Assessment for learning: what, why and how?

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to the be ready for the world conference i'm becky from cambridge university press and i'll be hosting your webinar today i'm delighted to be joined by dr karen angus cole who will take you through this session on the what how and why of assessment for learning karen is an education consultant and lecturer in education at the university of bath in the uk before we start i just wanted to go through a few points with you you may have noticed your microphones are muted they will stay on mute as we go through the session to avoid any background noise karen and i are also both hosting this webinar from home so if there are any issues with our internet connections please bear with us there will be a q a session at the end of this webinar so do post any questions you'd like to ask in the q a box as we go through please don't put any of those questions in the chat box as they can sometimes get a bit lost if you're having any technical difficulties with sound or video please let us know in the chat and we'll do our best to resolve them we recommend that you use headphones to listen to this session for the best sound quality we are recording the webinar and we'll send you a link to the playlist following the conference so don't worry if you miss anything if you're unable to see the q a or the chat icons please hover your mouse at the bottom or the top of the screen and they should appear and now over to karen great thank you becky hello everyone i hope you're well today let's begin talking about assessment for learning the what why and how so here's a familiar site a picture of a classroom with students listening to their teacher and the teachers explaining something to these learners but then the teacher starts to think i've just been teaching are my students learning does teaching lead to learning this is a key question for us as teachers when we're teaching in our classrooms are our students learning and this important question can be addressed by thinking about how we use assessment for learning in our classrooms so what are we going to cover in this session today we're going to look at what is assessment for learning which will abbreviate to afl we'll also think about why might i want to use afl in my classroom and then we'll also think about how can i implement assessment for learning in the first part of this webinar we're going to look at the first two questions what is assessment for learning and why might i use it and then we'll have a pause and we'll have a opportunity for you to ask any questions see what's come up in the q a session and then we'll address the last part of the webinar how can i implement afl so to understand what assessment for learning is and why we might use it we're going to consider three questions and these three questions can be returned to again and again throughout your teaching in a lesson in a unit in a year of study and they're also transferable between educational contexts between subjects year groups countries and so hopefully you'll find them useful for your own practice so question number one this question is where is the learner going and so we need to think about what do our learners need to understand to know and be able to do by the end of a sequence of learning for example a lesson or a unit a year or even the whole course and it's important that you don't keep this a secret that this isn't just something that the teacher themselves knows it's important to share this with your learners not keeping them in the dark why well by sharing our learning intentions and success criteria with our students teachers and learners can have a clear and shared understanding of what needs to be achieved in order to show success one word of caution though do check that learners understand the aims the intentions the success criteria sometimes we as teachers can use learning intentions and success criteria that seem quite abstract for our learners and we might use terminology that they don't really understand if we take time to share the learning intentions and success criteria and check that our students understand them then everybody understands the journey the destination and everything becomes transparent for everyone who is involved in the learning process so this brings us to question number two if we know where we want learners to go which was question number one the second question is where is the learner now how close are they to reaching the learning intentions how far are they from reaching the learning intentions and we need to find out the answer to this question quite regularly why well by regularly assessing where your learners are you can find out what they have accomplished what they can do and what they're still struggling with an even better approach is if your learners can themselves reflect against the learning intentions and success criteria they can reflect on their progress and they can start to think about whether they have met the learning intentions this is another benefit of the learners themselves understanding what the learning intentions and success criteria are so that they can develop these reflective skills so this now brings us to question number three we know where the learners are going which was question number one and we know where the learners are now which was question number two so we now ask how can the learner get there how can the learner get to meet the learning intentions from where they are at this point in their learning what should the next steps be for their learner the learner what could you do what could your learners do to get closer to meeting the learning intentions why do we need to do this well the evidence that you can gather helps you to make choices in your teaching and to be responsive to your learner's needs it helps you as a teacher to develop and choose appropriate activities and provide feedback that is going to take your learners from where they are at that point in their learning to the next stage to get closer to the learning intentions and so