feedback what they said as the teacher did and it shows I'm interested in what you thought, come on have a go, so Jamie said "that the big one had eaten the more light" there's Jamie both got an idea but he also difficulty in expressing that idea and this is his form of English to do it
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what the teacher then does is to say hmm I think I know what Monica and Jamie are getting at but can anyone put the ideas together, window, light, plants, many hands go up, teacher chooses a child that has not put up his hand, Richard "yes we thought me and Dean that it had grown bigger because it was getting more food" they'd been discussing in pairs and Richard is saying this is a joint response, some student stretched their hand up higher the teacher points to Susan and nods "no it
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grows where there's a lot of light and that's near the window" mmm Richard and Dean think the plant is getting more food, Susan and Stacey as well yeah yes Susan thinks it is because this plant is getting more light, what do others think? Tariq? Now this teacher been working in a group with us in trying to put into practice some of the idea we developed from literature about formative assessment, because we didn't believe that research can be just
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applied in the classroom, it has to be transformed into practical working knowledge by teachers themselves in their own way, and on the consequences of doing that are in this book "assessment for learning" which has been highly successful. Now, this is an extraordinary piece first of all, I'll say it's extraordinary because people who write about dialogue in classrooms said that a lot of the research in the USA and England I know
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particularly, it's quite unusual to have this sort of discussion, what's meant by teachers saying students are involved they ask a question, get an answer, ask another question, get another answer, ask another question, get an answer, if the answers right move on, if the answers wrong correct to move on, so it's ping-pong that's not dialogue lesson this is completely different this teacher is bouncing ideas about without judging
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them, because he wants to explore from the class where they are in their thinking having given a bit of time to think a little bit about it, so when he has it made that explanation he knows where they're coming from and which ideas they already have, which ideas he has to build on, or perhaps try and correct and the way he's doing that taking Jamie and Monica's idea and then taking another idea, taking them neutrally, bouncing them around, that's one of
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the things that's unusual about this and I've had many teachers discuss it and they quite often don't pick up what to me is one of the most unusual features, every contribution by a pupil in that transcript is a sentence, not a phrase, not the right word, a sentence and those sentences contain words like thought, because, think, and so on, they're reasoning words. This is a classroom where this teacher is so developed with these pupils that there's reasoning and
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thought going on, that is very unusual. That same teacher five months earlier when he had already been working with us under the influence with other teachers and so on produced a lesson which we also have in the same book which is dreadful because it's all guess what I'm thinking of questions one-word answers children being put down and told they got it wrong and slowly with feedback and help and being a guy really willing to learn, he
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got to this standard, that is, I repeat, unusual from all the surveys I've read on classroom work and requires courage to work the way he was working and notice of course getting those plans set up and so carefully beforehand the whole thing had being prepared and there's a teacher at the same group in the same project just reflecting on what she'd learned about questioning in the classroom, "my whole teaching style has become more interactive. instead of
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showing how to find solutions, a question is asked and pupils given time to explore answers together. My year 8 target class is now well used to this way of working. I find myself using this method more and more with other groups." key feature there is giving time, because research had shown that most teachers, no, many teachers, this was in the USA but there has been some similar evidence in England, when they've asked a question usually allow less than a second for an answer to come
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before answering their own question or or asking another question, to allow a few minutes few pupils to think and talk about the question is unusual, and certainly the first stages of opening up a lesson area like photosynthesis you do need that to get an exploration from it, but more than that, no hands, "Unless specifically asked pupils know not to put their hands up if they know the answer to a question. All pupils are expected to be able to answer at any time even if it
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is an 'I don't know'." Now the teacher, this was a reflection at the end of the work with us and one of the things she'd learnt about, we didn't, that is I, my colleagues at Kings, proposed this, we wouldn't have thought of it, but one of the teachers said I think we should stop pupils putting hands up stop it being a competition to see who's best, because if we do that you get a competition with the bright guys sat at the front or in the middle and the people who are hoping
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nobody asks that question because they don't know what's going on anyway and they sit at the end out of trouble, and that, this teacher said you've got to change that. One way to change it is to say no hands I want everyone to think and I'll pick on almost anyone it then follows, supportive climate. "Pupils are comfortable with giving a wrong answer they know that these can as useful as correct ones. They're happy for other pupils to explore their wrong answers
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further." And again that supportive climate, that taking neutrally different ideas, and as happen could have happened with the girl and the flower called Betty that's very important and this teacher is reflecting that this is what she had learned through the work with others starting off from our research results, but taking it much further. Behind that is a principal, dialogic teaching. Children, we now know, need to talk, and to experience a
