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Session 5 – Making feedback purposeful and manageable, part 2: Effective peer and self-assessment

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Session overview:

How can we make feedback purposeful and manageable?

This session will focus on:

Understanding what effective peer and self-assessment looks like
Improving pupils’ metacognitive strategies to support them to be more independent learners

Approximate session length: 35 minutes

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Effective peer and self-assessment

When done well, peer and self-assessment can:

Give pupils the opportunity to think carefully about their own learning and that of their peers
Reduce marking load for the teacher
Allow pupils to develop their mental model of what success looks like in a task and support them to develop transferrable knowledge
Support self-regulation and independence

When done poorly however, it can lead to:

Poor progress for pupils
A waste of lesson time
Pupils focusing on the wrong learning points
Pupils developing a poor mental model of effective feedback
The development of misconceptions

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Effective peer and self-assessment

Watch the following video of Stuart Kline from Evidence Based Education as he explains what is needed to establish effective peer and self-assessment in your classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1GGBSpgQnI&feature=emb_title

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Effective peer and self-assessment

Hear from a fellow primary teacher as she explains how she has established peer and self-assessment in her classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfA090pUqS0&feature=emb_title

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Metacognition and self-assessment

Imagine a group of pupils that were independent enough to effectively self-assess by;

evaluating their knowledge
identifying gaps in their learning
determining the effectiveness of their work
planning to make the relevant changes in the future.

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How can you teach pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate learning?

Plan

Encourage pupils to think about the goal of their learning and how they will approach the task.

How will I approach the problem? Which strategies will I use?
How do I manage my resources?

Monitor

Emphasising the need for pupils to assess the progress they are making as they go.

What is working? What isn’t working? Why am I finding this challenging?

Evaluate

Appraising the effectiveness of their plan.

How did I do?

The first step is to ensure that pupils have secure subject knowledge in the area in which they are applying the metacognitive strategy. Without knowledge, pupils will not be able to apply the strategies they are being taught. Instead, they will still be trying to understand and learn the concept, rather than reflecting effectively on how well they have learnt it and what they need to do next.

The next step is to know that development of metacognitive strategies requires explicit teaching and modelling in order to train pupils’ thinking.

The EEF report into metacognition and self-regulation highlights that you should ask pupils questions that focus their thinking on how they could plan, monitor and evaluate their learning. The teacher should also explicitly model this thinking in order to develop it in their pupils.

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Activity

One of the seven recommendations for teaching metacognitive strategies is to encourage pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning.

Consider the scenario below. Then, after each verbalised thought in the table, identify whether it would support a pupils’ ability to better plan, monitor or evaluate their own learning.

Scenario:

You have asked your pupils to draw or paint a self-portrait. Knowing that modelling the task will give pupils a clear idea of what success in the task looks like, you draw your own self-portrait in front of the class. Knowing also that an effective way to develop metacognitive strategies and self-regulation in your pupils is to verbalise your thinking, you talk aloud through your model, articulating why you have made the choices that you have.

Answers

1. Plan

2. Monitor

3. Plan

4. Evaluate

5. Monitor

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Begin to familiarise yourself with;

The EEF have developed seven practical recommendations that support the teaching and development of metacognition in pupils. Two of these strategies have been covered in this ECF programme. Take five minutes to review the remaining five.