Originally posted on February 2, 2019 @ 9:00 am

Last term the IB published a new document – “Assessment principles and practices – Quality assessments in a digital age”. Below I post my summary and notes on the document.

Introduction

The aim of this document is to explain the principles that the IB has adopted to make sure that assessment is meaningful, fair and in the best interests of the students involved.

All assessments are a balance between conflicting demands and many concerns about testing fail to take this into account. An example is the tension between reducing the assessments burden and the risk of candidates only having one opportunity to show what they can do.

The IB aims to be a holistic programme of study and this should be reflected in the assessments. Decisions should therefore focus on the impact of the overall programme, not just on one subject, discipline or assessments. The IB focusses on what it is important to assess and not what is easy to assess.

Assessment is all about balancing conflicting and competing demands. Poor quality asssessments will lead to poor quality outcomes, even if assessment is “only” formative.

Assessment principles are what the IB thinks are important in creating qualifications and assessments. They come from what is considered important about an IB education. Assessments should support education, not distort it.

Assessment practices are the ways in which the principles are delivered in a meangingful and practical way.

IB exams should represent an opportunity for candidates to show what they understand, rather than being a unique experience which they need to master. Technology therefore should be driven by the assessment needs and not the other way around.

The IB is exploring eAssessment as a way to ensure that students are able to genuinely demonstrate what they know. In this way, assessments will seek to utilise technology where it may make the assessment more authentic. The IB has already moved to eMarking for many DP components and will seek to implement eAssessment in the DP, although it aware of the risks:

1. Burdens on schools
2. Risk of failure
3. Security
4. Tech for the sake of Tech
5. Bias against certain groups of students and device effects
6. Changing standards
7. Barriers to schools offering IB programs

Assessment

Assessment can mean many different things but generally is divided into summative and formative although today there is a drive towards “assessment as learning”. Assessments need to be designed carefully to meet the purposes its results are used for. Excellent formative assessments may be poor summative assessments (See here).

Assessment can mean any of the different ways in which student achievement can be gathered and evaluated and there are different assessment models, namely the compensation model and mastery model. The mastery model requires a basic minimum in all criteria to be met, whilst the compensation model will allow poor performance in one criteria to be balanced by very good performance in another criteria.

Formative assessments aim to provide detailed feedback to teachers and students about the students strengths and weaknesses. In contrast summative assessments focus on measuring what the student can do at a specific time. Summative assessment seeks to make a judgement about a candidate, not inform future teaching and learning.

The balance between measuring achievement and identifying correctly what still needs to develop is called assessment validity. It is important to note that the balance between quality of feedback and attainment is opposite in formative vs summative assessment.

Different national systems have adopted different approaches to assessment and these reflect the tensions between the wider aims of the society, the time and resources available. There is no one size fits all or perfectly optimal assessment system. Additionally summative assessment is increasingly being used to analyse teaching quality.

The backwash effect is the influence that an assessment has on the teaching of the content. This can be positive or negative. Snyder’s hidden curriculum is the meaning that students create about a discipline based on this assessment tasks. Assessment needs to be designed around constructivist learning theory.

Marks and grades are not the same thing. Marks refer to credit given to a candidate in line with a mark scheme, and has no other meaning. Grades describe the quality of a candidates work.

Generally IB assessments are not norm referenced. The IB generally uses marks as an indication of overall performance and then looks at how well candidates with x marks performed matched to the grade level descriptors. They then place boundaries based on the descriptors.

Validity means asking if an assessment is fit for purpose. The IB’s first concern is whether the programme is valid, then whether the elements of the programme are valid and finally whether assessments are valid. Validity is not an objective concept and is a balance between competing issues. We cannot prove validity but can construct a validity argument based on evidence.

eAssessment offers new opportunities for interaction within exams and therefore improves the validity of some aspects of assessment. It also removes some of the security concerns while introducing others.