this feedback is about helping students to progress from where they currently are so in summary when we're trying to understand what assessment for learning is and why we might use it we've looked at three key questions that can scaffold our thinking the first is where is the learner going the second is where is the learner now and the third is how can the learner get there and these exist in a process in a cycle we need to know where the learner's going we find out where the learner is now and then that helps us to determine how the learner can get there so this cycle is the process of assessment for learning so we can therefore think about asking the question what is assessment for learning we can define it as an integrated teaching approach that elicits information about where learners are in their learning so that feedback can be provided that continues to move learning forwards and why summarize why we might implement assessment for learning our assessment approaches then become integrated with our teaching rather than being an add-on and this supports the achievement of learners to get to the learning intentions learners therefore make more progress and actually learners can be empowered to direct their own learning so at this point i just want to pause because you've looked at the what and the why i want to know if there are any questions that have come up in the chat and that we can answer at the moment becky is there anything that we can look at now hi karen not just yet but you've given us such a lot of great information there it might just take a while for for people to gather their thoughts and think of a question so whilst they do that i wondered if i could ask you something um which is that often when i speak to teachers they will ask me about formative assessment i just wondered if you could um explain a little bit about what the difference is between assessment for learning and formative assessment yeah that's a really great question thanks becky we can often have um teachers asking the similar a similar question um so i would say that assessment for learning is the process that we go through in the classroom to think about those three questions that we just looked at whereas um where is the learner going where are they now and how are they going to get there whereas the formative assessment is the purpose of the assessment so it's more of an adjective we decide that we're going to do some assessment is it going to be formative are students going to be finding out where they are in their learning are they going to get feedback that moves them forward or alternatively the other assessment type um is summative assessment now summative assessment tends to be when we're assessing a student how far they've come what they've actually learnt and then usually it involves giving a grade so maybe and if we think about the a levels or igcses for example that would be summative assessment however we may have some assessments which could be both summative and formative so if a student does an in-class test and that is summative because they get a grade for that test but if feedback is also provided and students learn from that process it becomes a formative piece of assessment as well so in summary formative will be the purpose whereas assessment for learning is the actual process of going through in the classroom asking yourself those questions as a teacher oh great thanks karen that's a really nice easy way to remember process and purpose thank you we have now had a few interesting questions come in so um i'll choose some of these to ask you now before we move on um abdul has asked what the difference is between assessment for learning and the learning objectives could you speak a bit about the relationship between those two paps yeah so um we can kind of think of it in terms of sort of backwards design so um we start off thinking when we're planning our lessons how what do we need our learners to know what do we need them to be able to understand what do we need them to be able to do and you may get this from your specification content for example um from the syllabus from the curriculum but there there's that's what drives what you're going to do in the classroom because we know that that's where we need to get students to so those learning objectives are the key thing that you need to think about before you do any planning of your lesson and then you need to think about right if students meet those learning objectives how will i know what evidence will i be able to gather from them that shows me that they've met those learning objectives or those learning intentions and that might become a bit clearer in the second half of the webinar where i give some more concrete examples of how you can link learning objectives to different assessment for learning approaches so hopefully that will help to answer as well that's great karen i think i'll just ask one more from the the q a here and there are lots now coming in we will get to the end of karen's session but um there's an interesting one here from rania that asks assessment as learning and assessment for learning what's the difference it's an interesting yeah a really great question so yeah definitely that is something that is coming up um in pedagogical literature at the moment so assessment as learning often refers to students themselves becoming the assessors so things like self-assessment things like peer assessment and so they are going through the process of assessing work themselves to learn from that process and i can refer to that a little bit later on as well in some of the activities that i share as practical ways in which you can embed assessment for learning so i would say that assessment as learning is kind of a type of assessment for learning where it's really student focused and it's developing reflective um capacity and things like metacognition as well great thanks karen i think we can carry on and we'll pick up some of your great questions coming in at the end of the session thanks karen great perfect thanks becky so let's just return back to um this image