Teachers as enquiring professionals

Monday 27^th October 2014 saw the teaching staff of Inveralmond Community High School come together to look at Moderation within the BGE under the direction of the Tracking Implemento Group.

Lindsey Duncan, PTC Languages started the first session by engaging staff with a very informative presentation from Education Scotland looking at the “Professional learning resource: assessing progress and achievement paper”. This gave a great insight into the thinking behind the paper.

From this, staff then divided into their curricular areas to look at this paper in more detail. Staff very enthusiastically dissected the paper and then discussed the important messages arising. This was an extremely informative session and when staff came back together as a large group it highlighted some good practice already taking place across certain faculties and how others are currently assessing pupil work.

Session two started with Jen McKenna delivering a practical presentation on how to use the resources available from Education Scotland to moderate within the BGE. She highlighted that when moderating we need to look at the teacher / pupil voice and demonstrated how progression pathways show skills development and how this linked directly to Blooms taxonomy.

Staff then looked through the “assessing progress and achievement paper” and the progression pathway for their curricular area.  Discussions about the significant aspects of learning (SALs) and key messages arising from the paper followed with staff started to link this to current S1-3 course work and delivery.

Using the curricular area paper staff then took on board the opportunity to moderation an example of S3 work. A series of reflective questions were used to determine if we felt pupils were successfully working towards/demonstrating a particular SAL.  This opportunity allowed thought provoking conversations to take place, which I am sure will lead to even more positive experiences being planned for our pupils.