Validity chains can be used to think about validity. There are five elements to the chain:

• Reliability
• Construct relevance
• Manageability
• Fairness
• Comparability

All of the above are necessary to achieve validity but there are also tensions between each of them. The IB places the most value in construct relevance – assessments that actually test what they intend to test, but not at the exclusion of all else.

Reliability is the extent to which a candidate would get the same test result if the testing procedure was repeated. There are several sources of unreliability. Consistent outcomes are not the same as the right outcome. The aim of marking reliability is to ensure that all examiners make the same judgement as the senior examiner.

Construct relevance is concerned with accurately measuring the thing that the assessment is attempting to measure.

Manageability can be discussed in terms of the candidate, the school and the IB.

Fairness and bias is concerned with ensuring that the test does not give an advantage to one group over another. Bias can arise from:

• The delivery of the assessment
• Bias arising from marking
• Bias related to assessment questions

Comparability of assessment is concerned with how the grades from assessments can be compared between years or subjects. The IB seeks to maintain three principles about comparability:

1. The standard of work to achieve grades within a subject or discipline is comparable between years.
2. Grades between subjects have a consistent meaning so that different routes to achieve the program award are comparable.
3. Although the IB aims to focus on higher order skills, IB assessments are broadly comparable with similar exams offered by individual nations or other awarding bodies.

IB’s approach to validity

The IB believes that construct relevance and authentic assessment are more important than maximising reliability. The IB believes in rounded, holistic education. Its priority is for strong arguments of validity at programme level. Validity is a complex and multi-faceted balancing act and there is not single right answer, where you place the balance is ultimately a judgement based on the value of the organisation that is developing the assessments. The IB aims to do more than other curricula by developing inquiring, knowledgable and caring young people who are motivated to succeed.  We need to consider how the aims of individual subjects fit into the holistic aims of the IB.

IB assessments are weakly criterion referenced. That is candidate performance is matched against behavioural descriptors.

Comparative marking represents an alternative to traditional marking. The basis is that the human mind is better at making comparisons than absolute judgements. In these examples examiners make win/lose comparisons between pieces of work. In subjective marking mathematics, combined with an importance statement will allow a team of examiners to compare and “mark” students work. However comparative judgement requires many marking decisions because each piece of work must be looked at several times by several examiners.

For the IB the underlying principle is to test what is important and assessments should encourage good teaching. Comments on summative work are used to support examiner marking. Comments on formative work are give feedback to learners.

IB programme-specific processes

Key elements that link all IB programmes are:

• The learner profile
• Approaches to teaching and learning
• international mindedness

IB programmes are conceptual, that is, they focus on powerful organizing ideas that are relevant across subject areas and that help to integrate learning and add coherence to the curriculum. We need to consider how are assessments within each program meet the broader objectives of the DP.

ATLs

The IB recognises the need for schools and individual teachers to have the space to be creative and the ATLs are suggested as guidance and to help highlight good practice and enable discussion. The ATLs are not meant to be prescriptive. Skills can only be improved over time and if taught in a sustained fashion.

Notes

There is definitely some new information here that I am happy to receive. I was not aware that teachers could be observers at grade awarding meetings or at the final awarding committee, and this is something that I would definitely pursue in the future or recommend my teachers do. I was also pleased to see the section on ATLs and the nod from the IB that these are not mean’t to be prescriptive and that schools and teachers should be free to be creative.

Originally posted on January 26, 2019 @ 12:20 pm

This term I am starting my National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership (NPQSL) and last Saturday travelled to Beijing to attend the first face to face session on succeeding in senior leadership.

The pre-session activities had been focussed on culture, mission and vision statements. Prior to this, I had thought of these statements as being nebulous and having no real bearing on the real business of schools. To be fair in the majority of the schools I have worked in, these are not things that have been referenced or referred to in the daily working of teachers. In fact, it is only in one school which I was involved in setting up where I can remember a meeting discussing these things. We were asked, in a meeting, to suggest ideas for our mission and vision statements and then we never referred to them again. I can remember one close friend being frustrated because no one he was working with seemed to understand what the mission and vision statements of a school were for or how they might be used. Looking back, I question whether any of the leaders I had worked for in the past really new what these things were.

