Plus ca change... Hugh Humphries (TESS last week) certainly sees an unbroken conspiracy to distract teachers from the business of teaching, stretching all the way from individualised learning and Kent maths in the 1980s to the promotion of formative assessment, co-operative learning and metacognition today.
He’ll be interested, and I hope not disappointed, to learn that Kevin Logan, once banished in apparently the same wilderness, is now fully restored and enthusiastically promoting formative assessment (and other aspects of Assessment is for Learning) among his colleagues in the sunny Highlands.
Why? Because, unlike Hugh Humphries, he understands that formative assessment and so on, ce n’est pas la meme chose, but an opportunity to redress the failings of 20 years ago and give children and young people today greater responsibility for their learning.
Like Professor Brian Boyd, he knows that young people learn well when they are fully engaged in the activity, and interventions by teachers based on formative assessment and the like are invaluable in helping to steer that engagement.
He also knows that an initiative like AifL has not been “enforced” on a “reluctant teaching profession”, but embraced enthusiastically by those who have listened and heard its message.
Eric Young iTelligent Classrooms Limited Mayfield Biggar
