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Professional development of teachers—A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom
Studies in Educational Evaluation 37 (2011) 55–61
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Professional development of teachers—A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom Kari Smith Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Available online 13 April 2011
A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is the teachers’ assessment practice. In many contexts, including the Norwegian, AfL has not been successfully dealt with during initial teacher education, and there is a need for qualified teachers to engage in professional development in AfL. This article first discusses different perspectives of professional development, not all of which lead to change of attitudes and beliefs resulting in changed practice. Difficulties in implementing AfL beyond the individual teacher and reach the full teaching staff is presented through experiences from a Norwegian research and development project. The next project to be briefly discussed focuses on engaging teachers in developing their own criteria for good classroom assessment. Finally the paper proposes that a major obstacle to teachers’ professional development in AfL is the competence of teacher educators in AfL. Do those who are to guide and support professional development in schools hold the essential knowledge and competence themselves? The conclusive argument is that for AfL to be common assessment practice in schools there is a need for development processes at various levels of the education system. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Assessment for learning Professional learning Development Assessment competence
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. (Saul Alinsky) Introduction A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is the teachers’ assessment practice which again depends on teachers’ competence in assessment. As understood in this paper, teachers need to understand the power of assessment which can either strengthen or harm students’ learning processes. As such, one can say that assessment is a two-edged sword. Competent teachers in assessment are able to use data from assessment of students’ learning in planning instruction, and they are skilled in grasping what Black and Wiliam (2009) call ‘‘moments of contingency’’ for AfL purposes. In the title of this paper lies a strong underlying claim, (the author’s intention) and which can be understood as if most teachers lack sufficient competence in practicing assessment for learning (AfL) (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). This, rather strong claim,
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is first and foremost based on my many meetings with teachers around the world discussing AfL. The context for the current paper is mainly Norwegian, as AfL is at the heart of the educational discussion in Norway. The issues discussed are, however, likely to be of relevance to a wider international audience. Highly qualified and dedicated teachers who want to support their students’ learning feel that they do not know enough about AfL to successfully practice it in their own classroom, or more often, that they are prevented to do so, because of external directives and steering documents regarding how assessment is to be done. Many teachers claim that there is simply no time to thoroughly learn about and implement AfL because they have to cover the curriculum. They are expected to cover an above-theirhead decided amount of material to prepare students for exams. Not only the students’ learning is being assessed, teachers are evaluated according to their students’ exam results. In brief, the circumstances prevent well intended teachers from learning about and applying a pedagogy which has been found to have a major impact on students’ learning outcomes (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007 among others). This article first discusses different perspectives of professional development, not all of which lead to change of attitudes and beliefs resulting in changed practice. The difficulties in implementing AfL as common assessment practice beyond the individual teacher so it reaches the full teaching staff across subjects will be presented through a case from a Norwegian
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research and development project (Smith, Sandal, Syverson, & Wangensteen, 2010). There are additional obstacles to changing assessment practice, the major one is probably the top-down directives found in national or local steering documents about how assessment is to be practiced by teachers. The next project to be presented in short is a research and development project focusing on engaging teachers in developing their own criteria for good classroom assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). Finally the paper proposes that a major obstacle to teachers’ professional development in AfL is the competence of teacher educators in AfL. Do those who are to guide and support professional development in schools hold the essential knowledge and competence themselves (Smith, 2007)? The conclusive argument is that for AfL to become common assessment practice in schools, there is a need for development processes at various levels of the education system, from preservice teacher education, to in-service education, as well as professional development for those who are responsible for teacher education at the highest level (Harlen, 2010).
Professional development Much is written about professional development and many well known models have been developed. Common trends in professional learning are that teachers reflect on current practice they themselves question or which is questioned by external forces, quite often in form of national steering documents and reforms. Teachers seek alternative practice, try it out and through reflection develop trust in the alternative practice. Models of this kind are, for example, Kolb’s development model based on experiential learning (1984) and Korthagen’s ALACT model (2001) which consists of five circular steps: (1) action, (2) looking back on the action, (3) awareness of essential aspects, (4) creating alternative methods of action, and (5) trial. The impact of external aspects, such as environment, time, leadership and collegial support, has not been in focus of these models. Recently Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung (2007) from New Zealand have reported on professional development processes essential for improving students’ learning outcome, in which they suggest that first there is a need to identify the expected learning outcomes for the students, and where the students are positioned in relation to these. The New Zealand researchers then suggest that teachers have to become aware of what knowledge and skills they need to hold to help students achieve the expected learning outcomes. Educational leaders have to be clear about their role in enhancing student learning by initiating development processes, motivate and engage teachers in professional learning. Changed teaching practice should ultimately lead to challenging students with new learning experiences. It is necessary to examine the impact the changed practice has on students as learners and their learning outcomes. It is not enough to ask teachers how they feel about the professional activity in which they have participated, by the end of the day it is the impact on students’ learning outcomes which needs to be in focus (Timperley et al., 2007). There are several important issues that are reflected in the model presented by Timperley and her colleagues, first of all that such a development process is a time consuming process which takes between one and two years before any change can be noticed, and second that the process involves students, teachers and leaders. As the focus is on the students’ improved learning, teachers need to learn about and try out new practices, and leaders are responsible for providing the necessary support system, such as resources, time and beyond all, an atmosphere where trust and support allow for trial and sometimes failure.
In light of the above, it is possible to say something about what does not ensure professional development takes place. It is not sufficient for leaders or teachers to tick off participation on a list of activities, such as listening to expert lectures and attending externally mandated brief seminars. The belief that the more, the better, and that more expertise input will lead to a change of beliefs and a change in practice, fails to support professional growth. Fullan clearly criticised such a top-down approach to professional development already in 1991: Nothing has promised so much and has been so frustratingly wasteful as the thousands of workshops and conferences that led to no significant change in practice when teachers returned to their classrooms (Fullan, 1991, p. 315). Professional development is, as seen in this paper, an internal process the teacher goes through, it is related to examination of current practice, learning, understanding, change in attitudes, all of which lead to changed practice (Guskey, 2000). It is conscious learning stemming from an internal urge to better support student learning which challenges current beliefs and practice (Berliner, 2001). Professional development does not easily occur because of external regulations, it depends more on the extent to which the individual teacher experiences a need for change. It is the teacher who has to engage in the professional development process (Day, 1999). When aiming at changing assessment practice at a school level, the individual teacher needs to engage in a personal learning process within a setting which has agreed upon introducing AfL at a school level with full support and participation from the leadership. If AfL is implemented by a few individual teachers it is not likely to have any impact on students’ learning and achievement (Timperley et al., 2007). In the next part of the paper two initiatives aimed at promoting teachers’ professional development in AfL are briefly described followed by a presentation of a survey mapping the presence of AfL in pre-service teacher education curricula.