which we looked at right at the start of this webinar and think about afl allowing us to think about learners learning as a consequence of our teaching so we have we asked this question we raised this at the start of the webinar does teaching lead to learning and so by thinking about assessment for learning we can really start to answer that question is our teaching leading to learning in the classroom how might we do that we've looked at what assessment for learning might be why we might do it thinking about learners progress but how do you actually go about doing that in the classroom practically and before i go and share some ideas i want you to think about your own practice for a few moments so i want you to reflect and i want you to spend a few moments reflecting on your own practice your own context your own students and i want you to think about the three assessment for learning questions how do you clarify where your learners are going how do you find out where your learners are in their learning and when and how often do you do this and how do you respond to the information that you get about your learner's learning so we're going to have a bit of silence for just a few seconds just to allow you to actually take some time and reflect on your own practice in relation to these assessment for learning process questions okay so when we think about embedding assessment for learning in our teaching we have to recognize that you the teacher play an important role in the classroom an incredibly important role you teach but you can incorporate assessment for learning into your teaching and you can respond to that information that you gather by embedding assessment learning by adapting your teaching having your teaching informed by the results of the assessment for learning process to help you to maximize your students learning and we can incorporate assessment for learning cycles regularly into our teaching we can do some teaching we can embed some assessment for learning that informs our next steps for our teaching we can do some more assessment for learning etc etc the regular incorporation of these assessment for learning cycles can be over a longer period of time it can be over a shorter period of time it can be across a lesson it could be you embed it throughout a unit you think about how often you're embedding assessment for learning in a year of study or even the whole course and the key idea is that you keep finding out where your students are in their learning is your teaching leading to learning where are your students now where are they now after more teaching has happened where are they now after even more lessons have happened what scaffolding do your students need to move forward in their learning and actually meet those learning intentions however with this repeated assessment we do not mean that you should be giving your students written tests all of the time to assess their learning there are many many different ways that you can embed assessment for learning into your lessons to support your students to reach the learning intentions without always having to give formal written tests so i'm going to go through a few examples now of how you might embed assessment for learning into your lessons the first one that we're going to discuss is circulating and questioning so circulating just means moving around the classroom not just staying at the front but moving amongst your learners and doing this can be really really powerful in terms of allowing you to find out where your learners are in their learning so for example you might ask your learners a question that is related to the learning intentions so this will allow you to work out how close to meeting the learning intentions or students are and it may be that you ask a question to the whole class but then you allow the students to discuss the learners with one another discuss the answer sorry with one another and as the learners are discussing their answer to the question that you've asked you can walk around the classroom and you can listen to their discussions and their answers and that gives you information about the learner's progress based on the answers that you can hear whilst you're walking around and also whilst you're circulating you're able to stop and talk to certain groups or individual students and provide them with immediate oral feedback and that will let them know how well they're doing so you may correct them you may praise them you may give them and some indication that they're along the right lines and give them some hints and so it can be a really quick way for students to get feedback on their answers without necessarily having to put their hand up in front of the whole class when maybe they might be shy and not want to speak out in front of the rest of the class so let's give a concrete example of how this might be done imagine that you were teaching a science lesson and the learning intention was to explain how plants absorb water from the soil say for example by the end of this lesson you wanted all of your learners to be able to explain how plants absorb water from the soil and you may have done um a short introduction a short explanation but now you want to check that your students can actually explain the process so you ask them the question how do plants absorb water from the soil you allow them to discuss with one another and you start walking around the classroom and as you're walking around the classroom you hear a student say ah it passes across a cell membrane now you can intervene and you can give feedback and you can ask the student what do you mean by it it passes across a cell membrane what is it you can also ask them which cell membrane are they talking about you can also ask them which process which transport process are they talking about now you could do this as a whole class discussion as well but remember that there are benefits to students interacting with one another and incorporating active learning for example so the results of the walk around the classroom after asking the question might indicate that many students