From January to March 2019, teachers from Juying Secondary School presented their applied learning from their small group advisement with CTL faculty to participants in the Management and Leadership in School (MLS) programme, at the elective on Leading Assessment Feedback taught by Dr Rachel Goh. The cases of teacher practice illustrate what can be done as part of feedback practice with regard to interpreting and acting on the evidence of students’ work.
The practices included:
(1) isolating and structuring performance to help students notice the sub-components in the question so that they can identify their gaps and work on one aspect at a time;
(2) addressing conceptual challenges using intermediate scaffolding such as a cline and/or other visual representations to help students access the epistemological structure of knowledge; and
(3) making transfer visible through the use of checklists and/or sentence frames for process transfer and the design of a follow-up task to close the feedback loop.
Zhi Wen demonstrated how he had used a table with rows and columns to show students the sub-components of a question involving solving quadratic equations graphically. He also developed a process checklist to feed-up and guide students in looking back.
Clive addressed the conceptual challenges his students had in understanding the abstract concepts of energy transformation by redesigning explanation-type questions with intermediate sub-questions. He also designed parallel tasks without scaffolding
to assess their learning.
Cheng Ling explained how she and her colleague, Tricia, had used a swing technique to make visible the counter argument and rebuttal argumentative structure as well as sentence frames to make visible the language demands of an argument to students in the English classroom.
The MLS participants consulted Sonia (third from left) on her use of a table to illustrate to students in her History class the components required in their answers and her use of a number scale to get students to weigh the importance of factors in an argument.