Building sustainability
المؤلف:
Steve Thornton & Sue Wilson
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P136-C13
2025-06-26
496
Building sustainability
Boud (2000) outlines eight principles by which to build sustainability in assessment.
1. Confidence that new learning tasks can be mastered. The students interviewed were confident that the targeted reflections prompted by the interview questions would enable them to be reflective and critical teachers when faced with the day-to-day challenges of teaching in a secondary school.
2. Exploration of criteria and standards which apply to any given learning task. The students were aware of the criteria by which they would be assessed.
These were:
➣ Capacity to critically reflect on and improve your teaching;
➣ Capacity to use mathematics education literature and a range of resources to inform your teaching;
➣ Capacity to think critically about issues in mathematics education;
➣ Evidence of a coherent rationale for and philosophy of mathematics education.
During the subject, students explored what these might mean for the interview and portfolio, and raised questions about how they might address them effectively. In the process of doing this they gained a greater awareness of the role of standards and criteria in evaluating teacher knowledge, practice and attributes as outlined in the Standards for Excellence.
3. Active engagement with learning tasks in order to test understanding and applications of criteria and standards. As noted by Melissa, many of the students engaged with the learning task at a level that was much deeper than that which might have been required to obtain a passing grade. Rather than the focus being on marks, the focus was on questioning their own beliefs and practices.
4. Development of devices for self-monitoring and judging progression towards goals. By focusing on the Standards for Excellence the students were able to evaluate their current state of professional competence. This set them up to monitor their development in the teaching environment, and to undertake future assessment against the Standards. The assessment thus encompassed the knowledge, skills and predispositions required to underpin life-long learning, while still meeting the needs of the present as defined in the course of study at University.
5. Practice in discernment to identify critical aspects of problems and issues. By asking the students to target their portfolio and interview to specific, but broad and open questions, students were required to make judgments about what to include in the portfolio. The students' responses to the interview question discussing a critical issue showed that they were able to critically examine several aspects of an issue, and arrive at informed positions. In doing so they drew on the disciplinary knowledge gained through their University studies and the professional knowledge gained through their experience in schools. They saw teaching as an on-going process of inquiry rather than as an exercise in reproducing the status quo.
6. Access to learning peers and others with expertise to reflect on challenges and gain support for renewed efforts. Many of the students spent several hours practicing their answers to the interview questions with their peers. In the process they built up a community of learning, as evidenced by the reflective discussion following the assessment.
7. Use feedback to find new ways of engaging with a task. While the students were unable to respond to the feedback given by their University lecturers as it was at the end of their course, it was clear that they used the feedback of teachers in schools to improve their teaching and to develop as reflective professionals. They did not necessarily accept and act upon every piece of feedback; rather they evaluated the usefulness of their teacher's feedback in the light of their own observations of student learning.
8. We should take care in our use of vocabulary to avoid creating closure on ongoing learning. Melissa's response "I am still sitting on the fence" showed that she had maintained an open mind on a critical issue. Students understood that the assessment task was very much a snapshot of where they were "at the time", rather than being an assessment of some final point in their development as teachers. In this way the task met the needs of the present (University accreditation) without compromising the students' future learning needs.
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