understand or many students are struggling to explain a concept and so depending on the outcome you may choose to set a different activity to that which you had actually planned and that will help your students move from where they are now towards the learning intentions and this is responsive teaching it will help the students to get to where they need to go and it helps them to get there from where they are now and this is good teaching it is not bad because you diverge from the lesson plan it is responsive teaching that helps to meet the needs of the learners in front of you so here's another example of how we can embed assessment for learning approaches into our classroom this is called whole class hinge questions now a whole class hinge question is a question that is asked to the whole class and it's a quick question that learners answer normally individually and its aim is to determine whether all learners in the classroom understand a particular fact not piece of knowledge a particular skill something that is related to the learning intentions are all the learners there yet and the question has to have a correct answer or an incorrect answer and if you find the students are answering correctly then perhaps you can move on and stretch and challenge them by asking a more difficult question setting a different and more challenging activity or it might be that you're happy that this part of the lesson um all of the students have met the learning intention for that part of the lesson and so you can move on to the next part confidently knowing that your learners have met the learning intention if students answer incorrectly then you can clarify misconceptions you might give them a different activity to do you can also pair learners so those which got the answer correct with those that got the answer incorrect and peer learning can occur where they can learn from one another so one of the key things is that this whole class hinge question should be really quick for the students to answer but the important part is that you give learners thinking time so you may pose the question and then you may wait for 30 seconds the students think on their own and then they come up with their answer to your question every single student in the classroom is expected to come up with the answer to the question and it should be really quick for you to scan the students responses and we'll look shortly at how they might indicate their responses to you and so because it's quick for you to scan the responses of your students you can quickly make a decision about what to do next in your classroom where are your students how close are they to the learning intentions based on the answers that have been given and so what are you going to do next to help them to move further on with their learning so how could they respond to you how can you get all of the students in the class responding all at the same time you could have them answering questions which are true or false so thumbs up for true thumbs down for false or other options where you have three potential answers to a question and each answer is represented by thumbs up thumbs down or thumbs in the middle you could also have questions which are multiple choice and so students can quickly indicate a letter rather than having to write out a lot of information and then can do this by maybe posting in a chat if you're teaching online or on a whiteboard which we'll talk about in a second if they hold up a mini whiteboard you can add numbers to answers to questions or your question answer might actually be a number itself and students can indicate what they think about the answer by indicating through their fingers if you are online you can use emojis that could come up in the chat and so students can either indicate how confident they feel about a particular part of what you're teaching maybe with a smiley face a sad face if they're not too happy with it and would like to spend more time in the lesson going over it and then mini whiteboards so this can be really useful if rather than having a multiple choice question you have students write down one particular word or a couple of words answers or a symbol or they draw a shape for example and they can do this and then they can show their whiteboards however one of the really key things here is that you want students to have thinking time and then to all show their responses to you at the same time so that they're not influenced by each other's answers so you need to get your students to think on their own and then you need to give a signal when you want them to all respond at the same time and set the expectation that every single student should be responding so that you can get an understanding of where all of the students in your class are at one particular point so let's look at a concrete example again so in this example we've got a math question what is the product of five and three and again you can have a correct answer which would be a learner who might write 15 on a mini whiteboard if they were able to just write down their answer and that would be correct if a learner writes an incorrect answer this could give you more information about any misconceptions that they might have for example if they wrote eight on their mini whiteboard and showed this then it means that they added rather than multiplied this was a quick to answer question but the teacher gave learners thinking time they quickly scanned the mini whiteboards looking for their responses and then they quickly made a decision about what to do next so in this scenario if there were only a small number of students who got the answer incorrect perhaps the teacher sets an activity for those who got the answer right and then works in a small group with those students who got the answer wrong and gives them a bit more support to understand what it means when we need to find a product of two numbers this is the responsive teaching responding to the needs of the learners in the classroom maybe they hadn't planned for some students to get the answer incorrect but they respond and recognize