Assessment has a strange habit of drifting away from teaching. The machinery hums along nicely. What often gets lost is the point: assessment is for teaching. Indeed, that is what he called his highly influential book. Not the department’s ‘for/as/of/near/underneath learning (LOL)’ but as something teachers should use to inform and improve their teaching.

Patrick Griffin’s mantras pull practice back to basics. Only assess what students do, say, make or write, not mysterious things we can’t directly measure. Evidence should come before inference.

Another of his mantras is about restraint. Only assess to find something out, if you plan on using the information, and if you can interpret it. If the result isn’t going to change what happens next, then the assessment is mostly paperwork with better branding. It wastes teacher time and student time. If that hour long assessment isn’t creating at the very least an extra hour of learning, why did it happen?

This also clears up the formative vs summative mess. Summative and formative are about how you interpret results, not the assessment itself. The same task can be used either way depending on what you DO with the information. We obsess about gathering evidence but pay scant attention to the purpose of gathering, or to its interpretation and dare I say it, its USE.
There’s also a moral edge to it. Assessment should be used for information, not judgement. Judgement creeps in when we use grades as a verdict on a person, rather than a snapshot of performance on a particular thing, at a particular time. So many students experience assessment at school as negative judgement. In other fields, assessment is simply a neutral method for gaining information to make better decisions. We should move to that.

And finally, the uncomfortable one: a culture of challenge, not just a culture of support. Support without challenge is just reassurance. Challenge without support is just punishment. Questioning pedagogy doesn’t need to be seen as a personal attack. Let’s take our egos out of it and all try and be better. Dylan Wiliam made a great point about this: he’s never seen a good measure of teacher effectiveness but he pointed out that is kind of irrelevant seeing as we should all just be trying to get better all the time. Everyone can learn.

[Photo by Tanmay Jain on Unsplash]