learning, teaching and assessment
Establishments that have engaged with the values, purposes and principles of Curriculum for Excellence in its early stages have often focused on the role of learning, teaching and assessment, taking this forward as part of their responsibility to plan and meet desired outcomes.
The experiences and outcomes have been written in ways which will help staff to adopt engaging, enterprising and active learning approaches in a variety of contexts to promote effective learning and enable personalisation and choice. The practices outlined in Building the Curriculum 2 - Active Learning in the Early Years can apply to other stages of learning. The opportunities in this framework for developing interdisciplinary learning can encourage more relevant, more engaging and more enterprising learning and teaching. Curriculum planners at all stages should regularly consider the opportunities presented by the experiences and outcomes to develop active learning throughout, from 3-18. Planning should encourage participation by, as well as being responsive to, the learner, who can and should influence and contribute to the process. This is particularly important for those children and young people who need additional support for their learning.
Teachers' professional judgement about the progress children and young people are making and the point at which they should progress from one level to another will be important features of learning and teaching approaches.
To support curriculum planning and to ensure that all learners have access to an active, enterprising learning environment, a coherent approach to planning learning, teaching and assessment and to sharing information about progress and achievements is needed. Assessment information is used for many, varied purposes and it is essential that assessment activities are planned in a way that fits these purposes. Learners and others involved in their learning need timely, accurate feedback about what they have learned and how much and how well they learned it. This helps to identify what they need to do next and who can help them build up their knowledge, understanding and skills.
A young person's progress should be assessed in ways and at times appropriate to that person's learning needs. Judgements made about this learning should be based on evidence from a broad range of sources, both in and out of school and by reference to a learner's progress over time, across a range of activities. The approaches to assessment developed through Assessment is for Learning provide a sound platform to support this planning. Learning, teaching and assessment should be designed in ways that reflect the way different learners progress to motivate and encourage their learning. To support this, all learners should be involved in planning and reflecting on their own learning, through formative assessment, self and peer evaluation and personal learning planning.
Staff will need to have a clear understanding of how their own pupils are progressing in relation to others in their establishment, authority and different parts of the country, against the outcomes and experiences at different levels. They will need to share broader local and national expectations Regular, planned opportunities for dialogue will be required within and across establishments to help staff share and consistently apply standards.
Indicators of good practice and advice in effective evaluation of learning, teaching and assessment are available in Journey to Excellence, The Journey to Excellence part 3: How Good Is Our School? and The Child at the Centre: Self-Evaluation in the Early Years. Fuller guidance will be issued about the role of assessment in supporting the purposes and principles of Curriculum for Excellence. It will be designed to help those with a responsibility for learning and teaching to reflect on and plan for:
- choosing assessment methods that are fit for purpose
- evaluating evidence and assessing progress in learning
- recording and reporting on learning using evidence