Jenny Deacon, principal teacher, and her colleagues at Carron PS are exploring the use of “floor books” to moderate and self-evaluate their planning and assessment. Jenny is one of Falkirk Children’s Services QAMSOs (Quality Assurance and Moderation Support Officer), and is leading this development work which is spread over 8 moderation sessions in 2017-18.
Jenny facilitated professional learning for colleagues using her QAMSO training to work with them to plan how they could build moderation into their school processes. They are using a floor book format to familiarise themselves with the moderation prompts which can be seen in the photos. These prompts help teachers shape and link their planning and teaching and assessment.
Teachers in each stage agreed to gather evidence of their thinking processes using a floor book format. This is helping them to develop a shared understanding of what learning looks like at each level. Teachers will fill around 2 pages of their floor book for each significant unit of learning or group of experiences and outcomes. They decided that they wanted to have floor books for each stage, and have captured evidence of literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing and interdisciplinary learning. Jenny shared a selection of these floor books with fellow QAMSO’s at a recent meeting, and they considered how this method could work as a means to gather or exemplify pupil achievement at each level. Yvonne McBlain met with Jenny in November 2017 to look at the interdisciplinary learning floor books. They discussed the potential for designing specific groups of interdisciplinary experiences and outcomes which could act as holistic assessment “bundles” or tools for schools across the authority to use. Both look forward to exploring this further with colleagues, so watch this space!
This work contributes to the school improvement priorities, and also to National Improvement Framework (2017) drivers – Teacher Professionalism and Assessment of Children’s Progress. Jenny and her colleagues will review the contribution of their floor books to their moderation processes as part of their school self-evaluation in May 2018.