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rich diet of spoken language, in order to think and to learn. Reading, writing and number may be acknowledged curriculum 'basics', but talk is arguably the true foundation of learning. And that's from Professor Alexander Cambridge, who has done extensive research in classrooms in several different countries, across Europe and in the USA and he noted one of the features was that in some countries they think that talking is a way of learning, in
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other countries teachers don't, they think talking is just to fill in time and to make people happy, but the real learning comes when you're right, and the question is which do you believe and you believe that when you're talking you are actually learning as well as when you're writing. A different commentary by David Wood on how children think and learn book. Such encounters are the source of experiences which eventually create the 'inner dialogues' that form the process of mental
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self-regulation. Viewed in this way, learning is taking place on at least two levels; the child is learning about the task, developing 'local expertise'; and he is also learning how to structure his own learning and reasoning. Now that's a more profound but very important statement and I found it stopped you whether you find it, that in engaging and discussion there are two things going on I'm trying to formulate and say what I think and then I'm hearing other people
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and they don't think what I think is perfect and marvelous as I thought it was and they are by saying something different and leading me to reflect back why didn't I say that well why did I say that and is that just partly right and or wrong and so on so there's this second level of reflection going on as well as the immediate engagement in the to and fro, and there's more to it than that but that's why those two paragraphs reflect and those of you who have or
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will come to read about Vygotsky and his work, you'll find that what's here is reflecting that genius' initiatives. Interaction in oral dialogue you start from and build on the learners' prior understanding. Secondly, dialogue with written work, and I'm going to come to this, reflect on and review classwork, homework, tests. So I want to move the agenda now into a different level of dialogue; dialogue with written work which is a to-and-fro, different time
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scale, and therefore different features, going back to my model of pedagogy, we've done deciding the learning games, we talked a little bit about planning activities, we talked about implementing in the classroom, and the next stage is review, and I've found that a useful term to sum up this stage, because whenever a pupil writes a report, answers a question, essay or test, does a piece of homework, often he's been asked, or she, to put it together, to
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repeat in his or her own terms, what's been said, to reflect and relate two or three things that have happened, that can happen in written work in a class, or homework, it can happen in a test, and that then is an opportunity for thought and learning but it's also an opportunity for feedback and the question is how do you give feedback on written work where it's individual and can be done in more than one way, which way, and now I've come to a very
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important point of what's called comment-only marking, I'll quote first some research results by Ruth Butler, where they researched, worked with, year 7 pupils it was in Israel but it's their equivalent to year 7 pupils, 12 classes, 4 schools the data was only collected for the top quartile and the bottom quartile of each class, which is why there are only 132, but with that data with these pupils and classes the experiment consisted in giving all 12 classes the same teaching,
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the same aims, the same teachers, the same classwork, but there were three kinds of feedback, one-third of the classes were given feedback as marks on written work they had to produce during the teaching, another one-third of the classes were given only comments on the written work they produced during the teaching, and the third group were given both marks and comments together and the point of the research was to set a test at the beginning then to set the
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same test at the end and look at the gain in the learning that happened with classes treated in these three different ways and also to ask the pupils whether they'd be interested to go on to learn more from the subject or not those given marks showed almost no significant gain and the top quartile were interested in going on, the bottom quartile were not, those given comments showed a 30% gain and all were positive in wanting to go on, now one can
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understand that because marks don't tell you what to do, they tell you your good or might cheer you up, or tell you you're not very good and you might decide why they don't want to do that anyway, they don't help you, comments do help you, they tell you what's wrong or what you might do to put right the weaknesses, what's more hard to understand is the third category were given both marks and comments they showed almost no gain, top quartile interested, the bottom
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quartile not interested. Now it's my colleague Chris Harrison who had already done some research on talking to groups of pupils about what they did with their homework books when they'd been handed back with the teacher not there and they said well what we do is I look at my mark I look at what my friend got and that's the end of it, and that's a terrible waste, effort put into setting the task, effort pupils put into doing it, effort the teacher puts into marking, commenting, or whatever
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on it and what does it produce; pupils just look at marks and decide they're good or not good, the teacher has a set of numbers in the record book, what's the contribution of all that to learning, not as anything like as much as it could be if one uses comments, and those comments give guidance, and if one also ties the comments to opportunities or requirements to do something about the comments, to improve, correct, add, then you're beginning to use that opportunity to