The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project is a research and development project (R&D) which aimed at introducing the digital portfolio as a meeting place between students, teachers, parents and schools types during the transmission between lower and upper secondary school when students are asked to make important decisions about their future education. The focus was on students choosing a vocational and less academic education. This student population is at high risk in Norway with a drop out rate of about 60%, and much attention is given to the problem in the media and by the Government. The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project was a 30 months long project financed by the Norwegian Research Council. It was located within a University College and involved five schools in a rural region in Norway. The project leader came from one of the major universities. The development objective of the project was to support vocational teachers developing a digital portfolio for AfL purposes which should function as a means of communication firstly between the students and the teacher, but to which also parents could have access. Moreover, the intention was that the students could bring the portfolio with them from lower to upper secondary school, which involves a change of schools and to some, also moving away from home, due to the long distances between the school and the home we often find in some rural parts of Norway. The research focus was threefold, first to examine the processes teachers and the schools went through in developing the digital portfolio, second to examine the underlying motives for students’ choice of education,
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and finally to examine the possibility of establishing the digital portfolio as a meeting point. For the purpose of this paper only the professional development initiative is discussed. Introducing the digital portfolio to the schools was a process that started from the very beginning of the project and accumulated at the end with oral and written presentations by the schools informing about the initiatives they had undertaken. The process included several steps and activities, but underpinning it all was the concept of action research as a professional development tool, a ‘systematic inquiry by teachers with the goal of improving their teaching practices’ (Levin & Rock, 2003, p. 136). The framework developed consisted of eight-two days resort meetings with participating teachers and the five school principals during the 30 months. There were also five one-day meetings hosted by the schools, one meeting in each school in which the participating teachers, the principals, the project group and all the teaching staff from the host school participated. In addition, the project group visited the schools several times to provide guidance and support, and at the end there was a large regional conference with invited participants from regional decision makers, teacher educators and other schools in the district. Each of the five schools presented its action research project, all of which have been included in the extensive project report. The steps in the process were: 1. Expertise input on AfL, digital portfolios and action research. 2. Teachers sharing experiences and worries at the beginning of the project. 3. A team from each school deciding on the school’s topic for the action research project. 4. Teams sharing experiences and worries during the action research process in dialogue with the project group. 5. The project group visiting the schools for on-site guidance. 6. Oral and written presentation by schools of action research projects. Members of the project group were all involved with teacher education, and these were also the researchers. We examined the processes by observations and dialogues during the process, sent out electronic questionnaires to teachers at the end of the process, and conducted a two-hour long focus interview with the principals who had been conditioned to participate in all activities from the
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beginning. The project is recently completed and any eventual long-term impact on students’ learning cannot currently be examined. However, when looking at the impact the project has had on the participating teams of teachers, the findings strongly indicate there has been a change of attitude to AfL and a change of assessment practice. The change is most noticeable in terms of feedback given to students and how teachers engage students in a learning dialogue around multiple and varied documentations of learning facilitated by the digital portfolio. A number of examples of changed practice included in the students’ portfolios and the dialogues between students, teachers and to a minor extent, parents, were easily traceable. One of the teachers wrote this in his personal log:‘I feel that the digital portfolio and the dialogue I develop with my students help me adapt my teaching to the individual student, to keep track of their progress and to differentiate my teaching to the kids working at various levels with individual goals. Through the log the students become more reflective as they really show they are able to inform about what project they are involved with on the building site, how they do the job, what they learn, and what they want to learn more about. They can also say how their work stands in terms of what the project manager wants to see. They paste pictures of their work, so I can see’. These findings were supported by the teachers’ own comments to the open questionnaire and by the analysis of the focus interview with the principals. So, when looking at the impact on the participating teachers’ practice, the project seemed to have had the intended effect (Smith et al., 2010). However, when looking at the effect on the school as a whole and the assessment practice of all teachers in school, the impact is minimal. This was at first glance a disappointment to the project group, having naively expected that when the principal was heavily engaged in the project over time, and also having occasional meetings with the full teaching staff, there would be an impact on the assessment policy and practice in school reflected in an extensive use of digital portfolios across the school subjects. We carefully tried to create a professional development process stretched over time (30 months), we included the principals, we provided external expertise, and at the same time gave ownerships to the teachers of their own development by means of action research activities. One of the teams formulated their action research goals as
Challenging practice and beliefs
Leadership School level
Team level
Ownership External expertise input
Individual level
Trust and support
time Fig. 1. School development model.
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‘We want to give our subject (carpentry) a higher profile in school through developing the use of digital portfolios. We also want to make the subject relevant and motivating for the students. We want to help the students compile a portfolio that includes things such as students’ presentation of themselves, tutorials with teachers, their own interests and educational choice, a curricula vitae, career plan, on (building) site experiences, entrepreneurship’. The teacher teams decided on the focus and on the process, the research group acted as counselors and provided expert input. There was a positive atmosphere of trust at the meetings during which teachers and principals shared success and obstacles during the process. All the above points are found to be conducive to sustainable professional growth (Gray, Pilkington, HaggerVaughan, & Tomkins, 2007; Timperley et al., 2007). What we did not pay sufficient attention to was the need to include all teachers, to spend more time on team work within the schools, not only among the schools. Unless this is done, we realize in retrospect that one cannot expect a full change in assessment practice towards AfL in the school. All teachers have to develop a sense of ownership to the project, as illustrated in Fig. 1. In the project ‘‘portfolio as a meeting point’’ we catered only for the two inner levels of the circles, expecting this to have an effect on the third level, the school level, and we were wrong. All three levels need to be taken into consideration when planning for changes in common teaching practice in a school. The lesson we learned is that all teachers have to develop a kind of ownership to the changes, and a natural transmission from a smaller group to the whole staff does not occur even though the principal was schooled in the change and supported the development process. Teachers are likely to carry on with traditional practice of assessment unless they really come to believe in the pedagogical power of AfL. The principals were fully aware of this challenge and one of the principals sees the importance of meeting the challenge: ‘So far the teachers who participated in the project have presented their way of using a digital portfolio to all the staff. However, it has been adapted only by one of the school departments. Now the goal is that digital portfolios become part of the school culture and every teacher will use it. This is how I want to see the school develop’.
informative and relevant feedback. It seems that feedback in Norwegian elementary school is very general and unspecific, consisting mainly of praise. There is a lack of informative feedback which informs the students on how to proceed with learning (Klette, 2003; OECD, 2005a, 2005b). The main criticism is that Norwegian children are under-challenged in school (OECD, 2005a). A major goal for the professional development aspect of the project was to empower teachers in AfL, and this was done by inviting the teachers, in dialogue with the project group, to develop their own criteria for good assessment practice, instead of telling them what good assessment practice means. The teachers would then apply the criteria when reflecting on personal assessment practice, as a kind of criteria for self-assessment of practice. A form of action research was also here the chosen development activity including the following steps: The participating teachers (and the principals) were introduced to AfL by the project group and selected readings of recent research literature. All teachers in these small schools and the two school principals were invited to join the project teachers on two study-trips, one to Wales and the other to North Ireland to meet with international experts on AfL (mainly members of the Assessment Reform Group (ARG)) and observing AfL practice in schools in Wales and Belfast. The research group developed a list of 33 criteria for AfL assessment practice to be presented to the teachers. The list was created in light of recent assessment literature and recent national steering documents on how assessment is to be practiced. Next, the teachers were asked to select 10 criteria for good assessment practice to be listed in order of priority. They were invited to add other personal criteria. The teachers were asked to describe the importance of each of the chosen criterion in relation to own practice. The teachers were asked to comment on the different criteria and give examples from own practice. The teachers were encouraged to discuss the selected 10 criteria within the full teaching staff in order to reach a collective agreement of AfL practice within the school. The final moderated list consisted of 13 criteria for AfL practice and these were chosen for inclusion in the project. (Engelsen & Smith, 2010).
