As I mentioned in my previous post I attended a talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival this week on Assessment and Curriculum for Excellence give by Terry Lanagan, Executive Director of Educational Services at West Dunbartonshire Council.
My reason for attending was to find out more about assessment and Cfe. From the event I gained a deeper understanding of the Curriculum for Excellence. I had been seeing it as a replacement as 5-14 – another set of guidelines to what to teach but I now understand that it is a change to how I teach rather than what I teach. Curriculum for Excellence is a change to teaching and learning which is not content lead but it is there to broaden and widen the learning of the children. The challenge is to now work with the children to give them the skills to deal with the modern way of living.
So where does assessment fit into this? I think that assessment should be part of the planning. I feel this is being done already with the WALT/Learning Intention and WILF/Success Criteria. With these the children can see what they learning and why.
In Building the Curriculum 5 three questions are posed.
What are we assessing?
How we assess?
When do we assess?
Teachers have been empowered to answer these questions for themselves. Curriculum for excellence is a bottom up approach to teaching and learning. This is an opportunity for teachers to work together to build the new curriculum not just within individual schools – clusters, local authorities even across Scotland. There is a lot of great practice. I look forward to seeing some of this for myself.
The national assessment resource (NAR) is launched later this month. It will be bank of shared practice on what schools have done so far on assessment and Curriculum for excellence. My hope is that from these examples others go on to find their way of assessing their teaching and learning.
What do you think?
