The Importance Of Assessment For Education

Finally, purposeful teaching, teachers plan and facilitate their practice with a particular education goal (Alexander, 2004: 28). This, I believe, is very much evident in my practice as a student teacher, due to the level detail that goes into the evaluations I carry out of every lesson. These evaluations encourage next steps and involve assessment of individual children. Assessment for learning is very much present in all the lessons I have taught, thus giving me an indicator of how they will achieve their potential. Due to the emphasis on assessment both formative and summative from schools and the government, I would argue that this principle is very much necessary in all teaching to plan and facilitate appropriate lessons. When reflecting …show more content…
These variations have aimed to address ‘the importance of spoken language in pupils development across the whole curriculum – cognitively, socially and linguistically’ (Scholastic, 2013: 111). Prior to these changes, the primary national curriculum for English did require children to develop their speaking and listening skills. In spite of that, scholars such as Alexander (2012) argued this was not adequate, and the government needed to integrate talk into the national curriculum across all subjects. The huge growth of interest around talk in the classroom caused the government to rethink the national curriculum aims across the whole curriculum. The English primary national curriculum (2014) aims to ‘use discussion in order to learn; children should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas’ (Scholastic, 2013). Children should become familiar and confident in using language throughout key stage two. This aim encourages talk in all aspects of English not just spoken language. Talking about the origins of words when learning spellings can help children remember them for …show more content…
This engaged the children and began to bring the story to life. The children then broke off into pairs before entering into a larger group discussion of how the story could start and develop. ‘Using paired talk as a strategy offers children thinking time to formulate meaningful answers’ (Goodwin, 2010). By giving the children chance to discuss what they saw, it meant they had time to rationalize their thoughts and understanding. Working in groups then allowed them to interact with their own and other ideas to create a story. I have also observed talk for writing being used during English. Talk for writing enables children to build a wide vocabulary, through talking about and learning stories. Children appear to respond well to this. Nonetheless, it is not possible to ensure all children stay on task when there are many discussions going on in the room. This type of off task talk would be of no educational