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produce a written dialogue a to-and-fro to improve the learning on the basis of this review and what pupils have shown about how far they have got with it, so dialogue of written work is important, but there's something more important, it's not just about improving the learning. Ruth Butler who did this particular piece of research had this sort of idea "those given feedback as marks are likely to see it as a way to compare themselves with
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others" which she called 'ego-involvement' "those given only comments see it as helping them to improve. This group out-performs the former. Feedback given as rewards or grades enhances ego rather than task involvement." that is by giving feedback in one method, grades, for example as opposed to another, comments about how to improve, you are changing their view of themselves as learners you're shifting them and they tend if they get only
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grades and rewards, tend to see it as a competition and they're good in this competition or not good in this competition, if that's not done they've just given rewards, there's ideas about how to improve, they start to be more objective about the task and how they can do better, that work has been done at far greater depth over a long time by Carol Dweck and though I don't use her phrases it's her ideas, with ego-involvement "both high and low attainers
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are reluctant to take risks and react badly to new challenges, and failures simply damaged self-esteem." with task-involvement, "learners believe that they can improve by their own effort, are willing to take on new challenges and to learn from failure." and that's all in a wonderful book on cell theory she published in 2000, some of you may have met her later book on mindsets, I don't think it's anything like as good as the first one which is a story over years of researched how she built up
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ideas, and take those assertions, one of the things she did was to take the ranking at the end of primary school of a big sample of children and then just check up where they were a year later in the next phase of schooling in u.s. middle schools, those who ,according to her checks with them, saw themselves as competitive, as good or bad, and so on, like ego-enrolment, they'd gone down in the ranking, those who believed they could improve by their own efforts
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and were focused on the task they had to do when they were given feedback, they went up in the ranking, similarly she found with a similar research she compared the results of pupils at the top american high school with their ranking in their results after a year in college, the same thing happened, those who had this competitive, ego involved, am I inherently bright or inherently weak view of life went down, those who didn't think in that way, but
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just said i think i by my own efforts can always do better, they went up. It's not about getting pupils all to believe they're all equally intelligent or quick at learning, they'd never believe you if you tried that anyway because it's not true but getting everyone to believe that they by their own effort can do better they're not predestined to be high learners or lower learners everyone can do better, that's what a teacher should be trying to
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establish, the difficulty of course was if she started in the school simply, for example, there's a new teacher deciding they're not gonna give any marks or grades or any homework there would be questions asked very quickly, particular my parents, and i would just say; nobody should ever start this without some way of explaining to parents what's being done and why. One of my best one-day in-service exercises with the whole school was, they'd argued
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about all of this sort of thing and this was one of the biggest things the teachers are worried about at the end, what about marks and grades and only giving comments and nothing else and the head teacher stood up and said "it's clear this has to be cleared up, there will be no marks, or grades and homework in this school from now on." I could have kissed, her it made my day, but it is evidently in the long run a matter of school policy but things can be done
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within that policy; here's a teacher writing about her reflections on this having got into this through the work done with us "Previously I would have marked the work and graded it and made a comment. The pupils only saw the mark and/or credit. after a credit they lost the motive to improve. Now they get a credit after we have gone over the work so they have an incentive to understand the work." That's one way in which the teacher is put into a dilemma by all this
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being raised, something in this two-year project they should think about then this is the way some of them dealt with it, I'm going to go on giving them marks and grades but only after they have discussed the comments and thought about how they can improve, that was one way of coping, other teacher told the pupils, I give marks they're not written in your work they're in my record book if you really want to know you can come and ask, but what I want is for you
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to respond to the comments and do some extra work to put it right, and she reported that they asked quite a lot at the beginning but most of them got bored of that in the end and just focused on the comments and the better work they might do there's a teacher commenting on this practice in a different light "Students are not good at knowing how much they are learning, often because we as teachers do not tell them in an appropriate way. When asked by a visitor
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how well she was doing in science, the student clearly stated that the comments in her exercise book and those given verbally provide her with the information she needs." So this is terrific I wouldn't have expected this much progress who needs marks or grades anymore, you need them when you've got a put people in some uniform frame to make decisions in the future, but that's not needed most at the time informal summative