that some students need a bit more support to understand the product so again assessment for learning has been used to find out where the learners are in their learning and provide feedback and adapt teaching so that all learners can move forward and meet the learning intentions the teaching is always being informed by the information that the teacher is getting by doing the assessment for learning and embedding it within the teaching so that feedback can be given as quickly as possible so that any misconceptions any misunderstandings can be clarified can be corrected as quickly as possible some of you may have come across this this is a framework from dylan william an assessment for learning framework and it shows the importance of the three questions thinking about where the learner is going where the learner currently is and how they're going to get there but you can see that there are three roles in the classroom in this particular framework the first is the teacher but then there is also a peer and there's also the learner and we can see that in the row for the teacher it's really important that the teacher is able to engineer effective discussions tasks and activities to elicit evidence of learning it's also important that the teacher provides feedback that moves learners forward but if going back to what we spoke about at the start if everybody in the classroom has a good understanding of the learning intentions and a shared understanding we can actually start to use peers and learners as great resources learning resources for one another in the classroom peers can provide feedback they can help their peers to find out where they are in their learning and how they might get there and also students can be activated as owners of their own learning and so they can self-assess their work and this can be really really powerful but it will only work if everybody has a shared understanding of the learning intentions so how could this work in practice two stage tests is one potential example so you could have learners who complete a short test it could be a really informal test and they could do that individually they could self-assess against the mark scheme for example or what you could do instead is actually get learners to complete the same test in a group with only one test paper immediately after they conducted the individual test this is a really great way to get students to interact with one another to learn with one another to provide feedback for one another it's a really engaging and motivating way for students to be at the center of their learning to get feedback from peers quickly to engage in discussion and what they have to do is decide together on the answer that they think is the most appropriate and so this is a really really beneficial way of using peers to move learning forward in a classroom so that students are working together and helping each other with their learning just before we finish i want to think about the scales of afl an aspect of assessment for learning to remember is that it can take a range of formats it could be quite informal such as circulating and questioning or it could be more formal such as an in-class test where learners then self-assess using a mark scheme and then you still take in the marks so this would be an example of something that was formative and summative and an example of assessment as learning if the learners are doing self-assessment assessment for learning can also occur over different periods of time it's not necessarily just suited to within one lesson over short term it could occur over a longer period so we need to remember that learning can be what is a longer term process just because students appear to have not or to have learnt something in a lesson it doesn't mean that in one month two months a year's time that learning will still be there it can take a long time for what we understand to transition into our longer term memory so we need to provide opportunities for students to reinforce knowledge and understanding we need to check what they are retaining as well what skills what knowledge or understanding they are retaining over a longer period of time so for example in class questioning is quite short-term it's in the actual lesson and it's quite informal it's quite um it involves the teachers interacting with students quite informally that's not a written test it's not under timed conditions if we look at an endotopic test that's over a longer period of time and if we give feedback with that test rather than just marking it and giving it a grade then it becomes a bit more it's more formal students tend to sit them um individually under silent conditions but if feedback is provided through self-assessment or peer marking or if you provide feedback to the whole class on how they did and focus on particular questions that they may have struggled with or you give individual feedback that becomes assessment for learning rather than just an assessment of learning and it is less short-term because it's over a longer period of time and then maybe you might have end-of-year learning summaries which will be more longer term so it's your turn to reflect again now based on what we've discussed this afternoon i want you to think again about your own practice i want you to think about what you already do but what more could you do what tweets could you make to your practice how could you clarify where your learners are going how could you find out where your learners are at in their learning and when and how often could you do this and how could you respond to the information you get about your learner's learning so i'll just give you a few moments to think about those questions now and reflect back on what we've discussed this afternoon so just to summarize what we've covered together in this session we've thought about what assessment for learning is why we might want to use it in our classroom and how we can implement afl in our classrooms as well and i hope that you've got some practical strategies that will help you to embed afl into your classroom practice as soon