OER4Schools/Assessment portfolios

Assessment for OER4Schools programme: Portfolios

In order to gain a certificate for the OER4Schools programme, teachers will be assessed. As part of this assessment, we are now asking teachers to prepare a simple portfolio, used for interim assessment. This portfolio should include your 5 “best” pieces of work (eg completed activity template or lesson template, concept map, etc) from what you’ve done so far this year. These should be quality items that illustrate what you have learnt, and what you feel you have implemented successfully.

Please prepare those five items (and write your name at the top of each sheet); hopefully you already have material in your folders that you can dig out or draw on. It can be an activity outline using one technique (e.g. traffic lights or no hands up) or a (plan for a) whole lesson. We then would like you to do an audio reflection that mentions each item in turn.

At the start of each reflection, state clearly which item you are talking about (eg. “my class discussion about how diseases are transmitted”, or my “concept map on parts of a plant”), and then discuss the following questions:

Why have you chosen the item? What does it illustrate? For example, what new technique did you decide to trial and how did you apply it in your lesson? How well did it work in practice? What did you learn from that about what works or doesn’t work to support interactive teaching and learning?

Note. We encourage you to include developing new computer skills but please do this through showcasing your new knowledge about interactive teaching techniques rather than just including computer skills by themselves – so your chosen activities or examples of learning about interactive teaching may or may not involve computer use!

Note. that we will need you to submit the work as requested (copies of the 5 items plus uploading a reflection to the server) in order to award certificates at the end of the year.

Bjoern & Sara 4th July 2012

� Further guidance.

We emphasise that the portfolio we have asked you to prepare is not to test you. Instead, it is an opportunity for you to showcase what you have achieved, what you have learned, and how your thinking and practice have moved on. We all know that you have moved on, we just want you to document that! We do not need “paper evidence”, but your own recollection and thoughts are enough evidence for your own learning!

Because we heard that you were struggling to put the portfolio together, we thought we would provide some further guidance!

Three pieces of work. It’s ok to just submit three pieces of work, but please do submit three. You can submit more if you like. We’ll give you feedback on anything you submit, so it’s in your own interest to submit a good range of your work!

What can I submit? You can submit concept maps, lesson plans, activity templates, collections of images, … e.g. for traffic lights, you would submit the classroom activity that went with it. Go through your homework throughout the course, and see what you made!

The type of work you submit doesn’t need to be unique - it’s ok for several people to submit e.g. mindmaps, even on the same topic! Because these are your own, and because you have used them in your classroom, they will be different, and tell a learning story about yourself.

For each piece of work, do an audio reflection. To do this, think about how you would show a teacher in another school what you have been learning through the OER4S programme? What concrete examples would you share with them? How would you show them the range of things you have covered? Suppose then this teacher asked you some questions, e.g. What worked well, what didn’t work so well?  What would you say to them?

Ideally you would make a link between the workshop session and your classroom trial. Tell us  where did the idea come from, and how you applied it. We don’t want or need evidence - we just want to know, if your own words, what you have learned!

We’ll give a short example, for the sort of reflection we would like you to record. For example: “I learned about _________ in session ____. I thought that it could be really useful for my pupils during a lesson on _________, I tried it out with my students. The work I have submitted is an example of ________. I have also submitted an example of what the students did. I had initially written this ______ [for the students], and the students then added ________. Students responded differently. Mary had difficulty with it because ___________. (E.g. some computer did not work - why did it not work?!) I concluded the lesson with a plenary, and they told me these answers. If I was to do this again, I would do it like this: ______. I would also apply this tool to another lesson on such and such a topic ________ because ______________“.

This is an email to participants and is slightly more refined as some issues have already been worked through.

FINAL PORTFOLIOS To obtain the full OER4Schools programme certificate, we would like you to present three more examples for your final portfolios. These should concentrate on Units 5 and 6 this time. Please don't feel that you need to write a lot about the techniques themselves this time, however:

Present as much student work and lesson plans/materials as you can, so we can see clearly what went on in the lessons and how you applied the techniques (mention which ones you used and why/how). Then submit your reflections on your learning from these, either by typing them (bullet points are quite sufficient, it need not be an essay!) and/or by doing an audio reflection where you think really hard about how your practice and thinking have changed over the course of the year, referring to examples wherever possible. If the paperwork doesn’t make it completely clear what you and the students did, then elaborate this too (as you helpfully did last time). Note that if you type something you don’t need to speak it too – audio and written reflections should be complementary not duplicating. See whether you can apply e.g. a Leadership for Learning lens or perhaps the thinking hats to your reflections, to help you structure them.

Almost all of the reflections in your portfolios were very positive so don't hesitate to dwell too on the challenges and pitfalls you experienced and how you overcame them. It's very unlikely that every new technique would work brilliantly the first time you tried it, there will always be adaptations to make, so please describe that process too and be self-critical. For example, were your talking points and questions open-ended enough or did some of them have “right answers”? If some learners did not participate fully or respond as you had hoped they would, what did you or what could you do next time to try and address this? If you think something needs adapting for certain learners, suggest this.