Do you know about Pivotal Assessment?
This is the time of year when assessment is at the forefront of many teachers' minds. Is assessment ongoing in your classroom? Or do you find yourself under pressure, gathering evidence, for end-of-year formal grading and levels?
Pivotal can help you. We may be well known for our Behaviour and Safeguarding training, but Pivotal Trainers are also experts in Assessment. Our lead trainer, Paul Dix, has written The Essential Guide to Classroom Assessment. Pivotal trainers also provide keynotes and full INSET days on assessment. More information follows....
The Essential Guide to Classroom Assessment by Paul Dix
The Essential Guide to Classroom Assessment shows you assessment is not just a set of processes or the final mark, but a series of opportunities to encourage and build on successful learning. Inviting you to reflect on your teaching methods, award-winning teacher trainer, Paul Dix, provides you with the skills, tools and strategies you need to put effective assessment models into practice in your classroom. Demystifying current thinking and debate to offer clear, practical guidance, this book cuts through unnecessary jargon and is guaranteed to save you time.
The Essential Guide to Classroom Assessment answers the following questions, and many more:
- How can I get students to take more ownership of their assessment?
- How can I encourage productive self, peer and group assessment?
- How can I effectively track the progress of different children in my class?
- How do I elicit meaningful targets from students and stop writing them myself?
- How can I improve formative assessment and save myself time?
- How will I have time to do all this?
You can order books online through the Pivotal Shop, by email to ellie@pivotaleducation.com, by phone 020 70001735 or by fax 020 70224976
" 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, 'The Essential Guide to Assessment' (published by Pearson 2010)
Tailored Assessment INSET
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
If you would like to talk to a member of the Pivotal team about tailoring training for your staff, then please call Ellie on 020 70001735 or email ellie@pivotaleducation.com
For more information about Pivotal products or services, please do get in touch, we are always happy to answer your questions.
Date: 07/06/2011