Teachers’ self-assessment of personal assessment practice Another professional development project which was also funded by the Norwegian Research Council focused on developing criteria for AfL assessment with teachers so they could use these in critical reflection of their own practice. The project was called Reflection based portfolio as a tool for developing teachers’ assessment competence and was initiated by a University College on an island in the west of Norway. It involved ten teachers in two small elementary schools (five from each school) and the two principals. The project leader came from the College and it employed a research counselor from a nearby university. The project was a three-year project, and the overall goal of the project was to support teachers in developing a reflection based portfolio as a tool for improving teachers’ competence in AfL. The research part of the project examined the processes the teachers went through by studying the teachers’ voices presented in a shared digital portfolio. Only a small part of the project related to the participating teachers’ professional development is discussed below. The context of this project is, as in the project previously described, that both national and international research finds that Norwegian teachers do not provide the students with sufficient
The teachers participating in the project were then invited to examine their own assessment practice in light of the criteria they themselves had developed and to write their reflections in a blog created for the project.
Perspective based on Policy documents
Theory and researchbased knowledge
Own practice
Fig. 2. Assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010).
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We found that there are three poles that shape teacher’s assessment practice, own practice, steering documents and research as illustrated in Fig. 2 In the beginning of the project the teachers would see their own assessment practice mainly in light of ‘‘how they used to do it’’ and the steering documents. They evaluated their practice in light of the official policy, especially in relation to how they met extensive demands for documenting assessment. This was also felt as a burden, ‘I spend so much time on filling in forms and papers that I have little time to really teach’. There was little or no relation to literature on assessment and to research findings informing about AfL. These teachers, as most Norwegian teachers, are found to be obedient to steering documents, mainly because they do not hold sufficient competence in assessment to engage in a discussion about top-down directives. However, after the process, we notice in the teachers’ reflections a much more confident tone which draws on professional experience and beliefs supported by theoretical and research documentation of how AfL is to be put into practice. They have developed a more critical attitude to own practice and to steering documents, and they experiment with finding their own ways of how to implement them in alignment with personal pedagogical beliefs. ‘I shouldn’t always blame the students if they do not do as well as I had expected, I have to look at my own competence in assessment and mainly in how I involve the student in assessment’. The project group’s ambition was to empower the teachers in AfL by applying a bottom-up process, however, without disregarding the importance of teachers’ pedagogical practice, existing steering documents and research literature. Our conclusion is that in order to develop teachers’ confidence in AfL, there is a need to balance the three poles, each of which has an impact on teachers’ practice. The problem is when one pole becomes stronger than the other two, and assessment is practiced without informed reflection. Teachers must have the opportunity to develop their own practical theory (Handal & Lauva˚s, 1990) of assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). A point worthwhile mentioning is that in this project we noticed a different impact on the whole school level than in the project discussed previously. There are some likely reasons for this, first, the intensive engagement of the school principals. They participated in all activities, and one of them even engaged in personal blog writing about the project. A second reason is that these elementary schools are small, with a staff between 10 and 15 teachers each. The project could therefore invite all teaching staff and the two principals to participate in the study trips and in many of the development activities carried out in plenum. The other project worked with comprehensive secondary schools with a much larger teaching staff divided into departments. However, perhaps the major reason for the strong impact on the school culture is that the criteria developed for good assessment practice were discussed within the whole staff, and the final set of criteria was underpinned by agreement within the staff. The Reflection based portfolio as a tool for developing teachers’ assessment competence project is currently in its concluding stages and we will have to engage in future projects to examine the impact it has had on students’ learning outcomes.
Preparing teachers for AfL When looking at the situation in Norway regarding teachers’ competence in practicing AfL, we find that there is a large need for in-service professional development initiatives. Teachers want to,
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but they are not confident regarding how to integrate AfL in their teaching. Similar tendencies are found in other countries, and in England a large research project show that most teachers accept the principals behind AfL, but hat there is less success in actually putting it into practice in the classroom. Mansell and James (2009) claim that one of the reasons for this is that teachers are not sufficiently educated in AfL during their pre-service teacher education. This might be surprising as competence in assessment is mentioned as an essential competence all teachers should hold in multiple international documents presenting standards for teachers, e.g. the OECD Report Teachers Matter (2005b). Assessment practice is a key issue in the Norwegian educational discussion, and the two projects described above indicate that a great deal of public money is invested into raising teachers’ competence in assessment. If so many teachers lack sufficient competence in assessment, what happens then in teacher education, why do novice teachers not hold essential AfL competence? The answer lies partly in the fact that good AfL practice needs to be developed during practice, as it is, to a large extent, context bound. It is a question of exploiting moments of contingency (Black & Wiliam, 2009). AfL works best when it is adjusted to the student(s), the time, and the place (Brookhart, 2008). This requires a great deal of experience during which professional wisdom is developed. However, had assessment been given more attention during teacher education, had novices been knowledgeable about assessment, its relation to motivation for learning, self-efficacy, learning theories (Smith, 2009), and had they had been skilled in some practical application, AfL would have been less frightening for novice teachers to try out in their own teaching. In a small research project initiated by the Deans of teacher education programs in five teacher education institutions in the West of Norway, we have recently learned that the education students get in assessment and in AfL is minimal in the various teacher education programs the institutions offer (a one-year Post Graduate Certificate in Education course, a four-year program for elementary school teachers, a five-year master program for secondary school teachers). Assessment is, at the best, dealt with in a lecture followed by a seminar of a couple of hours, and it is frequently integrated in the educational studies and in the didactic courses without special focus. When examining the issue more in depth, we found that it is common for all the institutions to have only one person who can be said to have formal competence and research experience in assessment, and most of these do not teach assessment in pre-service teacher education courses. Another alarming finding is that there seems to be little agreement among teacher educators of how assessment is to be presented to teachers-to-be, and they get mixed, and not always well-informed, messages (Andersen et al., 2010). The question to be asked is who is going to educate teachers and teachers-to-be in assessment when there is a lack of competence in assessment in the teacher education faculties? As a result of this very recent study, the recommendation to the institutions is to start professional development initiatives among teacher educators, mainly by creating communities of learning about assessment and AfL in particular, where the faculty can share experiences, receive input from national and international experts, develop new practices, and discuss ways of explicitly teaching about AfL in teacher education. Master programs in assessment need to be developed, and PhD projects in assessment should be given financial support. We need to develop a large group of teacher educators with expertise in assessment so they can prepare teachers-to-be for practicing AfL in the very beginning of a teaching career. This is the situation in the Norwegian context, and even though many countries have come much further in their work of educating
