Assessment for Learning
Pivotal provide cutting edge training tailored to your institution. Sample agendas are available on request. We don't 'train and run', we build sustainable practice that works for the long term. All our training can be booked with coaching & mentoring.
Pivotal's Negotiated Assessment model is a highly flexible framework for target setting at the task level and beyond. It encourages autonomy and responsibility for learning in the classroom with students setting, monitoring and evaluating their own work and that of others.
As a teacher I want to be able to reflect on not just what I am delivering but day to day how effective my teaching is, what skills students have learned, how well they comprehend concepts and how much they understand. I really need to know this, not because I am obsessed with statistics or really enjoy the word ‘benchmarking’ or because I want to feed an obsessive statistical beaurocracy. I really need to know because it helps me to differentiate, to personalize, adjust my content and delivery, it gives my reflections meaning and allows me to direct appropriate support. If I can take ‘ what I have to do – NC, levels, targets, benchmarks, syllabus, tests, value added etc – and make it human I can hold true to what I believe is good teaching while satisfying the needs of those to whom I am increasingly accountable. 
Paul Dix, Director in his book, ‘The Essential Guide to Assessment’ (published by Pearson 2010)
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Pivotal’s Negotiated Assessment is influenced by the work of James Britton and Lev Vygotsky. It embeds key vocabulary in the process as well as the product, develops clear links between oracy and literacy and takes less than five minutes to create. The model creates opportunities for self, peer, group and teacher assessment and can be effortlessly adapted for all areas of the curriculum. It reduces preparation time for the teacher and is used to manage behaviour as well as learning
The system has been created to be criteria and objectives driven. It is easy to feel hemmed in and frustrated by the constant need to relate all teaching and learning to the assessment objectives.
Whilst we argue to make the system more flexible how do we make what we have to do more human? How can we create ownership with students when the criteria they have to refer to is always set by someone else? How can we engage students in a reflective process of assessment when the criteria are written for the teachers/assessors? Pivotal explains how positive reinforcement, autonomy and metacognition are key to making the system work for you and your students.
- Developing learning conversations and coaching techniques for students
- Negotiated Assessment and Assessment for Learning
- Autonomy, independent and personalised learning
- Metacognition and reflective learning
- Meaningful target setting for and with your students
One of the best whole staff INSET days the school has ever had. Three months on and the techniques and confidence built from the training is still having an impact on our students’ learning.
Zoe King, Boswells School, Chelmsford