AFL - from Pale to Pure
This recent TES article Think you've implemented Assessment for Learning? has prompted some reflection in me on my own journey with AFL. Wiliam suggests that there is much work to be done before AFL can be said to have had a substantially postive impact in our schools. I think he's right, and my own experiences and learning may help to illustrate some of the issues.
I trained in 1999 – just after the publishing of Inside the Black Box; the language and ideas of AFL have therefore been a feature of practice and professional learning throughout my entire career. It might be hoped that I was in a great position to benefit from AFL, that I would have ridden the wave of enthusiasm and development at an exciting time to be a teacher. The truth is less positive. For longer than I care to admit, whilst I was using some of the elements I thought I needed to, such as having lesson aims on the board, using mark schemes, doing some odd bits of (largely unsuccessful) peer and self-assessment, even getting the lollipop sticks out at times, the impact was negligible on the students I taught, and my own enthusiasm for AFL was accordingly low.
In retrospect I think this is because I was teaching in a style which might be termed 'pale AFL' – a phenomenon where some or all of the AFL strategies or 'bits' were on show, but there was no coherence, no sense of AFL as process, no heart, no excitement and no joy in my application of the approach. As a result, my teaching was largely activities-led; essentially I was coming up with a series of reasonably engaging (although not always) things for the kids to do in lesson time, and I would assess them every so often. I had lesson objectives, but not good ones – mine were generally too wide, or too unfocused, or too vague, or too 'tasky'. I used success criteria (usually for end of term assessments) but not well, often just sticking level descriptors or mark schemes in front of the students and trying to explain what it all meant. I gave feedback, but tended to mark each piece of work as if trying to assess the entirety of their communicative capacity at once – a result of the unfocused learning intentions with which I began. Kids were never really asked to do anything with the targets I gave them, beyond a vague expectation that the advice would be reflected in yet to be announced future work. My lessons were sometimes fun, sometimes dull, exhausting to teach; above all, they did not give students or myself a real sense that they were getting better, making progress, really gaining from this experience in a substantial way. Students from highly literate homes continued to do as well as they'd always done, but no better; I strongly suspect that students who needed better teaching than I was then able to give did as well as they'd always done also.It wasn't really until I took up a departmental leadership position that, helped by some inspirational colleagues, I even began to get my head around how powerful and exciting AFL could be. Aside from discussion with fellow teachers, I think there were two significant moments which helped me.
The first major breakthrough was in developing the use of success criteria in my own lessons. I know that sounds boring... but it wasn't! I maintain that success criteria is the great unloved of AFL, the runt of the litter, often ignored or mistreated through the use of cumbersome level descriptors from National Curriculum documentation or GCSE exam mark schemes. At some point, I finally understood that, if I was going to ask the kids to do something in a lesson, I should really put emphasis on making sure they knew a) how to do it and b) some of the ways that they might do it really, really well (the 'some' and 'might' are important here, leaving a sense that there are limitless directions that a student might take their work in order to be fantastic).
I can pinpoint my epiphany even to a particular activity – I was asking year 10 to storyboard a chapter from Frankenstein, to learn about drawing inference from text. On this occasion we set some basic process criteria ( referred to as 'skilled' criteira – ie if you are doing this, you are displaying the basic skill in question, with a focus on accuracy, clarity etc), alongside some open ended, aspirational success criteria (these were our 'exploring excellence' criteira, and brought in concepts such as increasing sophistication, detail, flair, precision, nuance etc). This helped me to use models with much greater precision, it had a transformational enrichment of the quality of feedback in the lesson, students were feeling that they were doing really well, and I was, suddenly, absolutely loving my job. Perhaps surprisingly, the second driver was the introduction of APP for KS3 English, sometimes considered the 'ugly-sister' of AFL. For me, it is more a grotesque, very-distant cousin - mechanical, bureaucratic, joyless – but nevertheless helpful in that it perfectly embodied what we didn't want English teaching to be like. There was also a sense that perhaps we 'had' to bring it in, that OFSTED would expect it etc. This was also a helpful pressure in some senses: if we weren't going to use APP, what were we going to use to show our students what they are learning and how they are making progress? Ultimately, it forced us to construct an alternative framework which subscribed much more closely to the real drivers of AFL – clarity of learning, quality, non-levelled success criteria, focused feedback etc (if you are interested in what this eventually looked like, find out here.
It has even at times occurred to me that this model of horrified reaction and resultant increase in reflection / game-raising may have actually been the whole point of APP – that a magnificent genius in the DCSF or whatever it was then may have orchestrated the whole thing in an attempt to raise teacher engagement and ownership – 'if we give them something truly awful, they'll have to come up with something brilliant on their own' sort of thing... Probably not though.
I've really just spent my time learning about and experimenting with AFL ever since, and for me the continuing shift from 'Pale AFL' to 'Pure-AFL' has been the most exciting and rewarding development of my professional life. By miles. My understanding now is based around some pretty simple ideas, but that doesn't mean that AFL is simple – it's not. It's complex, difficult to get right, and requires constant development of teacher learning and skill.
I know that often, teachers can find the language of AFL irritating – I did, before I really understood what it meant. But I suppose the language isn't the important thing. For me, pure AFL can be summed up as:
- What do we want them to learn? Is it focused, achievable, clear? Is it worthwhile? Is it hard enough – can they do this already? Is it too hard, for now? Is it exciting and joyful and interesting? Is it relevant and important? Does it justify our asking these people to spend their precious time on this planet in our classrooms learning it?
- What do we want them to do? Will it help them learn whatever it is we are learning? Is it exciting? Is it challenging? Does it ask lots of the students and get them to work hard, because if it doesn't we have got no chance of them learning anything? Is it too easy? Is it too hard? Is there some struggle? What about the ones who can do it well already?
- Do they know how to do it? Do they know how to do it accurately? Do they have some ideas as to how it might be done really well? Is there the potential in this task for students to do the best pieces of work they've ever done? And do they know the sorts of things they might do to achieve this?
- Have we shown them models of how to do it? Are we being more explicit about this than we think we might need to be, and are we therefore being mindful of the fact that students are coming to us with widely differing levels of cultural advantage when it comes to school work?
- Do they know how they are getting on? Are they acting on that knowledge, or are we leaving targets floating? Are they getting a sense that they are getting better at whatever it is that they are trying to do?
So, simple and complex at the same time – common sense combined with deep professional skill and judgement. A conceptual framework of sorts, but one which enables, not restricts creativity in the classroom. And something which we should stick with.
@tomboulter
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