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teachers in assessment (Wales, Scotland, reported by Gardner, Harlen, Hayward, Stobart, & Montgomery, 2010) a good guess is that Norway is not alone in having a long way to go to raise teachers’ competence in practicing AFL. Conclusions Professional development is not a straightforward business, there is no ‘‘one- size that fits all’’ recipe. Teachers’ professional development in AfL is even more complicated as assessment is often linked to summative assessment and external examinations which many teachers experience do not align very well with AfL practice in the classroom (Gibbs, 2006; Wiliam, Lee, Harrison, & Black, 2004 among others). Teachers feel pressurised to prepare the students for the exam to come, pressure coming from central governments, the school leadership, parents and students. Moreover, teachers themselves are evaluated in light of their students’ achievements on high-stakes test, all of which does not create a conducive climate to engage in professional development of AfL. Findings indicating a direct link to improved students achievement by an extended use of AfL which was brought into the assessment discussion by Black and Wiliam (1998), and which has been repeatedly supported by numerous scholars since then, has not succeeded in initiating a major change of common assessment practice in schools. The main reason is probably that most summative assessment still means exams, and using teacher assessment as summative assessment is not yet very common (Gardner et al., 2010). However, an additional explanation for why AFL has not developed strong roots in schools is related to the claim made in this paper, that teachers do not hold the essential competence in AfL to successfully implement it in their teaching. Therefore professional development activities are needed in preservice as well as in in-service education of teachers. In an extensive project in UK, the Analysis and Review of Innovations in Assessment (ARIA) the researchers present two main conclusions: (1) Initiatives in assessment do not always take full accounts of the key dimensions of the change process or the needs of the communities involved (Gardner et al., 2010, p. 7) and (2) Not having an explicit view of what is ‘good’ assessment for any particular purpose has the knock-out effect of making it difficult to decide what an improvement is (Gardner et al., 2010, p. 8). It can be inferred from the above that professional development in assessment needs to be contextualised and tailored to the group of participating teachers, and that there has to be a shared understanding of what good AfL practice consists of. Other researchers have pointed out the need for teachers to have time to engage in professional learning activities, and to be supported by the school leadership in the process (Timperley et al., 2007) so they can apply a trial and error approach in developing a personal practice theory (Handal & Lauva˚s, 1990) of AfL. Telling teachers what to do and how to change has proven to have limited effect on changed practice, and it is necessary to give the teachers a feeling of ownership of the process of change they are going through. Action research is suggested as a way of providing teachers with the feeling of control of the change (Gardner, Harlen, Hayward, & Stobart, 2008) and the likeliness of making it sustainable. Change will, however, not make an impact on students’ learning unless it reaches the whole teaching staff, which means that substantial resources need to be allocated to development processes. Teachers have to be part of learning communities, from which the principal cannot exclude her/himself. Likewise, regional school leadership and central national bodies are those who have to allocate resources and space for long-term professional development processes to take place if they want to see sustainable change in the assessment practice. Harlen (2010)
illustrates how such a holistic perception of lasting changes can occur in her suggested standards for assessment practice for classroom practice, school management, local and national inspections (where this applies), and for national policy formulation. The key to such a development is speaking the same language when communicating across the various sectors. Being acquainted with the rich literature on assessment and on professional development, researchers and educators in Norway have made serious attempts to engage teachers in professional development process to change assessment practice. Improving students’ learning through improved assessment practice is highly prioritised by the Norwegian government. In this paper two small research and development projects have been presented, both of which aimed at applying a bottom up approach over a period of two to three years. The teachers were given control over the development processes, including deciding guidelines for ‘‘good’’ AfL practice. In this respect, the chosen approach differs from the approach presented by Harlen (2010) who have worked out standards for good assessment practice which are presented to the teachers. The double perspective, research and development, found in two of the projects described in this paper, suggests a possibility of integrating research and practice. The research intervention is the professional development activities of the practitioners. Research becomes meaningful to the practitioners, and practice is essential to the researchers. The two groups depend on each other, even feed on each other, which creates a strong link between theory and practice. The paper has presented the procedures and discussed the experiences of projects in a Norwegian context. This is a limitation of the paper. However, from my many meetings with teachers around the world, there are reasons to believe that the Norwegian context does not differ extensively from the situation in many other countries. A lesson learned from these projects is that when planning changes beyond the classroom level, at a school level, it is not sufficient to work with individual teachers or team of teachers, but we have to reach the whole staff across subjects. A worry expressed in the paper is the concern regarding who should educate the teachers in AfL. A reasonable answer is that this becomes the responsibility of teacher educators, but do they have sufficient expertise to do the job? A survey in five Norwegian teacher education institutions did not provide a convincing answer that this is the case. So, it seems that the first pre-requisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is not only professional development of teachers, but first and beyond, to engage teacher educators in AfL professional development processes.
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K. Smith / Studies in Educational Evaluation 37 (2011) 55–61 Gibbs, G. (2006). How assessment frames student learning. In C. Bryan & K. Clegg (Eds.), Innovative assessment in higher education (pp. 23–36). London: Routledge. Gray, C., Pilkington, R., Hagger-Vaughan, L., & Tomkins, S. A. (2007). Integrating ICT into classroom practice in modern foreign language teaching in England: Making room for teachers’ voices. European Journal of Teacher Education, 30(4), 407–429. Guskey, T. R. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Thousand Oaks: Corwin. Handal, G., & Lauva˚s, P. (1990). Veiledning og praktisk yrkesteori. Oslo: J W Cappelens forlag. Harlen, W. (2010). What is quality teacher assessment? In J. Gardner, W. Harlen, L. Hayward, G. Stobart, & M. Montgomery (Eds.), Developing teacher assessment (pp. 29–52). Berkshire: Open University Press. Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning. A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge. Hattie, J. A., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81–112. Klette, K. (2003). Klasserommets praksisformer etter Reform 97. Oslo: Pedagogisk forskningsinstitutt. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Korthagen, F. J. (2001). Linking practice and theory, the pedagogy of realistic teacher education. Mahwah, NJ: Erbalum. Levin, B. B., & Rock, T. T. (2003). The effects of collaborative action research on preservice and inservice teacher partners in professional development school. Journal of Teacher Education, 54, 135–149.