The session reading began to shine a new light on these ideas for me and I summarise my notes on what I read at the end of this blog post.

In essence, a vision statement should be future orientated and formulate what the community is working towards in the long-term. I write community because whilst a school will have a vision statement, I think it is important they groups within and above the level of the whole school should also pay attention to what their vision is. If this is right I should think about what the vision is for KS5 and this vision should be linked to my schools vision as well. Vision statements should be reviewed on a regular basis in consultation with the people who work within those communities.

Mission statements are focussed on the present and the action that a community is taking to bring about that vision. Like a vision statement this mission statement will need to be reviewed regularly with input from all community members.

Both the mission and the vision of the community should influence decisions that are made in the daily “workground” and should be a lens through which policy is produced, disseminated and questioned. One of the colleagues I met had started as HOD for in a new department. They had placed a board up with titles of areas that they didn’t know about and asked their team members to write down things that they thought the HOD needed to know. From this they formulated a vision and mission for the department which is the lens by which they examine actions in department meetings.

These statements need to carefully formulated so that they can be used and communicated appropriately. Aside from their uses as described above we need to think about how they are communicated with the parental community and how they can be used to work with the parental community. There was the suggestion that we can interview parents when students are interviewed to carefully explain our vision and values in one to one situations.

When vision, mission and value statements are combined with data analysis they can be the backbone for creating a strategic plan to allow the school or community to move forward. Senior leadership has a focus on vision creating. Compared to middle leadership who have a specific team focus, and will be implementing that vision, senior leaders need to think broadly.

At this stage I think that identifying my moral purpose and the vision for my area is absolutely paramount. Both on an individual level and for the IB DP at my school. My thesis and the schools thesis need to be synthesised together for the IBDP and the UGO office.

Pre-Reading Notes

Moral Purpose – Michael Fullan

Five attributes of leadership; moral purpose, understanding change process, strong relationships, knowledge adding and coherence among multiple priorities. Moral purpose is both ends and means but we have mixed motives and that is fine. Moral purpose doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It interacts with the other components of leadership. Two case studies illustrate this: the national literacy and numeracy strategy in England and Monsanto. For leadership to be effective it must have 1. An explicit making a difference purpose. 2. Use strategies that mobilise many people to tackle tough problems 3 be held accountable by measured indicators of success 4 mobilise others sense of moral purpose Acting with moral purpose in a complex world can have insidious consequences. coherence making can be guided by moral purpose. Moral purpose must contend with diversity. Difference in morality from different cultures

Moral leadership by John West Burnham

Behaviour which is consistent with personal and organisational values which in turn are derived from a coherent ethical system. Decisions in education are naturally ethical decisions so leaders need to be ethically literate. The trad vs progressive debate. Professions have ethical purpose. Communities have a consensus over the values that they think are important. Leadership needs to secure this agreement. Culture is the expression of and reinforcement of the ethics of a community. Leaders exemplify what that society and community most value. Moral leadership can be taught through engagement with the meta narratives of ethical classics, reflection in action, coaching and networking.

Vision, strategy and planning in education by Mark Brundrett

To be effective agents of change, leaders in schools need a clear idea of some end goal. Vision is focussed on some goal to be achieved in the future. Leaders need to conceptualise and articulate a vision to influence followers through five mechanisms: 1 giving direction and purpose 2 organise action around future goals 3 provides a sense of identity and meaning 4 provides a common framework 5 vision may develop organisational norms. Personal visions possibly arise from a variety of different causes. Vision must be both individual and collective. Visions in schools and organisations will only succeed if they are bought into by the staff at all levels. Vision and strategy need to be linked at the outset and on an ongoing basis. If strategy is about achieving goals then it is inseparable from vision. Good strategy involves the organisation as a whole just like the vision. Strategies must encourage the involvement of as many people as possible so that they have a sense of ownership. Strategy must take account of long-term intentions and aspirations, the external environment, the internal strengths of the organisation, the prevailing organisational culture, expectations of stakeholders, future resources. Priorities change in education so it can be difficult to plot a straight line approach to strategy and planning. Four abcd approach to translating strategy into action: articulate, build (images metaphors experience) create (dialogues cognitive) define (formal plans)
Targets can help move things forward. School leaders need to have a vision of the school they wish to create. This will be personal but will accord with the aspirations of the wider community. Vision needs shared ownership.

