The chicken or the egg… do you develop your lesson plans or assessment first when planning?

The chicken or the egg… do you develop your lesson plans or assessment first when planning?

Assessment is the ‘ongoing process of gathering, analysing and interpreting evidence on student performance, reflecting on findings, and making informed and consistent judgements to improve student learning’ (DET, 2021). It is a crucial part of our teaching and learning programs. Assessment relates to High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) of #1 Setting Goals, #7 Questioning, #8 Feedback, and #9 Metacognitive Strategies, and is one of 5 core elements in FISO 2.0 (DET 2022). 

There are many types of assessment we can embed into our classes (formative and summative), and it doesn’t just need to be teachers collecting the data (self and peer assessment help here!), however, it is important there are elements of data collection in each of our lessons.

Lots of teachers we speak to have different ways of planning their teaching and learning programs, but is there a best way to do this?

The two most common approaches we see are either: 

1. teachers plan their lesson and unit plans first, then develop assessment criteria and a summative task to use for reporting, or 
2. teachers create assessment criteria and an associated task, then work backwards, developing the unit plan and lesson plans around this.

In ACHPER Victoria workshops with teachers, we’d often get the question, “what should I assess?” to which our past PL Manager Bernie Holland would respond with, “what are you planning to teach?”. 

This would often initiate robust discussion around how to narrow down a broad end goal into something you could easily explain and measure. You need to know where you want your students to get to so you can articulate your assessment criteria. If you are clear on their end point, you know what to assess and also what they need to do in the lead up to practice and work towards the end point. Planning and assessment are very closely intertwined.

An area that can create roadblocks for teachers when determining ‘what you are planning to teach’, is the openness of the Victorian Curriculum. While it is beneficial to have flexibility within the content descriptions and achievement standards, teachers really need to consider the specifics of what you want to teach and what you want your students to achieve within those parameters. For example, content descriptions relating to movement concepts and strategies could have hundreds of planning and assessment options. We also need to make sure what we are teaching and assessing is part of the curriculum, and selects the most appropriate aspects of the curriculum to focus on and assess in one unit, rather than ticking off as many of possible.

Another common discussion we have with teachers is around explicitly articulating your learning outcomes and assessment criteria. Developing explicit learning intentions and assessment criteria helps students more clearly understand your expectations, and provides a more targeted focus for you in lesson planning.

A win of developing explicit assessment criteria means you have very clear direction on activity selection and feedback to provide to students and to assist with developing reporting comments!

If you need some assistance with this, our Curriculum Support Charts and eLearn course on Assessment will help you out.

So, what is the best way to go about assessment in our planning, and how to we create assessment criteria and tasks which gives us useable data? 

These are our top tips…

• Use Backwards by Design (see diagram above) to:
  • Identify where you want your students to get to by the end of a unit or PE program,
  • Define explicit learning outcomes to show this
  • Make sure your explicit learning outcomes align to the curriculum
  • Plan teaching and learning activities which provide opportunities for students to work towards the learning outcomes.
• Bring students in to collect assessment data – saves you spending the entire lesson collecting data! Just make sure students understand the criteria, and you have some form of teacher assessment included to validate their responses.
• Target a limited number of assessment criteria to focus on – we don’t want to over assess or collect data which isn’t going to be used. Highlight 2-3 curriculum links at most per unit to assess. A good scope and sequence will highlight when you assess various aspects of the curriculum across a year.
• Make assessment a part of every lesson (formative) to get quick snippets of informal information to ensure your plan of working towards the end unit goal of the unit is on track. 
• Be agile – sometimes formative assessment data tells you that you need to change your plan of attack to work towards the overall unit goals (e.g.: students need more time to achieve success in an area, or the activities you planned aren’t achieving the outcomes you wanted). If you wait until the end of a unit to check in on progress and you have diverted off track, your student assessment data will not be accurate.

Need further help? Get in touch or check out our ’Scope and Sequence’ eBook, generic assessment pack (part of our Unit Plans for Curriculum resource).