After the complex and insane mindgames I had to play with myself just to get that first blog post written and published, I know that I need to get this second one bashed out super-quick before I lose my nerve.  It turns out I’m the Chandler Bing of blogging: so long as I can kid myself that we’re in this fun, casual relationship, it’s all good.  As soon as it looks like it’s getting serious you’ll see a me-shaped hole through that door over there. (Can you ghost your own blog??)

Anyway, so here I am, casually setting out on my first blogging challenge, which involves writing three posts over three months with a bunch of keeno colleagues.  Easy, you say?  What a great bonding experience and professional learning opportunity, you say?  Ho ho, my friend.  Not so fast.  First up, I have blogging baggage, as we’ve discussed.  Secondly, I really want to use this as an opportunity to play around with some evidence-based teaching strategies, specifically drawing on the recent issue of Impact magazine from the Chartered College of Teaching.  And I’m not quite sure what this will look like, or how it will work yet, but I think that’s ok for now.  Maybe you can help me to work it out…

For the last year I’ve been reading a lot around assessment, and I’m really interested in the concept of positive washback: how can we make sure that our assessment tasks add value to learning, rather than just taking a kind of dipstick measurement of it?  I like this idea because it challenges the notion that assessment – particularly formal assessment – must almost by definition be a bad thing: a challenge, an obstacle, at best a necessary evil.  If I’m going to spend a hefty chunk of my classroom on a particular assessment, I want to be absolutely sure that I’m squeezing as much learning value from that task as I possibly can.   So how can I maximise positive rather than negative washback?

I’m also interested in this because it goes slightly against assumptions about my subject (English literature).  We’re so much more used to hearing about testing in maths or the sciences (and my husband is a science teacher so I hear a LOT about it) but it doesn’t seem to marry with thinking about English as a creative art, or a skills-based subject.  I’m thinking a lot more lately (thanks to Daisy Christodoulou et al) about the knowledge underpinning those skills and that creativity, so testing could be useful here too.

My Grade 11s are currently preparing for their Individual Oral Commentary (an assessment piece I actually love), so there’s a nice opportunity here to see if I can plan for some of that positive washback as we work towards the final exam.  In particular:

1.  How can we use retrieval practice to strengthen recall of the key learning?
2.  Can I use testing in a way which increases students’ metacognitive skills, giving them a greater sense of ownership on this one?

I’m off to read Impact and mull it over a bit.  I’ll let you know how it’s going.