What makes a school a learning organisation – OECD report

The model focuses on:

• Developing a vision centered on the learning of the students
• Creating and supporting continuous learning opportunities for staff
• Promoting team learning and collaboration among all staff
• Establishing a culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration
• Embedding systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning
• Learning with and from the external environment and larger system
• Modelling and growing learning leadership

Trust time technology and thinking are the four T’s that underpin the above elements. Developing a shared vision is the result of a process that involves all stakeholders. We need integrate all including those on the margins of society as alienation poses a threat to democracy. The vision needs to aim to enhance the lives of all learners. Excellence and equity are not mutually exclusive goals. Some countries have managed to successfully improve outcomes of the most disadvantaged. (Disadvantaged is often implicitly financial but also language as in EAL learners in a globalised society.)

Setting direction vision and values

Generating culture is a high priority for leaders and the concept has a synergy with vision and value statements. Values statements are concerned with behaviour. It can be used as a lens to view decision-making and the formulation of policy. Mission statement are concerned with the present and present actions. It is about what the organisation does or is attempting to do. The vision statement is about the future and linked to ideas about future goals. These statements need to be actualised and this is achieved through culture as shown in Scheins model (see picture). Culture will make or break a school and changing culture is time-consuming. All of the statements above, like all good plans, should be time limited. Changing culture involved conjoining content and process. They are always a work in progress. Various models can be used to implement culture change. This eight step model suggests:

1. Establish a sense of urgency. Don’t change the culture if the arguments for changing it have not been convincing.
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition
3. Create a vision
4. Communicate the vision. Instead of the presentation use listening and questioning during conversations to broker by in. (Turning statements into questions could be a good way to build relationships with peeps)
5. Empowering others
   Coaching here through conversation is paramount
6. Planning for short-term wins
7. Consolidating improvements and producing more change
8. Institutionalising new approaches

Originally posted on January 14, 2019 @ 8:10 pm

In November I shared the first stages of my thinking about developing our academic honesty policy. In this post I want to follow-up, to document the most recent steps.

Last Monday, while trying to find my mind, which I appeared to have left somewhere between the UK and China, I lead the second inset session on academic honesty. Running inset when you are jet lagged isn’t fun – especially when all the team is equally as tired!

During this session, I followed a very similar model to October’s inset, using chalk talk as a way to elicit thoughts and ideas about the academic honesty policy.

I am keen not to simply impose my ideas about academic honesty on the teaching body but to encourage by in, I want to grow a policy as a team. It may seem like this is a little esoteric, but having a shared understanding of the why’s, what’s and how’s of teaching academic honesty is a really important part of what we do as educators. Understanding the issues of good practice in this area impacts on many other aspects of classroom practice and should engender a change in the way that we approach planning of units, lessons and tasks.

We started the session with a Quizlet live game of academic honesty terminology before moving on to practice the chalk talk again. I was inspired by my Christmas reading of Martin Robinson’s Trivium 21C and so started with the question:

–What is more important:

–developing students knowledge of facts or ability to critique and discuss facts?

Following from that we rotated around the three questions of:

1. Why teach academic honesty
2. How teach academic honesty
3. When teach academic honesty

Finally, the team was asked to present the discussion points and ideas on the question sheets that they started with to the rest of the group.

Before ending the session with a call for volunteers to join a working party, I shared the results from the staff citation survey that I conducted in November. These results certainly gave me some food for thought as there were some good arguments presented for not having a centralised citation policy. Most staff thought it would be a good idea to have a centralised policy but the arguments against it were that essential that students should be exposed to a variety of different ways, no one way is right, students joining the school may have learned different systems and should be allowed to demonstrate that learning. All valid points and I must have admit shifted my thinking on this one a little.