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assessment for me is a crucial part of the whole process, and another way the teachers exploited this was to say, I look at the work, I make my own decisions about it, but I then ask pupils to mark one another's in groups so she would have a group of pupils and they would circulate around them, four or five of them, one another's attempts at a piece of homework and then they discuss how they put them in rank order what's good about this one what's better about that
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one and start arguing, they might work with their own books in their group or another teacher would swap the books between groups so that there wasn't a personal investment in what they were talking about and out of that they would develop some understanding, a deeper understanding, of what the criteria are for doing well, because it's very easy to tell pupils what their targets are but when you're learning a subject you might not understand the target and when you
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do understand clearly what it means you part way to learning it anyway so you have to work through examples to build up that's what this peer marking can do, has been found to do. "We regularly do peer marking - I find this very helpful indeed. A lot of misconceptions come to the fore and we then discuss these as we are going over the homework. I then go over the peer marking and talk to pupils individually as I go around the room." and
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here you have the oral dialogue on the written dialogue we're working off one another using the fact that pupils had to review and express themselves individually as a beginning for an interplay that dialogue in two different forms. So the big advantages in peer assessment: all peoples can be involved, they use pupil language - and start to talk the language of the subject, they're more honest and challenging with one another than with their teacher, seeing
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your work through the eyes of your peers helps you to be more objective, the teacher can spot where they might best spend their time, but pupils need to be trained to work effectively in groups, and that's another very important piece of development, a lot of work has been done particularly in the last four or five years in the UK by two different groups looking at what happens in group work, in classrooms, and their first finding was not very encouraging, that groups were
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not working effectively, they were wandering off the subject, one or two were dominating occasionally, or there would be the pupil who thought the whole point was to prove who's right, and there would be a fight to do this and so on and Neil Mercer the professor, was of the OU now Cambridge, tried to train pupils in effective group work and his principles he established in a piece of research he did with pupils in Key Stage 2 in year 5 and these are the
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principles all students must contribute, no one member says too much or too little, every contribution treated with respect listened thoughtfully, group must achieve consensus work at resolving differences, every suggestion/assertion has to be justified arguments must include reasons, and he implemented those rules in training groups by assigning roles in the groups being trained, your role is to just watch that everyone's taking
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part and that no one is silent for too long and no one's hogging too much of the time, another pupil take that third bullet point, your role is to stand up at the end of the time allotted to the group discussion report what they agreed, and if they're going off-topic and all over the place you will l have nothing to say so you're gonna have to call them back to order to get them to brief you as to what they're gonna say,
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and the very important one was the last one, one person in the group was given the role of Challenger and what the Challenger had to do is to ensure that nobody made an assertion or a contradiction without giving a reason for it, if anyone made an assertion a contradiction they had to justify it with reasons. As a result of that training, two things versus when his colleague reported, one was that they listened to the dialogue in the groups before the
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training and after the training and after the training certain words, think, would, could, because, those reasoning words they came up three times more frequently after the training than before, the second was to compare those groups with comparable groups same background and all the rest all the other variables adjusted with the results subsequently Key Stage two tests of blessed memory and that was have been through this training did significantly
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better than those have not been through the training, so it paid off in the general improvement of their work but it also showed quality in the group discussions, and that's quite an important feature because reasoning for discussions are not common in everyday life we had one researcher in New Zealand reporting when she was doing this and organizing the groups in the classroom one pupil said don't put me in the same group as my best friend
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I don't argue with my best friend, and these studies of pairwise discussions between pupils I like that, they tend to agree with one another, not have a debate or an argument and there's a world of difference between social discourse and learning discourse, which has to be thought through, I learnt it in a very odd way because I and my wife went to a dinner party with some friends and when is it finished and we were walking back home in the dark
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and I said well that went well didn't it? She said no, and I said what went wrong, she said you, Mio? yes you, what did I do wrong, you kept asking for reasons, you kept quoting other people's ideas and work, yes, I said, this wasn't one of your seminars she said, it's a dinner party, you got it wrong, she's probably right she usually is, but that heightened for me, it's real story I assure you I didn't make it up, that heightened
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for me that distinction and in getting pupils to work in groups you're trying to teach them something new about interaction with people and that takes some work, cannot be taken for granted, and some of the general rules that Mercer and a different group make, you don't have too big a gap in achievement there, you put the top with the middle and the middle with the bottom, you don't put the top with the bottom, you mix genders, because they tend to be