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Mansell, W., & James, M. (2009). Assessment in schools—Fit for purpose? Assessment Reform Group. London: TLRP, Institute of Education, University of London. OECD. (2005a). Equity in education. Thematic review. http://www.oecd.org/document/ 3/0,2340,en_2649_34531_36296195_1_1_1_1,00.html. OECD. (2005b) Teachers Matter. Attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers. http://www.oecd.org/document/52/ 0,3746,en_2649_39263231_34991988_1_1_1_1,00&&en-USS_01DBC.html. Smith, K. (2007). Empowering school- and university-based teacher educators as assessors: A school-university cooperation. Educational Research and Evaluation, 13(3), 279–293. Smith, K. (2009). Samspillet mellom vurdering og motivasjon. In S. Dobson, A. B. Eggen, & K. Smith (Eds.), Vurdering, prinsipper og praksis-nye perspektiver pa˚ elev og læringsvurdering (pp. 23–38). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Smith, K., Sandal, A. K., Haug Syversen, M., & Wangensteen, R. (2010). Med Mappe som Møteplass, samarbeid for eleven si læring i overgangen mellom ungdomssteget og yrkesfag i vidarega˚eande skule. Research report, Sogn and Fjordane University College: Sogndal. Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Wiliam, D., Lee, C., Harrison, C., & Black, P. (2004). Teachers developing assessment for learning: Impact on student achievement. Assessment in Education, 11(1), 49–65.
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Professional development of teachers—A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom Kari Smith Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Available online 13 April 2011
A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is the teachers’ assessment practice. In many contexts, including the Norwegian, AfL has not been successfully dealt with during initial teacher education, and there is a need for qualified teachers to engage in professional development in AfL. This article first discusses different perspectives of professional development, not all of which lead to change of attitudes and beliefs resulting in changed practice. Difficulties in implementing AfL beyond the individual teacher and reach the full teaching staff is presented through experiences from a Norwegian research and development project. The next project to be briefly discussed focuses on engaging teachers in developing their own criteria for good classroom assessment. Finally the paper proposes that a major obstacle to teachers’ professional development in AfL is the competence of teacher educators in AfL. Do those who are to guide and support professional development in schools hold the essential knowledge and competence themselves? The conclusive argument is that for AfL to be common assessment practice in schools there is a need for development processes at various levels of the education system. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Assessment for learning Professional learning Development Assessment competence
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. (Saul Alinsky) Introduction A prerequisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is the teachers’ assessment practice which again depends on teachers’ competence in assessment. As understood in this paper, teachers need to understand the power of assessment which can either strengthen or harm students’ learning processes. As such, one can say that assessment is a two-edged sword. Competent teachers in assessment are able to use data from assessment of students’ learning in planning instruction, and they are skilled in grasping what Black and Wiliam (2009) call ‘‘moments of contingency’’ for AfL purposes. In the title of this paper lies a strong underlying claim, (the author’s intention) and which can be understood as if most teachers lack sufficient competence in practicing assessment for learning (AfL) (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). This, rather strong claim,
E-mail address: [email protected]. 0191-491X/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2011.03.005
is first and foremost based on my many meetings with teachers around the world discussing AfL. The context for the current paper is mainly Norwegian, as AfL is at the heart of the educational discussion in Norway. The issues discussed are, however, likely to be of relevance to a wider international audience. Highly qualified and dedicated teachers who want to support their students’ learning feel that they do not know enough about AfL to successfully practice it in their own classroom, or more often, that they are prevented to do so, because of external directives and steering documents regarding how assessment is to be done. Many teachers claim that there is simply no time to thoroughly learn about and implement AfL because they have to cover the curriculum. They are expected to cover an above-theirhead decided amount of material to prepare students for exams. Not only the students’ learning is being assessed, teachers are evaluated according to their students’ exam results. In brief, the circumstances prevent well intended teachers from learning about and applying a pedagogy which has been found to have a major impact on students’ learning outcomes (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007 among others). This article first discusses different perspectives of professional development, not all of which lead to change of attitudes and beliefs resulting in changed practice. The difficulties in implementing AfL as common assessment practice beyond the individual teacher so it reaches the full teaching staff across subjects will be presented through a case from a Norwegian
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research and development project (Smith, Sandal, Syverson, & Wangensteen, 2010). There are additional obstacles to changing assessment practice, the major one is probably the top-down directives found in national or local steering documents about how assessment is to be practiced by teachers. The next project to be presented in short is a research and development project focusing on engaging teachers in developing their own criteria for good classroom assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). Finally the paper proposes that a major obstacle to teachers’ professional development in AfL is the competence of teacher educators in AfL. Do those who are to guide and support professional development in schools hold the essential knowledge and competence themselves (Smith, 2007)? The conclusive argument is that for AfL to become common assessment practice in schools, there is a need for development processes at various levels of the education system, from preservice teacher education, to in-service education, as well as professional development for those who are responsible for teacher education at the highest level (Harlen, 2010).
Professional development Much is written about professional development and many well known models have been developed. Common trends in professional learning are that teachers reflect on current practice they themselves question or which is questioned by external forces, quite often in form of national steering documents and reforms. Teachers seek alternative practice, try it out and through reflection develop trust in the alternative practice. Models of this kind are, for example, Kolb’s development model based on experiential learning (1984) and Korthagen’s ALACT model (2001) which consists of five circular steps: (1) action, (2) looking back on the action, (3) awareness of essential aspects, (4) creating alternative methods of action, and (5) trial. The impact of external aspects, such as environment, time, leadership and collegial support, has not been in focus of these models. Recently Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung (2007) from New Zealand have reported on professional development processes essential for improving students’ learning outcome, in which they suggest that first there is a need to identify the expected learning outcomes for the students, and where the students are positioned in relation to these. The New Zealand researchers then suggest that teachers have to become aware of what knowledge and skills they need to hold to help students achieve the expected learning outcomes. Educational leaders have to be clear about their role in enhancing student learning by initiating development processes, motivate and engage teachers in professional learning. Changed teaching practice should ultimately lead to challenging students with new learning experiences. It is necessary to examine the impact the changed practice has on students as learners and their learning outcomes. It is not enough to ask teachers how they feel about the professional activity in which they have participated, by the end of the day it is the impact on students’ learning outcomes which needs to be in focus (Timperley et al., 2007). There are several important issues that are reflected in the model presented by Timperley and her colleagues, first of all that such a development process is a time consuming process which takes between one and two years before any change can be noticed, and second that the process involves students, teachers and leaders. As the focus is on the students’ improved learning, teachers need to learn about and try out new practices, and leaders are responsible for providing the necessary support system, such as resources, time and beyond all, an atmosphere where trust and support allow for trial and sometimes failure.
