Assessment
Most assessment measures. The useful kind changes what you do next — and it usually takes two minutes, not a period.
Two kinds, and the ratio between them
Assessment that measures
Term tests, examinations, marks and grades. Necessary, reported, and largely too late to act on. It tells you what happened.
Assessment that teaches
The two-minute check in the middle of a lesson that tells you whether to move on or to explain again. It costs almost nothing and it changes the next ten minutes.
Most classrooms do far too much of the first and almost none of the second.
Quick checks that take two minutes
Show me
Hold up one finger if this sentence is correct, two if it is wrong. Read four sentences. In ninety seconds you know exactly how many of the class have understood — and, crucially, which ones.
The exit sentence
In the last two minutes: Write one sentence using the present perfect on a slip of paper. Put it on my table as you leave. You read forty slips in five minutes and you know precisely where to start next lesson.
Explain it to your partner
Tell your partner in your own words when we use 'since' and when we use 'for'. Walk round and listen. What they say to each other is a truer measure than what they say to you.
The deliberate error
Write a sentence on the board containing the error you have just taught against. Is this right? The class's reaction tells you immediately whether it landed.
Traffic lights
Put your hand flat on the desk if you are confident, on its side if you are unsure, in a fist if you are lost. Less exposing than raising a hand, and far more honest.
One-minute paper
At the end of a topic: What is the most important thing you learnt? What is still unclear? Two lines. It takes ten minutes to read a class set and often reveals a misunderstanding you had no idea existed.
Designing a test that is worth setting
- Test what you taught. A test containing material not covered measures memory of the textbook, not learning.
- Include some easy items. A test on which the weakest students score nothing tells you nothing about them and teaches them only that they are hopeless.
- Include some demanding items. A test everyone completes easily tells you nothing about the strongest.
- Test skills, not only facts. Write a notice tells you more than list the five parts of a notice.
- Mark it quickly. A test returned three weeks later has lost most of its value; the students have moved on and cannot remember what they were thinking.
- Teach from the results. Take the ten minutes to go through the two commonest errors with the whole class. Without that, the test was measurement only.
The most useful record you can keep
Not a mark book — a list of each student's one recurring fault. One line per student.
At the next piece of work, look for that fault first, and tell the student whether it has improved. A student who sees that you remembered their particular difficulty takes your comment far more seriously than any mark.
It takes one page and it changes how marking feels for both of you.