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different types of discussion between men only and girls only you've got to mix it, and Mercer's group had produced a wonderful book, I'd recommend to anyone, called thinking together, which is a really work through sequence of training for primary pupils for throughout Key Stage two full of examples, the work examples, things you can do with pupils, I mean one of the splendid wanders about persuasive phrases and the first bit of this
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particular example is that you talk about phrases, because, do you think that, against that, it could be said, the sort of phrases used in persuasion and that was the argument of this particular piece of work, and then when the generalities have been gone through, pupils are asked to work on a particular example and here is her example, it's a letter which pupils have to rewrite to make it more persuasive, here's the letter, dear auntie thank you
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for offering to take me to the museum for my birthday but I don't want to go, do we have to go it's not fair, I don't even like museums, they're boring and full of old stuff, I want to go to the cinema, I need to see a film, you'll have to let me choose which one, I will bring my friend along with me, I want to have popcorn and I'm going to get a choc ice too, not only that it had better be the nine o'clock show only the little kids go early, you better take me to the cinema
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otherwise I will just be fed up and I will yawn a lot, if you don't like the cinema, bad luck, you're just paying the money, it's my birthday and I can do what I like, best wishes from Lorna. The pupil started to rewrite that letter, so that the person writing it might get what they want without offending their auntie seems to me a formidable task, I wouldn't like to try, but that's just for me to reflect to you the quality, I think that's a splendid book, first chapter
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about 10-20 pages about the principal, sort of thing I've been waffling about, but then it's a lot of carefully graded exercises to help you to develop these skills of working collaboratively in groups, and it's splendid and I think unique piece of work. So to look at my 5 stage model we've been through those three and we have been talking about informal summative assessment the review and then the last stage will be the formal summative assessment, we're getting into serious testing,
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but say a little more about tests as such and there's a formative use of summative assessment, and here's some of the ideas we've worked with. Students should be engaged in a reflective review of the work they've done to anable them to plan their revision effectively. One of the teachers we work with had an idea which he puts into practice in this way, he told a class near the end of work on one topic; next lesson, later in the week, two or three days later, we'll have
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a test, so I want you to prepare for that, when it came to that lesson he didn't give them a test, he asked them to discuss and exchange and report how they had prepared for the test, and he said he was pretty badly surprised almost appalled, some of them knew want to do, others didn't they'd just flip the pages of the book, they looked at some of the homework they done, they didn't have a system and he was appealing to them "I gave you some key
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words at the beginning, didn't you go back to those? I gave you these aims, they're part way through, why didn't you go through those?" "I hadn't thought of that." So to assume that pupils know how to prepare may be quite wrong, some can others can't. Different form, students being encouraged to set questions and mark answers to help them, both to understand the assessment process and to focus further efforts for improvement. I would never have dared suggest that, but the two pieces of research
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published in the USA, independent of one another, tried the same thing we had comparable groups and one group were told to prepare for a test in the normal way, another group taught the same material, taught in the same way, were asked to prepare for the tests and not by the normal way but by sitting in groups and trying to set questions that they think would come in this test and to set them mark schemes to go with them to show what you'd be looking
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for in the answers, the groups who spent time doing that did better in the subsequent tests than the groups who spent time in using their normal preparation, that was a strange result and the same results obtained in these two independent studies, because there's no evidence that they referred to a new existence existence one another, though you can understand again why that might happen, if you're gonna prepare a test you got to start to think what
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would it be worth asking a question about, what's important? what's trivial? you can imagine an argument about different proposals for questions on that issue, what's important? what's trivial? Has it been carefully put and so on and so one can speculate, now there is only speculation produced by the authors of this that the very act of trying to write questions made one think more carefully about the criteria and about the aims and it made one also
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perhaps respect the actual test questions that other people have produced, you began to see, hey the guy who wrote this meant it and if I try and answer a different question I'm not doing what was intended so for whatever reason this seems to work. Third one; students should be encouraged through peer and self-assessment to apply criteria to help them understand how their work might be improved. This is the same point
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being used for written work, homework and so on, can now be applied to tests, that is after setting a test at the end of a topic in school, the teacher could read through and learn from it what had gone well and so on, and even assign marks, but the pupils were just given, in an annotated form, their original test papers to circulate in groups and try and mark them, some teacher even said it worked to get them to invent a mark scheme, others gave them
