posted by:
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Paul Black
on March 24, 2000
at 9:06AM
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subject:
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Response
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I really enjoyed Mack McCary's contributions, so the main thing I want to say is congratulations to Mack. The title "Cultural Change" is very appropriate - I've found elsewhere that teachers may say, and believe, that they are adopting an innovation when in fact they are assimilating superficial aspects only and changing nothing. You may also enjoy the title of one research study in UK primary schools - it goes "Teacher-pupil interaction in formative assessment: assessing the work or protecting the child ?" (Pryor and Torrance in The Curriculum Journal vol.7 pp.205-226, 1996). For some primary teachers, formative dialogue and feedback are social functions, not cognitive or learning functions. We have found it very important to ask teachers to keep a journal: those that do take on change often do not realise how much they are changing. We are now working with some on our project on reviewing with them the diaries they have kept over a year to reflect with them on their change. I see part of the struggle to escape the habit of averaging or adding grades to be an escape from the practices of summative assessment. These, even when healthy in themselves (which is rare) provide a very poor model for formative work, so I think it important to make clear in any innovative work that "this is going to be different". I hope you are keeping a record from which you can write this up. I get the impression, Mack, that you have a lot to say aboput the processes of teacher change - can you say as much about how the pupils have changed in their attitude to learning, and does this connect with what I had to say about self- and peer-assessment ?:
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