Written Langauge

As part of the learning team's action research on assessment, we are looking at improving our use of self assessment. Learning intentions and success criteria are used regularly as is self assessment, however the general concensus is that we rarely collect and use data from self assessment to inform our own future teaching nor do we spend time working through discrepencies of children's actual ability and their perception. The general conclusion is that higher ability children tend to be harder on themselves when self assessing and lower ability children tend to assess their work at a higher level. We are going to spend more time developing the success criteria from the exemplars with the children. Hopefully this will develop more ownership over the expecatations and help the children to be more aware of what is expected. As a learning team we are going to analyse children's ability to self assess their own work and hope to see improvement over the term as their understanding of the expectation is increased as is their ability to more accurately and honestly appraise their work. I have been running optional 'writing workshops' in my class. For example workshops on speech marks, using similes, using different sentence starters. Hopefully this will help children to make more informed decisions about which workshops they will attend.