Monday 4 February 2008

Assessment is for...?

Learning? Is it? I'm still trying to embed this notion within my own head never mind in my own practice. Too much jargon clouds the issue I suspect and it can be all too easy to begin to lose sight of the point of the whole thing - enhancing the children's learning and trying to provide a happy, stimulating environment within the class and school.

Anyway, as a small step towards ensuring that the learning is in some way valid (whose criteria?) I'm trying to focus on getting those all-important learning objectives up for the children on a regular basis.

This point could be argued all day/week/year - indeed on my initial degree course (a BA in Sport in the Community) we spent seemingly endless hours on coaching modules where we looked at ideas around objectives, targets and aims. Asking questions like "are objectives stepping stones towards aims or is it the other way round?" and big ideas like that. I'm unsure to this day if we ever got an answer but I'm willing to consider - and try - anything which might benefit the learners.

For that reason I'm going to keep a note of all the "We Are Learning To" points (thanks Shirley Clarke for the jargon but I think we all had the idea anyway...) and post them along with the "evidence" pictures. We shall see how it goes.

Assessment is for Life. Not just for classroom observations. Discuss...

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