In light of the above, it is possible to say something about what does not ensure professional development takes place. It is not sufficient for leaders or teachers to tick off participation on a list of activities, such as listening to expert lectures and attending externally mandated brief seminars. The belief that the more, the better, and that more expertise input will lead to a change of beliefs and a change in practice, fails to support professional growth. Fullan clearly criticised such a top-down approach to professional development already in 1991: Nothing has promised so much and has been so frustratingly wasteful as the thousands of workshops and conferences that led to no significant change in practice when teachers returned to their classrooms (Fullan, 1991, p. 315). Professional development is, as seen in this paper, an internal process the teacher goes through, it is related to examination of current practice, learning, understanding, change in attitudes, all of which lead to changed practice (Guskey, 2000). It is conscious learning stemming from an internal urge to better support student learning which challenges current beliefs and practice (Berliner, 2001). Professional development does not easily occur because of external regulations, it depends more on the extent to which the individual teacher experiences a need for change. It is the teacher who has to engage in the professional development process (Day, 1999). When aiming at changing assessment practice at a school level, the individual teacher needs to engage in a personal learning process within a setting which has agreed upon introducing AfL at a school level with full support and participation from the leadership. If AfL is implemented by a few individual teachers it is not likely to have any impact on students’ learning and achievement (Timperley et al., 2007). In the next part of the paper two initiatives aimed at promoting teachers’ professional development in AfL are briefly described followed by a presentation of a survey mapping the presence of AfL in pre-service teacher education curricula.
The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project is a research and development project (R&D) which aimed at introducing the digital portfolio as a meeting place between students, teachers, parents and schools types during the transmission between lower and upper secondary school when students are asked to make important decisions about their future education. The focus was on students choosing a vocational and less academic education. This student population is at high risk in Norway with a drop out rate of about 60%, and much attention is given to the problem in the media and by the Government. The ‘‘portfolio as a meeting place’’ project was a 30 months long project financed by the Norwegian Research Council. It was located within a University College and involved five schools in a rural region in Norway. The project leader came from one of the major universities. The development objective of the project was to support vocational teachers developing a digital portfolio for AfL purposes which should function as a means of communication firstly between the students and the teacher, but to which also parents could have access. Moreover, the intention was that the students could bring the portfolio with them from lower to upper secondary school, which involves a change of schools and to some, also moving away from home, due to the long distances between the school and the home we often find in some rural parts of Norway. The research focus was threefold, first to examine the processes teachers and the schools went through in developing the digital portfolio, second to examine the underlying motives for students’ choice of education,
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and finally to examine the possibility of establishing the digital portfolio as a meeting point. For the purpose of this paper only the professional development initiative is discussed. Introducing the digital portfolio to the schools was a process that started from the very beginning of the project and accumulated at the end with oral and written presentations by the schools informing about the initiatives they had undertaken. The process included several steps and activities, but underpinning it all was the concept of action research as a professional development tool, a ‘systematic inquiry by teachers with the goal of improving their teaching practices’ (Levin & Rock, 2003, p. 136). The framework developed consisted of eight-two days resort meetings with participating teachers and the five school principals during the 30 months. There were also five one-day meetings hosted by the schools, one meeting in each school in which the participating teachers, the principals, the project group and all the teaching staff from the host school participated. In addition, the project group visited the schools several times to provide guidance and support, and at the end there was a large regional conference with invited participants from regional decision makers, teacher educators and other schools in the district. Each of the five schools presented its action research project, all of which have been included in the extensive project report. The steps in the process were: 1. Expertise input on AfL, digital portfolios and action research. 2. Teachers sharing experiences and worries at the beginning of the project. 3. A team from each school deciding on the school’s topic for the action research project. 4. Teams sharing experiences and worries during the action research process in dialogue with the project group. 5. The project group visiting the schools for on-site guidance. 6. Oral and written presentation by schools of action research projects. Members of the project group were all involved with teacher education, and these were also the researchers. We examined the processes by observations and dialogues during the process, sent out electronic questionnaires to teachers at the end of the process, and conducted a two-hour long focus interview with the principals who had been conditioned to participate in all activities from the
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beginning. The project is recently completed and any eventual long-term impact on students’ learning cannot currently be examined. However, when looking at the impact the project has had on the participating teams of teachers, the findings strongly indicate there has been a change of attitude to AfL and a change of assessment practice. The change is most noticeable in terms of feedback given to students and how teachers engage students in a learning dialogue around multiple and varied documentations of learning facilitated by the digital portfolio. A number of examples of changed practice included in the students’ portfolios and the dialogues between students, teachers and to a minor extent, parents, were easily traceable. One of the teachers wrote this in his personal log:‘I feel that the digital portfolio and the dialogue I develop with my students help me adapt my teaching to the individual student, to keep track of their progress and to differentiate my teaching to the kids working at various levels with individual goals. Through the log the students become more reflective as they really show they are able to inform about what project they are involved with on the building site, how they do the job, what they learn, and what they want to learn more about. They can also say how their work stands in terms of what the project manager wants to see. They paste pictures of their work, so I can see’. These findings were supported by the teachers’ own comments to the open questionnaire and by the analysis of the focus interview with the principals. So, when looking at the impact on the participating teachers’ practice, the project seemed to have had the intended effect (Smith et al., 2010). However, when looking at the effect on the school as a whole and the assessment practice of all teachers in school, the impact is minimal. This was at first glance a disappointment to the project group, having naively expected that when the principal was heavily engaged in the project over time, and also having occasional meetings with the full teaching staff, there would be an impact on the assessment policy and practice in school reflected in an extensive use of digital portfolios across the school subjects. We carefully tried to create a professional development process stretched over time (30 months), we included the principals, we provided external expertise, and at the same time gave ownerships to the teachers of their own development by means of action research activities. One of the teams formulated their action research goals as
Challenging practice and beliefs
Leadership School level
Team level
Ownership External expertise input
Individual level
Trust and support
time Fig. 1. School development model.
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‘We want to give our subject (carpentry) a higher profile in school through developing the use of digital portfolios. We also want to make the subject relevant and motivating for the students. We want to help the students compile a portfolio that includes things such as students’ presentation of themselves, tutorials with teachers, their own interests and educational choice, a curricula vitae, career plan, on (building) site experiences, entrepreneurship’. The teacher teams decided on the focus and on the process, the research group acted as counselors and provided expert input. There was a positive atmosphere of trust at the meetings during which teachers and principals shared success and obstacles during the process. All the above points are found to be conducive to sustainable professional growth (Gray, Pilkington, HaggerVaughan, & Tomkins, 2007; Timperley et al., 2007). What we did not pay sufficient attention to was the need to include all teachers, to spend more time on team work within the schools, not only among the schools. Unless this is done, we realize in retrospect that one cannot expect a full change in assessment practice towards AfL in the school. All teachers have to develop a sense of ownership to the project, as illustrated in Fig. 1. In the project ‘‘portfolio as a meeting point’’ we catered only for the two inner levels of the circles, expecting this to have an effect on the third level, the school level, and we were wrong. All three levels need to be taken into consideration when planning for changes in common teaching practice in a school. The lesson we learned is that all teachers have to develop a kind of ownership to the changes, and a natural transmission from a smaller group to the whole staff does not occur even though the principal was schooled in the change and supported the development process. Teachers are likely to carry on with traditional practice of assessment unless they really come to believe in the pedagogical power of AfL. The principals were fully aware of this challenge and one of the principals sees the importance of meeting the challenge: ‘So far the teachers who participated in the project have presented their way of using a digital portfolio to all the staff. However, it has been adapted only by one of the school departments. Now the goal is that digital portfolios become part of the school culture and every teacher will use it. This is how I want to see the school develop’.