as you teach again i want to say thank you and in line with the whole assessment for learning process and the idea of getting feedback to improve and move forward if you have any feedback that's always gratefully received and maybe we can return back and see if there are any more questions that have come up hi karen thank you so much for that that was really clear and i love how you unpacked as you mentioned at the start the process of assessment for learning there and we've had some great comments coming in um saying that you're offering some really nice strategies and it's really excellent presentation so hopefully people have enjoyed it and found it useful we have had a lot of great questions actually and i've been trying to organize them into some themes to tackle because there are some common threads coming out there um i think i'll perhaps start with what um i think will probably be quite a quick question which is is there a difference between learning intentions and learning objectives so um learning intentions is kind of what you intend students to learn um we would say that that tends to be now what we are calling what used to be learning objectives um objectives is yeah what you what you want students to learn as well but the idea around intention is that we it's what we intend we're not necessarily sure where the students are going to get there and so it gives us the idea that this is what we want in an ideal world and i think it allows us to remember that um not everybody is going to get to a particular place by the end of a lesson by the end of the unit and so there's not a huge amount of difference between an objective and an intention but i think it helps to reframe how we think about our students learning and that we were careful about assuming that they're going to get to a particular place by the end of a lesson so it encourages to be reflective um when we set those those learning intentions what we intend what we really hope our students will learn by the end of the period that we've set those intentions for great thank you that actually leads me on to another question that a few people have asked about actually in the q a and i think it links to your um points around being responsive as a teacher a few people have asked about how closely linked assessment for learning and differentiated teaching are and what that relationship is between those two could you perhaps say a little bit more about differentiation yeah that's a really great great question so um assessment for learning definitely allows you to bring differentiation into your classroom so for example if we imagine the really extreme situation where we have a teacher who teaches at the front of the classroom and kind of lectures to their students and there's no opportunity there to find out what the students have learned it's the same teaching approach for every single student in the classroom whereas if we have assessment for learning it brings in the ability to differentiate to respond to individual students needs to group students together as one of the examples i gave so every student doesn't have to be doing exactly the same thing in the classroom all of the time because everybody will be learning and making progress at different levels and that is what differentiation is but that doesn't necessarily mean we have to print off you know 10 15 different worksheets it could be that you could ask a different question to a different learner you may ask a question in a different way whilst you're circulating when you're circulating you may know that some students are struggling with a topic and so that allows you to then think oh hold on i'll go to them first whilst i'm walking around the classroom i'll then interact with them and then i'll move around to other students who i know are already quite secure in their knowledge in this area so it does allow us to differentiate quite well in the classroom by bringing in assessment for learning and thinking very very regularly about where each of our students is in their learning great thank you karen um on that point i suppose around um it being a student-centered approach we had a couple of questions that came in pranit and isabel asked questions along these lines about how you can improve student engagement and involvement in this process assessment learning is a particular relationship between the teacher and student is it's very dynamic um and i think a really interesting point isabel raised is how do you help students to not feel scared it's actually the phrase she used about showing what they might know or might not feel comfortable with do you have any tips for how to bring students in in a confident way it's a really great question because at the heart of assessment for learning is a really positive learning environment your classroom must be positive students must feel able to talk to one another they must feel able to talk to you and so you have to develop a culture as soon as you interact with your students you have to welcome them you have to make them feel like they are in a safe environment smile ask them questions find out what they like try to bring that into your lessons all of this relationship building is really key be really clear as well you know it is your chance to talk now um to one another that is okay if that's not something that you've done in your classroom before then be really explicit and say you can talk to one another now i will be walking around because i want to help you and i want to hear the things that you're saying so that i can help you and let you know if you've got it right if you are on the right lines or if i can help you in any way to move further forward or correct any misunderstandings and you know the words we use misunderstanding rather than something you've got completely wrong can make a real difference to the way in which students perceive the the opportunities that can come um from these interactions with one another and with the teachers so that they can actually see learning that progress in their learning so they can feel positive and confident about