Another advantage of decentralising the policy could be that departments take responsibility for agreeing a policy together and therefore think about and implement a procedure that is useful for them. Considering that only one member of staff has taken me up on my offer to form a working party to develop a policy, this could be another avenue for ensuring buy in to the new policy. I may ask HODs to formulate a policy and to let me know what system they are going to teach to ensure that we avoid the attitude of “let some other department deal with it”.

Now I need to think about how to take this forward so that we can launch a policy next August. I have now had staff contribute to the triage of where the school is at. Now we need to decide what to put in the policy and write it and I need to think of how best to achieve this, if teachers don’t volunteer to join the working group?

Originally posted on November 20, 2018 @ 10:14 am

One of my focuses this year as Diploma Programme Coordinator will be to work with the schools educators to devise a secondary wide academic honesty policy. This is the first time I have had to lead a collaborative project across the secondary and I am spending a lot of time thinking about how best to implement this.

The easiest thing, and the first thing that I considered, would have been to simply lift policies from previous schools (with permission of course – oh the irony!) and adopt it in the new context. On reflection I decided not to go down this path because doing so would have meant we lost a good opportunity for collaboration amongst the team and would have probably also ensured that we didn’t get the buy in and subsequent up-skilling, that we need if the policy is going to be successful.

Teaching academic honesty is one of those things that I think it is easy to expect everyone on the teaching team to be able to do and assume that they know how to do it when in fact there may well be understandable knowledge gaps within the team. Different people also respond to their own knowledge gaps differently. Not admitting to knowledge gaps is an behaviour that can develop insidiously in educators due to perceived peer, parent and student expectations. The culture of a school may well be one where, admitting ignorance is something that is frowned upon. I am also aware that simply admitting ignorance isn’t enough. People need to be motivated to fill the gaps once identified and this process takes effort. We all avoid the effortful path at times.

For this project, I decided to go down the long road and start afresh. I want buy-in from the team and I want to identify skill needs amongst the team so that we can begin to help teachers develop their own skills in this area, as well as develop a deeper understanding of the IB requirements for academic honesty.

One of the things that I learned as a workshop leader with the IB is that all training sessions with staff should aim to help colleagues develop their teaching skills and share pedagogical techniques as a secondary objective to the primary aims of the session. Thus, when I utilised one staff inset session in October, I planned to use visible thinking routine “chalk talk” as a route to triage where the team was in their thinking and understanding about academic honesty.

I started this session by introducing chalk talk with a practice question. On a prior inset session led by another team member we had looked at Hattie’s research and so to transition from that I chose the question: “Is homework necessary?” to get the team used to the format of the chalk talk.

For the main event, I took questions from the IBO’s documentation on academic honesty and grouped them into categories. I prepared the session in advance by writing questions onto the back of the paper I was going to use. In this chalk-talk, instead of answering one question and rotating through each table, each table had a different set of questions that each group responded too as they rotated through them.

The results can be seen here:

Following from the chalk talk, I asked each group to summarise the discussion and responses prompted by the questions they started with. I gave them 15minutes to prepare a presentation for the rest of the team, and asked them to reflect on that instruction: how do they effectively get their students to collaborate on tasks like this? How do we teach students to work collaboratively or do we expect that they will be able to do it? We ended the session by sharing the general findings from each of the groups.

Following on from this session I have written and disseminated a survey based around some of the concepts surrounding academic honesty and citations, in order to give staff a chance to have some continual input into the formation of our academic honesty policy. In January I hope to be able to review the data collected from this chalk talk and survey to begin working on developing our policy but I am unsure of where to take this next to ensure collaboration and buy-in amongst the team. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them!

