EducationFest… Reflections for me as subject leader

As a regular attender of #EducationFest, I know that I will leave every year feeling re-energised and inspired, but more importantly, informed.  As we know though, a one off conference does not lead to change in performance and so an important part of ensuring that this incredible CPD has an impact on my practice is to spend some time reflecting on my top takeaways.

This year I have decided to write 3 mini blogs rather than one big blog post, with each post focusing on a different area of my practice and this one is about my learning as someone responsible for the curriculum and assessment practices of a department.

For reasons that are irrelevant to this blog, next year I will be deputy head and also subject leader for RE.  I am pretty happy about that for two reasons.  Firstly, I only spent 18 months as HoD before taking on a new role and it was one of my favourite roles.  Secondly, because it is useful as  senior leader to see my own leadership decisions through a slightly different lens.  It was really interesting being at Education Fest and jumping between implication for me the SLT and me the ML.  These are my top ML takeaways.

In Daisy Christodolou’s session, she talked us through life after levels.  If you are interested in the bigger picture of her talk, check out my reflections of a senior leader post because this is going to reflect on her recommendations for good practice.  She identified a number of strategies that she feels are better than levels and these made good sense to me.  Having read her book and blogs of people influenced by her, I am already thinking about how to assess better and part of my drive is workload.  RE teachers often have more classes than most teachers and the assessments (commonly defined as marking) can be enough to break the most diligent of colleagues.  More than that though is the concern that staff are spending tremendous amounts of time on feedback which isn’t actually changing or improving anything.  A couple of suggestions put forward in this talk could help my team in both of these areas.

·       Use of multiple choice questions.  Christodolou took her through an example of a good/skilful multiple choice question and a less skilled question to demonstrate the effectiveness of MCQs.  A carefully crafted question serves a number of purposes.  It tells you whether the student has the knowledge or not.  It allows you to access the knowledge of all the students rather than one or two.  And if used well, it allows you to explore and unpick reasons behind misconceptions.  This is something we need to use more frequently to inform our planning.

·       Use of ‘one page proforma’ or class marking.  This is where, rather than writing in every child’s book, your read every child’s book and make a note on one page of the general trends observed in books.  Notes might be made in response to questions like ‘what were the main errors?’ ‘who struggled?’ ‘who did well?’ ‘whose work might I want o showcase next lesson?’.  You then provide feedback to the whole class.

·       Use of scaled scores.  Rather than focusing on grades/levels which do not give a true reflection of where students are working, focus on points and scores.

·       Comparative judgement.  I have had a little play with this thanks to Dawn Cox and I quite liked it.  Instead of reading an essay, comparing it to descriptors and giving it a grade, you compare essays against essays.  You simply read two essays and decide which is better.  As you feed this information into a computer, the computer can then do all the thinking through clever algorithm stuff and generate grades.  I think this could be a really useful process for standardising judgements within the department.  We might not all agree that essay A deserves 10 out of 12 but can we agree that it is weaker than essay B and stronger than essay C?   

I think I need to write a separate post on the curriculum implications that came out of the talks.  I can’t tell if the curriculum conversation is becoming more dominant or if I just find it really interesting so went to lots of talks on it.  For me as RE lead though, I am relieved to reflect that our decision to start from scratch at KS3 and to start from the point of the knowledge appears to be the general school of thought.  As Stuart Lock pointed out – focus less on the how and more on the what.  What do children need to know?  It is the question we should all be asking ourselves.  We have started this conversation and will continue to do so.  I also loved hearing Amanda Spielman discussing the importance of a rich and diverse KS3 curriculum rather than a narrow or GCSE focused programme.  So we need to think about the what.  And the what needs to prepare students for life, for further study and should also ignite a passion for learning in our subject. 

So my big focus as subject leader?  Curriculum and assessment.  And I like it.