actually engaging and it won't happen overnight i'm not saying you can suddenly just go in and do peer assessment and self-assessment overnight and the students won't know what's happening it'll have to be gradual so just maybe i guess i'd say think of one or two things that you might take back to your classroom you might start doing and just be really clear with the students about what you're doing and also why you're doing it and we all know why we're doing it because we want them to make as much progress as possible and enjoy their learning that's great i think um you mentioned how important feedback is as part of this process and we've had a few questions i think it's probably been the number one question actually is of course in the world that we're living in um in situations where teachers are needing to do remote teaching and they've got children or learners on another side of the screen um are there any parts of advice that you could offer around how this is manageable in a remote teaching context so feedback is a prime example of course how do you keep that going and make sure that students are responding to feedback taking in feedback when we have the the obstacles that we do at the moment how do you think that the current situation impacts the successful implementation of afl yeah it's a really good question i think we have to be clear that feedback can take many forms so it's not just marking and even just asking questions even getting students responses and then responding to their responses so for example if you ask a question and students put things in the chat you can pull things out and start to talk to the whole class about the things that are strong which are strengths and the answers and areas that might need improving breakout rooms are really great ways to still allow um students to be able to interact with one another and you can um you can ask maybe one student to feedback to the whole class out of the group that are in the breakout rooms so that you can ensure that productive discussions are still going on in a breakout room because i know it can feel weird sending your students off and not really being able to see what they're doing which doesn't happen in the classroom you can quickly cast your eye and see um you know across the whole room what's going on so and i think that's really important in terms of accountability but it also breakout rooms really help with those discussions which can help with care feedback um and even just um having giving students the opportunity to ask questions themselves um and it may be that they can do this anonymously so you you know if they don't want to be really visible you can set up um google documents where students can anonymously answer questions you know oh i still don't understand this try to there are many many ways but really simply i tend to just use the chat breakout rooms and then share documents or things like padlet where students can anonymously just post questions or worries that they might have or even asking them how have you responded to this feedback and then getting them to post um answers to that question so being really explicit about it and i think one of the advantages is that it can be more anonymous in an online environment which might encourage students who are a bit shy in the classroom to feel like they can actually have a voice in these online environments sure thank you i think we've probably got time for one more question um which i think um i would perhaps pick out the a few teachers in the chat have talked about um time limitations where they have a lot of um content that they want to get through in their lesson plan thinking about how to and when to make sure that they have lots of opportunities for assessment for learning in their in their lesson plans do you have any advice about that karen yeah going back to the um hinge questions so you'll actually find dylan william who i spoke about with the framework um he has some youtube videos on hinge questions and he advocates that these should be really quick so it shouldn't be that these sorts of activities take up huge amounts of time necessarily for hinge questions the whole point was that they're quick so that you can decide what to do next i would say i know there is attention because we have a lot of content but sometimes um it can be really difficult because you think well they haven't got this but i've still got this content but do you think if they don't understand one concept one aspect is that going to be difficult if it's a foundation for something later so would it be worth spending a bit more time on a particular area so that the students really do get it so that when you come to a related point later on they actually have that secure foundation um but also rather than thinking about you having to deliver content when can students also actively construct their own understanding as well so through active learning could students find things out for themselves rather than you having to deliver content and then you can have you can embed peer assessment into that so if students did a presentation or they don't have to present to the whole class where you have every single group presenting but they could just present in pairs to one another so there are different ways in which you can embed it in a way that is you kind of don't doesn't even really become assessment for learning anymore which is actually just part of your teaching and your lessons and it's all it all just becomes your teaching practice in a way that supports that your learners to construct understanding themselves and to receive feedback as efficiently as possible great thank you so much karen i'm afraid that that's all we have time for today everybody we really hope that you enjoyed the webinar thank you all for your questions and apologies if we didn't get around to answering yours thank you also to karen for taking the time to be with us today as we said earlier we will also be uploading a recording of this session to youtube we really hope that you enjoy the rest of your day and thank you again for joining us