Originally posted on November 3, 2018 @ 12:00 pm

I have reservations about the IB ATLs. I have written about this previously, mainly focussing on the approaches to teaching and I don’t really want to go over these issues again, suffice to say that it still causes me concern that the IB, as the only truly global non-national/international curriculum has such strong ideology that underpins what it requires teachers do. In fact the more I think about it, the more concerned I am by the fact that, on reflection, most teacher training curriculums that I am aware are not balanced and do not give good education to teachers on evidence, history, philosophy. Instead they simply uncritically present one ideology as fact.

My previous post focussed on the approaches to teaching. In this post I want to focus on the IB’s approaches to learning which I will refer to in this post simply as ATls. Hopefully this post will be a bit more positive!

There are certainly areas of the of the ATLs that I have come to appreciate. Before I get there I just want to state that from what I have read, I think that the evidence from cognitive science is pretty clear cut: there are no such things as general learning/thinking skills. More over, I don’t think that the often quoted 21st Century learning skills or 4Cs of: Communication, Collaboration, Critical-thinking, Creativity are anymore important in the 21st Century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries (they were referred to then; they are nothing new now) and I think the whole enterprise of trying to teach them outside of domains is an exercise that will only make our education system weaker, not stronger.

To make the ATLs work within the school context they need to be linked to and embedded in domain specific content. Some of them maybe more generalisable than others and in that sense may be more malleable for being taught independently, but most will need to be embedded within the teaching of specific content of a domain.

For example, elements of the self-management tranche of the identified ATLs may well be more stand alone, or at least can be taught independently of subject matter. However, teaching students about time-management still needs material to work on, in this case the students own general workload at school.

Mindfulness is another self-management skill that can be taught independently and, in my opinion, to great value for the learner. However for this to be affective it needs staff buy-in and training. While mindfulness is the new trendy idea, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what it actually is.

Thinking skills, communication skills and research skills, as identified by the IB’s ATL guide all require teaching and embedding within content. In terms of the Communication and research skills, one of the central pillars to teaching these is the Extended Essay.

In most schools the Extended Essay process is placed to the middle to end of the DP, with students perhaps beginning the process in term two of the first year and ending sometime around Christmas of the second year. This year we have gone to the extreme of bringing it to the front of the process as we feel it underpins and provides so many opportunities to explicitly teach the ATLs but still linking them to specific subject knowledge.

We have introduced our students to the process this September and have planned in specific interventions that look at research skills and communication skills, while we also begin to map out how these skills are taught vertically from year 7.

Our current year 12 students are supported through the process with clear scaffolding. First they are asked to think about general topics and clearly led through ways to identify and think about ideas. Subsequently, we introduce them to the library and its resources in a series of sessions which first look at the library and its resources in general before looking at the databases we have access to and how researchers utilise these resources appropriately using boolean operators..

Students are then asked to draft a proposal for their Extended Essay which would include the research question, an outline of the subquestions and a list of potential sources that can be used. This proposal needs to be agreed to and signed off by their supervisor before Christmas of the first year. The proposal becomes the basis for the first formal reflection.

In the second term, we show students how to critically appraise sources and continue to give them support in writing their outline for their essay. This takes place un until April where they submit their outline to the supervisors and follow up with a second meeting.

Following on from this meeting students will recieve feedback and after their exams, during their core week, they are given time to work on writing their Extended Essay in the morning with the aim that they would have a first draft completed by the end of the third term and submitted to their supervisor, this would form the basis of their interim reflection and their third meeting.

Student can then finalise their work over the summer, submitting it and completing their viva voce at the start of their second year. In this way this major piece of work is completed before the bulk of internal assessments and university applications begin.

By front loading the extended essay process in this way, I believe that the team has a greater chance of explicitly teaching, the research and communication skills needed to succeed in the extended essay. This reduces the chances of these skills being left to chance and also allows students to be able to apply these skills in their internal assessments for their other subject.

Finally by also, bringing some of the other internal assessments into the later half of the first year, we can begin to help students develop strategies for their own time management and organisational skills, by explictly showing them how they balance the commitments of the extended essay, internal assessments and other work. This can be done early in the course, allowing them to apply these skills later in the course.