informative and relevant feedback. It seems that feedback in Norwegian elementary school is very general and unspecific, consisting mainly of praise. There is a lack of informative feedback which informs the students on how to proceed with learning (Klette, 2003; OECD, 2005a, 2005b). The main criticism is that Norwegian children are under-challenged in school (OECD, 2005a). A major goal for the professional development aspect of the project was to empower teachers in AfL, and this was done by inviting the teachers, in dialogue with the project group, to develop their own criteria for good assessment practice, instead of telling them what good assessment practice means. The teachers would then apply the criteria when reflecting on personal assessment practice, as a kind of criteria for self-assessment of practice. A form of action research was also here the chosen development activity including the following steps: The participating teachers (and the principals) were introduced to AfL by the project group and selected readings of recent research literature. All teachers in these small schools and the two school principals were invited to join the project teachers on two study-trips, one to Wales and the other to North Ireland to meet with international experts on AfL (mainly members of the Assessment Reform Group (ARG)) and observing AfL practice in schools in Wales and Belfast. The research group developed a list of 33 criteria for AfL assessment practice to be presented to the teachers. The list was created in light of recent assessment literature and recent national steering documents on how assessment is to be practiced. Next, the teachers were asked to select 10 criteria for good assessment practice to be listed in order of priority. They were invited to add other personal criteria. The teachers were asked to describe the importance of each of the chosen criterion in relation to own practice. The teachers were asked to comment on the different criteria and give examples from own practice. The teachers were encouraged to discuss the selected 10 criteria within the full teaching staff in order to reach a collective agreement of AfL practice within the school. The final moderated list consisted of 13 criteria for AfL practice and these were chosen for inclusion in the project. (Engelsen & Smith, 2010).
Teachers’ self-assessment of personal assessment practice Another professional development project which was also funded by the Norwegian Research Council focused on developing criteria for AfL assessment with teachers so they could use these in critical reflection of their own practice. The project was called Reflection based portfolio as a tool for developing teachers’ assessment competence and was initiated by a University College on an island in the west of Norway. It involved ten teachers in two small elementary schools (five from each school) and the two principals. The project leader came from the College and it employed a research counselor from a nearby university. The project was a three-year project, and the overall goal of the project was to support teachers in developing a reflection based portfolio as a tool for improving teachers’ competence in AfL. The research part of the project examined the processes the teachers went through by studying the teachers’ voices presented in a shared digital portfolio. Only a small part of the project related to the participating teachers’ professional development is discussed below. The context of this project is, as in the project previously described, that both national and international research finds that Norwegian teachers do not provide the students with sufficient
The teachers participating in the project were then invited to examine their own assessment practice in light of the criteria they themselves had developed and to write their reflections in a blog created for the project.
Perspective based on Policy documents
Theory and researchbased knowledge
Own practice
Fig. 2. Assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010).
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We found that there are three poles that shape teacher’s assessment practice, own practice, steering documents and research as illustrated in Fig. 2 In the beginning of the project the teachers would see their own assessment practice mainly in light of ‘‘how they used to do it’’ and the steering documents. They evaluated their practice in light of the official policy, especially in relation to how they met extensive demands for documenting assessment. This was also felt as a burden, ‘I spend so much time on filling in forms and papers that I have little time to really teach’. There was little or no relation to literature on assessment and to research findings informing about AfL. These teachers, as most Norwegian teachers, are found to be obedient to steering documents, mainly because they do not hold sufficient competence in assessment to engage in a discussion about top-down directives. However, after the process, we notice in the teachers’ reflections a much more confident tone which draws on professional experience and beliefs supported by theoretical and research documentation of how AfL is to be put into practice. They have developed a more critical attitude to own practice and to steering documents, and they experiment with finding their own ways of how to implement them in alignment with personal pedagogical beliefs. ‘I shouldn’t always blame the students if they do not do as well as I had expected, I have to look at my own competence in assessment and mainly in how I involve the student in assessment’. The project group’s ambition was to empower the teachers in AfL by applying a bottom-up process, however, without disregarding the importance of teachers’ pedagogical practice, existing steering documents and research literature. Our conclusion is that in order to develop teachers’ confidence in AfL, there is a need to balance the three poles, each of which has an impact on teachers’ practice. The problem is when one pole becomes stronger than the other two, and assessment is practiced without informed reflection. Teachers must have the opportunity to develop their own practical theory (Handal & Lauva˚s, 1990) of assessment practice (Engelsen & Smith, 2010). A point worthwhile mentioning is that in this project we noticed a different impact on the whole school level than in the project discussed previously. There are some likely reasons for this, first, the intensive engagement of the school principals. They participated in all activities, and one of them even engaged in personal blog writing about the project. A second reason is that these elementary schools are small, with a staff between 10 and 15 teachers each. The project could therefore invite all teaching staff and the two principals to participate in the study trips and in many of the development activities carried out in plenum. The other project worked with comprehensive secondary schools with a much larger teaching staff divided into departments. However, perhaps the major reason for the strong impact on the school culture is that the criteria developed for good assessment practice were discussed within the whole staff, and the final set of criteria was underpinned by agreement within the staff. The Reflection based portfolio as a tool for developing teachers’ assessment competence project is currently in its concluding stages and we will have to engage in future projects to examine the impact it has had on students’ learning outcomes.
