There are certain things that teachers are compelled to do - through learned behaviour and professional norms - if they are to be considered to be doing their jobs properly. And these apply even if they think those things are a waste of time and have little impact on learning.

In my experience, most of these perceived requirements involve marking, grading and feedback. And, worryingly, even when the evidence shows that there is a better way of doing these things, bad habits have a way of sneaking back in.

In 2003, Paul Black came to the college I was working at and delivered an Inset session summarising the book he had written with Dylan Wiliam (Inside the Black Box: raising standards through classroom assessment, 1998). Their research clearly found that non-graded, formative feedback brought significant improvements in learning.

I came away from the session with the realisation that I was wasting a lot of time marking and grading and, in some cases, such actions could be having a detrimental effect on the young people I taught. The realisation had a transformative effect on the way I engaged students with the assessment and feedback process.

Fast-forward 15 years, though, and I was standing outside after a training session, feeling deeply embarrassed. One of the key messages of the session had been that schools and colleges were still falling into the trap of blending summative assessment (where students are assessed at the end of an instructional unit) and formative assessment (where assessment is ongoing and part of the learning process), therefore negating the impact of good-quality formative feedback.

I suddenly realised that the college in which I am deputy principal had fallen into that trap, too. Despite knowing that what the evidence said worked, despite following it in my own practice, the college had not fully embraced the power of formative assessment.

I travelled back to work, planning to fix the issue as soon as possible. But we were sitting on excellent outcomes and value-added scores - how could I persuade people to change when what they were doing seemed to be working?

I knew teaching staff would need the evidence from research (as well as their own experiences) if they were to buy in to making changes. And I knew we had to find a way to make the changes stick, so we did not slip back into bad habits. So, what did we do?

Step 1: leadership

I knew we had to get a critical mass of managers and leaders on board (some of whom had attended the same training session) before fleshing out what it would mean in practice. If this was to work, it had to be led and modelled by every senior figure in the college, and the message had to be consistent.

So, as members of the senior leadership team, we developed a rationale for change, backed by the research. I delivered this first to the senior staff and, after getting their buy-in, presented it to our directors of learning (heads of department).

After accomplishing a critical mass of support for the shift in approach to formative assessment and feedback, a working group of directors of learning, teachers and the college management team worked to flesh out what this approach meant and might look like.

Step 2: communication

Next came the task of communicating the vision to teaching staff. This was accomplished via department meetings, Inset days and fullstaff meetings. The first such meeting occurred in July 2018, then there was another in August, with further developments rolled out during two November Inset days.

Step 3: implementation

We needed to make instant changes to the cross-college mark book to help reduce the excess continuation of summative assessment. One of the directors of learning had been experimenting with the notion of training goals rather than marks. He felt passionately that this was the way forward and formed a working group to pursue the idea.

The key objective was to design and put in place a new cross-college system that monitored skill development rather than marks or percentage attainment in tests. The central tenet was that it is a mechanism to help improve performance rather than just a measurement of performance.

Laid out like this, it sounds simple. But we hit a fair few challenges along the way.

The first was that our management information system (MIS) team was not able to move as fast as we had hoped in terms of delivering the changes to the mark book. This meant that some staff, who had not really bought into the cultural shift of less grading, carried on as they had always done because the mark book allowed them to do so.

Just as the IT was difficult to adapt, some staff were, too. We are all creatures of habit and have default ways of working, and real change doesn’t happen overnight. I’m very conscious that we are on a journey and that, for this to work, we need to remain really focused on the goal in mind and not be distracted by fads. It also requires patience and understanding that staff will make mistakes along the way and we need to be OK with this.

One key rationale that helped bring about buy-in was the focus on workload. Teaching staff were on board with really analysing the activities we do and reflecting on those that had the biggest impact.

It was relatively easy to convince teaching staff that the amount of marking that was being done did not lead to the desired level of improvement and that there were better ways of creating meaningful improvement from different methods of feedback. This led to some very effective teacher-led Inset about peer marking, sample marking and using technology to help BTEC assessment.

Another helpful intervention was “walking talking mocks” (WTM). These involve a lead teacher talking through aspects of the exam paper and then allowing students to make notes, complete answers and self-assess in an exam hall environment. There is no formal assessment involved. It is about building confidence and practising exam technique.

The WTM models for students what A-grade responses look like in exam conditions and allows them to engage in the assessment process as well. And it all demonstrates the power of formative assessment.

Impact

Overall, it has been a huge success. Staff have noticed the benefits and bought into the changes, and the quality of work is exceptional. The new training goals have been perfected and the practice established for this year.

Meanwhile, the principal met with all students with high expected grades to test the following:

• How do they feel about being graded only twice a year?
• Do they have a clear understanding of what they are good at, what they struggle with and, most importantly, what they need to do to improve?
• What are their aspirations in terms of progression routes?

On all three points, students were very positive and, most encouragingly, got the whole idea behind reduced grading and increased formative feedback.

The only group that was a little nervous about the lack of grades was the small number of students who had attained a full suite of grades 8 and 9 at GCSE - however, they also understood the rationale.

Mid-year predictions using the Alps Connect online tracking system would suggest the maintenance of grade 3 (excellent).

What next?

We are still developing our assessment model - we definitely do not see the journey as complete - but we have begun to solidify how things are done to ensure lasting changes. In June, we introduced the new model of assessment and learning in college (via a training book) to all teaching staff. This was to be led by key teachers who have developed the book over the past six months.

Meanwhile, in the past six weeks, departments have agreed and planned what their student training goals would be for this year and then recalibrated homework/assessment where necessary to ensure their approach actually developed students’ skills.

For this to be successful in the next 12 months, communication with key managers and teaching staff will be critical. Also, I have to help remind people that things will sometimes go wrong and that is OK. This is part of a journey and it will evolve as we experiment more with it.

What pleases me is that we are moving forward all the time, not slipping back. I don’t want our teachers to feel they are doing things that are a waste of time, and I don’t want us to slip back into bad habits and face embarrassing revelations, as I did at that training session.

Mark Henderson is deputy principal of Queen Mary’s College, Basingstoke

This article originally appeared in the 6 SEPTEMBER 2019 issue under the headline “Break your bad assessment habits”