The Learning Project at St Mary’s

Many of the projects being undertaken by leaders at St Mary’s concern themselves with assessment and the role it plays in shaping learning and how to improve learning. Driving home today I listend to a podcast by Dr. Richard H. Hersh wherein he makes some very powerful points; two of which I will try to paraphrase for the benefit of our current research:

1. Perceptions about assessment vary wildly from administrators to teachers to students. At its worst and in the boldest of terms, admins see assessment as accountability, teachers see assessment as a summative statement and student see assessment as punitive and perverse. The grand, missed opportunity here is that assessment, in its truest sense, can be the most powerful tool for learning. This is framed by deep questions about knowing, such as “How do we know that we have learned what we need to learn?”

2. The usual way of organising learning goes like this: curriculum, aims, objectives, pedagogy, assessment. In this model, it is almost natural that assessment is an afterthought, barely related to the lofty purpose of the curriculum. The danger is that assessment, looked at in this way, becomes a ‘checking’ of content, rather then a driver of learning. Hersh asserts a model which places assessment alongside curriculum as the starting point of planning, prior to any other of the mechanical processes of education. This, then becomes two powerful questions: 1. What is it that students need to know and be able to do? and 2. How will we and they know that they do know and can do these things?

Many of you would have heard me speak of assessment as being the driver for learning and curriculum design. The research projects are a great opportunity for use to give assessment the profile it deserves as a life-centred and meaning making process which runs as a rich seam through learning.