Whatever internal system you use for assessing writing, come May year 6 teachers will be using the Interim Teacher Assessment Framework to decide whether a child is 'Working towards', 'Working at', or 'Working at a greater depth'. Many teachers, like myself, may already be using this to assess writing, building up an evidence base of what each child can do to support end of year assessments. However, finding out what a child can't yet do is so much more useful. A great number of the statements focus on spelling and grammar. Whilst some may argue that this is... (Read More)

What techniques do you use to gauge understanding from your students? How do you really know if they understand what you’ve taught? Obviously marking work is very informative, but wouldn’t it be better to have a clearer understanding as you're teaching? Whilst self-assessment methods such as thumbs up can be effective, they also suffer two main problems; peer pressure and the fact that students can be misguided in their level of understanding. Through the use of student response systems it is possible to gain a greater depth of understanding of how our students’ are rea... (Read More)