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the mark scheme and asked them to apply it. Here's a teacher commenting on the result of doing that. After each end of term test, the class is group now to learn from each other. [the researcher] has interviewed them on this experience and they are very positive about the effects. Some of their comments show that they're starting to value the learning process more highly and they appreciate the fact that misunderstanding is like given time to
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be resolved, either in groups or by me. They feel that the pressure to succeed in tests is being replaced by the need to understand the work that has been covered and the test is just an assessment along the way of what needs more work and what seems to be fine. Now I personally would never imagined that a teacher we worked with would end up saying something like that, but it shows that the pupils view of the informal testing that went on was that it was
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helpful to them and not a judgment of them. What I've been talking about on one level is feedback in discussion, feedback in written work, self of peer assessment, the formative use of tests, those are the activities within which these things happen, but reflecting on what comes out of that in terms of learning by asking this question, what can capable learners do? If we're trying to develop as a fundamental a capability as learners, they can engage in and learn
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from interactive dialogue that's the formative assessment the dialogic teaching of the example I used, they can reflect critically on the detailed outcomes their own work and take initiatives to improve it, that's peer assessment and the formative feedback, giving comments and not marks or grades, making collaborating group work which is not just something a helps learning but should be an end in itself you haven't to look very hard or very far at what
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employers say about what they need from new employees they'll come up with the capacity to collaborate working creatively in groups it's one of the frequent things that turns up, achieve a broad overview of their progress and guide their development in the light of the aims of the learning that's the loftiest name they become effective learners because they can manage their own learning, painfully but slowly can work towards
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that by some of the different issues, ideas, that are being proposed. A teacher reflects on his role, there was a definite transition at some point, focusing on what I was putting into the process and what the pupils were contributing, it became obvious that one way to make a significant sustainable change was to get the pupils to do more the thinking. I then began to search for ways to make the learning process more transparent to the pupils. Indeed I now
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spend my time looking for ways to get pupils to take responsibility for their learning at the same time making the learning more collaborative. That was one of the teachers in the project with us. Here's three comments on changing the student's role because this isn't just about changing what teachers do, it's about changing what learners think they ought to be doing. ...A number of pupils... are content to 'get by'. Every teacher who wants to practice formative assessment must
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reconstruct the habits acquired by his pupils. That's a Swiss French speaking genius, Perrenoud. The hard thing is not getting new ideas into their heads, it's getting the old ones out. That's one of the principles of learning where you build on what the learner already has and show how bits of it are good other bits become not as effective as they are, and transform into new bases, if you don't do that and you simply tell people what's right, ignoring what they have
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thought about the issue in the past, they'll end up with two layers of knowing, one layer a school wants, the other layer they used every day and get confused between the two, and finally one of the pupils being interviewed by one of my colleagues, Now I know she is interested in what I think, not in whether I can get the right answer, and that's part of this change that's needed to change pupils so that they look at it in that way. In fact one of the teachers that worked with us, left the
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school they're working with because we choose some middle-of-the-road local authority schools with the help of the local authorities and she went off to a high status, as it happened girls school, and started teaching a class in that way and after the first two or three lessons the girls complained, miss why don't you tell us the right answer instead of spending his time getting us to talk about it, she was challenging their view of what
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classrooms and learning should be about and it took her some time to get them to change and finally, there's no 'quick fix' that can be added to existing practice with promise of rapid reward. On the contrary, if the substantial rewards of which the evidence holds out promise are to be secured, this will only come about if each teacher finds his or her ways of incorporating the lessons and ideas that are set out above into his or her own patterns
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of classroom work. This can only happen relatively slowly and through sustained programmes of professional development and support. William and myself wrote that in 1998, everything we've done since, particularly spending two years with a group of six schools about 40 teachers which produced this book and the lessons from which I've given you, are things which showed great diversity, great ingenuity, new lessons learnt through teachers transforming stuff into practice, not
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through applying research, but the teachers differed, some did a lot of this and didn't do that, some did a lot of that and not much of this, each one had their own way, and the only advice we ended up with to any teacher or school coming to this afresh, don't try and do all of these things at once, it won't work, you take one of those ideas like dialog in teaching or feedback on written work or the use of tests and
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work on that and then try and get it to gel and go with the others, take too much on and you can't cope with all the change so I'll stop at that point thank you
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