Preparing teachers for AfL When looking at the situation in Norway regarding teachers’ competence in practicing AfL, we find that there is a large need for in-service professional development initiatives. Teachers want to,
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but they are not confident regarding how to integrate AfL in their teaching. Similar tendencies are found in other countries, and in England a large research project show that most teachers accept the principals behind AfL, but hat there is less success in actually putting it into practice in the classroom. Mansell and James (2009) claim that one of the reasons for this is that teachers are not sufficiently educated in AfL during their pre-service teacher education. This might be surprising as competence in assessment is mentioned as an essential competence all teachers should hold in multiple international documents presenting standards for teachers, e.g. the OECD Report Teachers Matter (2005b). Assessment practice is a key issue in the Norwegian educational discussion, and the two projects described above indicate that a great deal of public money is invested into raising teachers’ competence in assessment. If so many teachers lack sufficient competence in assessment, what happens then in teacher education, why do novice teachers not hold essential AfL competence? The answer lies partly in the fact that good AfL practice needs to be developed during practice, as it is, to a large extent, context bound. It is a question of exploiting moments of contingency (Black & Wiliam, 2009). AfL works best when it is adjusted to the student(s), the time, and the place (Brookhart, 2008). This requires a great deal of experience during which professional wisdom is developed. However, had assessment been given more attention during teacher education, had novices been knowledgeable about assessment, its relation to motivation for learning, self-efficacy, learning theories (Smith, 2009), and had they had been skilled in some practical application, AfL would have been less frightening for novice teachers to try out in their own teaching. In a small research project initiated by the Deans of teacher education programs in five teacher education institutions in the West of Norway, we have recently learned that the education students get in assessment and in AfL is minimal in the various teacher education programs the institutions offer (a one-year Post Graduate Certificate in Education course, a four-year program for elementary school teachers, a five-year master program for secondary school teachers). Assessment is, at the best, dealt with in a lecture followed by a seminar of a couple of hours, and it is frequently integrated in the educational studies and in the didactic courses without special focus. When examining the issue more in depth, we found that it is common for all the institutions to have only one person who can be said to have formal competence and research experience in assessment, and most of these do not teach assessment in pre-service teacher education courses. Another alarming finding is that there seems to be little agreement among teacher educators of how assessment is to be presented to teachers-to-be, and they get mixed, and not always well-informed, messages (Andersen et al., 2010). The question to be asked is who is going to educate teachers and teachers-to-be in assessment when there is a lack of competence in assessment in the teacher education faculties? As a result of this very recent study, the recommendation to the institutions is to start professional development initiatives among teacher educators, mainly by creating communities of learning about assessment and AfL in particular, where the faculty can share experiences, receive input from national and international experts, develop new practices, and discuss ways of explicitly teaching about AfL in teacher education. Master programs in assessment need to be developed, and PhD projects in assessment should be given financial support. We need to develop a large group of teacher educators with expertise in assessment so they can prepare teachers-to-be for practicing AfL in the very beginning of a teaching career. This is the situation in the Norwegian context, and even though many countries have come much further in their work of educating
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teachers in assessment (Wales, Scotland, reported by Gardner, Harlen, Hayward, Stobart, & Montgomery, 2010) a good guess is that Norway is not alone in having a long way to go to raise teachers’ competence in practicing AFL. Conclusions Professional development is not a straightforward business, there is no ‘‘one- size that fits all’’ recipe. Teachers’ professional development in AfL is even more complicated as assessment is often linked to summative assessment and external examinations which many teachers experience do not align very well with AfL practice in the classroom (Gibbs, 2006; Wiliam, Lee, Harrison, & Black, 2004 among others). Teachers feel pressurised to prepare the students for the exam to come, pressure coming from central governments, the school leadership, parents and students. Moreover, teachers themselves are evaluated in light of their students’ achievements on high-stakes test, all of which does not create a conducive climate to engage in professional development of AfL. Findings indicating a direct link to improved students achievement by an extended use of AfL which was brought into the assessment discussion by Black and Wiliam (1998), and which has been repeatedly supported by numerous scholars since then, has not succeeded in initiating a major change of common assessment practice in schools. The main reason is probably that most summative assessment still means exams, and using teacher assessment as summative assessment is not yet very common (Gardner et al., 2010). However, an additional explanation for why AFL has not developed strong roots in schools is related to the claim made in this paper, that teachers do not hold the essential competence in AfL to successfully implement it in their teaching. Therefore professional development activities are needed in preservice as well as in in-service education of teachers. In an extensive project in UK, the Analysis and Review of Innovations in Assessment (ARIA) the researchers present two main conclusions: (1) Initiatives in assessment do not always take full accounts of the key dimensions of the change process or the needs of the communities involved (Gardner et al., 2010, p. 7) and (2) Not having an explicit view of what is ‘good’ assessment for any particular purpose has the knock-out effect of making it difficult to decide what an improvement is (Gardner et al., 2010, p. 8). It can be inferred from the above that professional development in assessment needs to be contextualised and tailored to the group of participating teachers, and that there has to be a shared understanding of what good AfL practice consists of. Other researchers have pointed out the need for teachers to have time to engage in professional learning activities, and to be supported by the school leadership in the process (Timperley et al., 2007) so they can apply a trial and error approach in developing a personal practice theory (Handal & Lauva˚s, 1990) of AfL. Telling teachers what to do and how to change has proven to have limited effect on changed practice, and it is necessary to give the teachers a feeling of ownership of the process of change they are going through. Action research is suggested as a way of providing teachers with the feeling of control of the change (Gardner, Harlen, Hayward, & Stobart, 2008) and the likeliness of making it sustainable. Change will, however, not make an impact on students’ learning unless it reaches the whole teaching staff, which means that substantial resources need to be allocated to development processes. Teachers have to be part of learning communities, from which the principal cannot exclude her/himself. Likewise, regional school leadership and central national bodies are those who have to allocate resources and space for long-term professional development processes to take place if they want to see sustainable change in the assessment practice. Harlen (2010)
illustrates how such a holistic perception of lasting changes can occur in her suggested standards for assessment practice for classroom practice, school management, local and national inspections (where this applies), and for national policy formulation. The key to such a development is speaking the same language when communicating across the various sectors. Being acquainted with the rich literature on assessment and on professional development, researchers and educators in Norway have made serious attempts to engage teachers in professional development process to change assessment practice. Improving students’ learning through improved assessment practice is highly prioritised by the Norwegian government. In this paper two small research and development projects have been presented, both of which aimed at applying a bottom up approach over a period of two to three years. The teachers were given control over the development processes, including deciding guidelines for ‘‘good’’ AfL practice. In this respect, the chosen approach differs from the approach presented by Harlen (2010) who have worked out standards for good assessment practice which are presented to the teachers. The double perspective, research and development, found in two of the projects described in this paper, suggests a possibility of integrating research and practice. The research intervention is the professional development activities of the practitioners. Research becomes meaningful to the practitioners, and practice is essential to the researchers. The two groups depend on each other, even feed on each other, which creates a strong link between theory and practice. The paper has presented the procedures and discussed the experiences of projects in a Norwegian context. This is a limitation of the paper. However, from my many meetings with teachers around the world, there are reasons to believe that the Norwegian context does not differ extensively from the situation in many other countries. A lesson learned from these projects is that when planning changes beyond the classroom level, at a school level, it is not sufficient to work with individual teachers or team of teachers, but we have to reach the whole staff across subjects. A worry expressed in the paper is the concern regarding who should educate the teachers in AfL. A reasonable answer is that this becomes the responsibility of teacher educators, but do they have sufficient expertise to do the job? A survey in five Norwegian teacher education institutions did not provide a convincing answer that this is the case. So, it seems that the first pre-requisite for AfL to be successfully implemented in the classroom is not only professional development of teachers, but first and beyond, to engage teacher educators in AfL professional development processes.
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